To The Contrary Film Festival: Clara - Angel of the Rockies

Funding for To The Contrary provided by: The Cornell Douglas Foundation, committed to encouraging stewardship of the environment, land conservation, watershed protection, and eliminating harmful chemicals.

Additional funding provided by: The Wallace Genetic Foundation, The Oak Foundation, The Colcom Foundation, and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation.

♪ Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe Welcome to the To The Contrary Film Festival, launched to celebrate 25 seasons on PBS.

Our program is a platform for the voices of the underserved: women, families, and diverse communities.

And our film festival brings you the best work by members of these groups in 5 categories They are: Current events about advancing the rights of women, girls, and diverse communities in the U.S., internationally, the history of the US women's movement, telling women's stories, and, student entry.

This week we bring you Clara: Angel of the Rockies.

Patricia McInroy produced our winning entry in the US women's History category.

We want you to meet Clara Brown.

She was born into slavery, and was freed in 1859.

She moved out to the American West, and not only made a home and a name for herself, but went on to inspire and help many others.

Singer: This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.

This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.

This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

When I found out about Clara Brown, it just struck me that this was almost too good to be true.

And there's an old Negro spiritual that says "Whatever you do, comes on back to you."

And it exemplifies her life.

She did all good, and in the end, here's a miracle.

Anyone who needed money could go to her and get money.

If you needed food, she would feed you.

Take you into her house and feed you.

If you needed clothes, she would get clothes for you.

She did all those different kinds of things never expecting in return.

Riggs Smith: She became known up there as the "Angel of the Rockies."

We're not really sure, she was born in the first decade of the 1800s, probably, although even then, we're not sure.

Riggs Smith: She was born an enslaved person in Virginia.

Owned by a family there, to her childhood.

At which point, they moved to Russellville, Kentucky.

Tamara Rhone: She belonged to Ambrose Smith.

She was on that plantation with her mother.

She was a field hand.

And so that basically is where she grew up.

But apparently she did not know that she was a slave, or the meaning of slavery until she was about six years old.

And that's when she understood, what slavery was all about.

She was converted when she was eight years old.

In one of those great awakening tent shows.

From that point on, God became a very important part of her life.

What happened is that afterwards, she took Christianity to mean for someone to be Christ-like, if they were a Christian... And I joke with my students sometimes, there are people who go to the church, to the mosque, to the temple... and there are people who follow their religion.

And those are not necessarily the same people.

But she was the one that took Christianity to heart.

And I think that's the basis of what she did.

In the meantime, as she's growing up, she actually marries, which is unusual for enslaved people, but she marries a man by the name of Richard.

And by the time they were 35, they'd had four children.

She had a son, who was Richard Jr. and then she had a girl, named Margaret, who was really rather fragile.

And then she had twins, Eliza Jane and Paulina Ann.

Well, when the twins were about eight years old, Paulina Ann drowned.

Dr. George Juune: And the one who survived for all of her life, had these nightmares about not being able to save her sister and blaming herself.

Clara Brown put a lot of intensive time and effort into locating the daughter because she remembers having to put the daughter to bed, holding her before the daughter would go to sleep, and then the daughter waking up and crying and everything in the middle of the night.

Singer: Do lord, oh do Lord.

Lord remember me.

Oh, do Lord, do Lord.

Gwen Scott: 1835, she and her whole family were auctioned off.

Because Master Smith died and there were all these uh, bills.

And that was kind of the pattern if there was an estate settlement.

Why, if they didn't have the money to cover it, well then they would sell slaves, divide up the families.

Riggs Smith: Seeing your children walk away from you, knowing you'd never see them again.

Imagine the children, seeing their mother and brothers and sisters walk away, saying, "what's going to happen to me?"

Tamara Rhone: So her family is totally broken up Every single one of them was sold to different owners.

She was under the belief that particularly her husband and her son were sold to Deep South owners, meaning, and that's like being sold down the river, which definitely shortens your life span.

♪ When she is bought by George Brown, she doesn't have that hard work to do.

She's a house slave.

And she almost gets to be a surrogate mother again with- with- with George Brown's kids.

Her owner died, and then she had- the owner had three daughters, and so they bid the highest price on her to free her from slavery.

Singer: How sweet the sound that saved a wretch...

The daughters also made arrangements for her to have a place to go.

Because it was the rule in most of those southern states that a slave had to be gone within a year, or six months to a year, or otherwise they could be put back in slavery.

They had friends in St. Louis.

And so then, that's how she got to St. Louis.

For the first time has a salary, has money that's hers.

At the age of 57, she decides that she wants to come out to Colorado.

Because there is a gold rush out here in Denver and also up in the mountains.

Gwen Scott: So there are a lot of people going west.

Clara says "well, maybe, maybe..." "Eliza Jane" - because she still has understanding that Eliza is alive still... "Maybe she has gone west, maybe she's been on the Underground Railroad."

"Maybe all these good things."

Carly Gunning: And so to get there, they had to cross this desert, called "The Starvation Desert."

And... Aunt Clara Brown, she was the one who provided the food and washed the clothes.

Tamara Rhone: Denver was basically made up of some tents, a few cabins, some teepees along the river, that was kind of it.

She's very hard core.

This woman became one of the richest people in Colorado.

even though she was totally illiterate.

She was not a business person, so how in the world did she do this?

Riggs Smith: You know she was very resilient, after she got here and looked for her family, and didn't find them, she went to Central City.

Mining had moved to the mountains.

The stagecoach didn't want to sell her any ticket.

One of those young men that was from the wagon train, he's going up there too.

So he says, "Well you can pose as my slave."

She gave him the money and they took the buggy on up to Central City.

Riggs Smith: And she set up a laundry business for miners She did really well at it.

There was supposedly the first true laundry in the Colorado Territory.

And she also not only does the washing, but she helps him with their families and all the other kinds of things.

Plus, she's a midwife or "catching babies," as they called it.

She's a nurse, she's a cook, she's a maid when needed.

She was, she was like... the... She did everything, the jack of all trades.

Dr. George Juune: She kind of adopted a couple of the miners informally, of course.

And they said, "No, you just can't be loaning money to people."

"What you have to do, is to have them sign a piece of paper."

Tamara Rhone: She would grubstake, which means that when a person came in, if they were new and they didn't have the equipment to do the mining for the gold, she would give them the money to get the tools and stuff like that, for a percentage of their profits.

And there's a couple documented transactions where her share of a mine was sold.

Her share would have been thousands of dollars.

♪ And so she acquires a lot of real estate.

Tamara Rhone: By 1864, they say that she owned like 16 lots in Denver.

She had three properties in Central City.

She had properties in Georgetown.

She had properties in Idaho Springs.

She had $10,000 in her savings account.

♪ She made substantial money at the time, but Clara believed in community, believed in giving back.

So, Clara didn't keep her money.

♪z I think it comes about out of respect.

After you get to be a certain age, Black women either become Auntie or Mother.

There were so many people that were so thankful for what she did to help them, and this is Black and White, that they called her "aunt."

"Aunt Clara Brown" by itself can be taken two ways.

One is that at this particular time, when she was out here in Colorado, many White people would not call a Black person Ms., Mrs. or Mr., and they would use the term "aunt" or "auntie" to move away from that.

And so, a lot of the writings... have... they have her being called "Aunt Clara Brown."

And I think sometimes it depends on who's doing it and for what reason.

It can be negative if you are in a service work position like a maid or whatever, but I never came away with it being a negative for her here.

Now, I could be wrong.

But I prefer to call her Mrs. Brown, not Aunt Clara Brown because, again the avoidance of using that term for Black people, to call one "aunt" or "uncle," rather than "Mr." or "Mrs.," is what's going on here, in the minds of some people.

Like "Uncle Tom" was a term of negativity that you gave to a sellout.

She was never considered as a sellout.

[gun shots] Around 1865, the Civil War has ended.

Many Black people are moving out of the South.

They don't want to stay there because racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan itself were forming, and so, they heard about places in Kansas, like Nicodemus, Kansas, and they also heard that Black people were coming out to Colorado.

She now feels a lot more comfortable in going back to the South to search for her family.

Gwen Scott: She thinks that perhaps if she goes to Kentucky or Tennessee, in that area, why then she could find Eliza Jane.

Tamara Rhone: And we're not talking about, you hop on a plane, this is an ardous journey.

So she travels to Kentucky to look for her family, and she doesn't find Eliza Jane.

Some accounts say that she did find some relatives.

Rodger Baker: She went back to Kentucky and Tennessee, did not find her daughter but ended up bringing a number of settlers, maybe as many as a couple dozen back to Colorado.

Numbers vary, from 20 to 26 different people.

Dr. George Junne: And so what she did, she provided them wagon trains to come out to Colorado.

She was able to find a lot of the mining jobs, um scattered throughout Central City, Gilpin County, and Clear Creek County.

♪ So she kept them safe and everything like that, And in food and stuff along the way out.

And again this is something that's based on her religion, because you just give when people need it.

You don't ask them why they didn't pull themselves up by their bootstraps, all this kind of stuff.

If you need help, she helped you.

It goes along with her personality.

She's always there to help somebody because she thinks about... this is her mission, God says this is what you do.

What she did was she liquidated, pulled her savings, liquidated some assets.

♪ Tamara Rhone: She loses her properties, and she had unscrupulous real estate dealers.

Gwen Scott: Her resources have all but dwindled.

She lost some of her property with a fire, and then there was a panic and another fire.

Dr. George Junne: She lost a lot of her fortune.

There was a flood in Denver, and all of her records were there.

And there also was an attorney that she had who cheated her out of a lot of money.

Her health is beginning to fail.

She's almost gone blind.

She's suffering from edema, she's having difficulty breathing.

So she had to come out of Central City, out of Gregory Gulch, and move to a lower altitude.

So she returns to Denver in 1880.

When she was getting older, she really didn't have anything.

But the one thing she did have that sustained her was her faith.

Because in her mind, God was just putting her through a test, and if she kept her faith, everything would be restored to her.

So she moved to Denver.

Tamara Rhone: So people come, they provide her with meals.

she has a rent-free cottage.

Dr. George Juune: And so she stayed there, and she continued to try to find her family.

She had heard that her husband was deceased.

She also at one point heard that her son was missing, lost, or deceased.

Her daughter, Margaret, lost or deceased.

But Eliza Jane, that baby twin, was still out there.

There was still hope for that.

And that was her resilience, she never gave up that hope.

She searched and searched and searched, to no avail.

Broke her heart.

Because she continued to believe that her daughter was still alive.

And she would ask every wagon train of Black people, of single Black people who came into town, if they knew of her daughter.

And she kept on trying and kept on trying, and so finally, she was able to find a clue.

So, and it's in about oh, 1882 or 3, that this letter comes in.

From a friend, who is a former Denverite.

Who says to her, "I think I know where your daughter is."

Eliza.

Eliza Jane.

Eliza Jane.

Eliza Jane.

Eliza Jane.

Eliza Jane.

"From everything that you've described," "I believe this is Eliza Jane."

She has no money.

There's even an event, I guess we'd call it a benefit, for her.

♪ Her neighbors took up a collection for her, and some gave her food, and she got on the train and she's in her 80s now.

She gets on the train and she goes back eastward to find her daughter.

Gwen Scott: And one of her best friends was an official of the railroad company.

And so they went to Council Bluffs and it was raining, and Eliza Jane was standing on the platform.

Clara Brown spies her, "I know that's my daughter!"

♪ Gwen Scott: They depart from the train and they are so excited, and overcome with joy and glee that they're hugging, and they fall into the mud, pick themselves up, and they were reunited.

She finds out that Eliza Jane had been married.

♪ Eliza Jane lived in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

And so when Clara Brown went to see her, that's when she also found a granddaughter and found out that she had four other grandchildren.

And that they were able to reconcile so late in life is just goose-pimply, there's almost no other way to put it.

In third grade, that was the thing that I remember the most from my report, was that she found her daughter.

So Clara Brown now has a family again.

♪ Dr: George Junne: So she comes back to Denver.

And one of the grandchildren comes back with her, along with Eliza Jane.

Tamara Rhone: She becomes even more and more ill. ♪ She dies in her sleep of congenital heart disease, is what they say, and this is October 26, 1885.

Her daughter and her granddaughter were there.

I have a source that mentions her brother, and some nieces, and many others.

And the eulogy was done by Rev.

E.P.

Wells, who was a personal friend off hers.

♪ The elites, the pioneers were there, present at her funeral.

♪ ♪ That shows, around Colorado how highly thought of that she was not only by Black people, but by White people.

Rodger Baker: And the Colorado Pioneer Association actually drafted a lovely resoluition about her.

♪ And she obviously was very connected to the churches.

She had roles in starting probably half a dozen different churches.

Tarmara Rhone: They say her funeral was at Central Presbyterian.

I thought it was at a Methodist Church, but they said Central Presbyterian.

If you go to Central City, where she lived, she helped to build one or two churches there, and also donated to a lot of different charities, and so forth.

Tamara Rhone: There's a bronze plaque, that was placed at the St. James Methodist Church.

♪ Dr. George Junne: She was voted into the Colorado Pioneers' Association.

She's the first African American that is part of that.

There's a stained glass window of her in the State Capitol.

Tamara Rhone: There's a chair... in the Central City Opera House that acknowledges her contributions.

♪ Riggs Smith: I do not recall any opera having the emotional impact on an audience that this one did.

People were just openly weeping in the audience.

As late printed as 1980, one of the geographical features just west of town was described on the maps as N----- Hill.

Later revisions would soften it somewhat to "Negro Hill."

But I still thought that was pretty unacceptable in this day and age, so... Naming the hill after the most famous African American resident of the town would recognize the community that existed here with a much more positive emphasis.

So I went through the process, which consists of going to the U.S. Board of Geographic Names, and you fill out some paperwork, and put down your reasons for why you think this hill should be renamed, and, to their credit, they saw the need for this change and made it quite quickly and very simply.

And...

So now, if you look up on a USGS database and type in "Aunt Clara Brown Hill," it'll give you both the GIS location and then a little description of how it came to be named that way.

Riggs Smith: Every so often, people come in here and say, "Where's Clara Brown?

I want to go see her tombstone."

Rodger Baker: And to see something like this, where goodness is rewarded.

is extremely gratifying.

Dr. George Junne: Everything that she did, returned to her tenfold.

Tamara Rhone: She did everything in life that she set out to do.

Carly Gunning: She always stuck to her dream and she didn't give up.

Riggs Smith: Once you know her story, then how do you not love her?

Gwen Scott: When you consider being a slave being a slave for something like, 50 some odd years, and you have that much life left, that you can get to the reward.

Singer: This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.

This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.

This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.

This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.

This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine... We hope you enjoyed this week's To The Contrary Film Festival winner.

And as always, whether you agree or think "To The Contrary," please join us next week.

Funding for To The Contrary provided by: The Cornell Douglas Foundation, committed to encouraging stewardship of the environment, land conservation, watershed protection, and eliminating harmful chemicals.

Additional funding provided by: The Wallace Genetic Foundation, The Oak Foundation, The Colcom Foundation, and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation For a transcript, or to see an online version of this episode of To The Contrary, please visit our PBS website, at pbs.org/to-the-contrary.

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