Return To The United States
In 1868, after the American Civil War and passage of constitutional amendments granting emancipation, citizenship and rights to freedmen, the Crafts returned with three of their children to the United States. After raising funds from supporters, in 1870 they bought 1800 acres of land in Georgia near Savannah in Bryan County. There they founded the Woodville Co-operative Farm School in 1873 for the education and employment of freedmen. In 1876 William Craft was charged with misuse of funds, and he lost a libel case in 1878 in which he tried to clear his name. The school closed soon after. Although the Crafts tried to keep the farm running, dropping cotton prices, and post-Reconstruction era violence contributed to its failure. Whites discriminated against freedmen as they worked to re-establish white supremacy in politics and economics.
In 1890 the Crafts moved to Charleston, South Carolina to live with their daughter Ellen, who was married to Dr. William D. Crum, who would be appointed Collector of the Port of Charleston by President Theodore Roosevelt. The elder Ellen Craft died in 1897, and William in January 1900.
Read more about this topic: Ellen And William Craft
Famous quotes containing the words return to the, united states, return to, return, united and/or states:
“Yet I shall never return to the past, that attic.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.”
—Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928)
“I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an animal, a plant, an inanimate object, indeed lost to us until the day, which for some never arrives, when we find that we pass near the tree, or come to possess the object which is their prison. Then they quiver, call us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Freed by us, they have vanquished death and return to live with us.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“At twelve, the disintegration of afternoon
Began, the return to phantomerei, if not
To phantoms. Till then, it had been the other way:
One imagined the violet trees but the trees stood green,
At twelve, as green as ever they would be.
The sky was blue beyond the vaultiest phrase.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Falling in love with a United States Senator is a splendid ordeal. One is nestled snugly into the bosom of power but also placed squarely in the hazardous path of exposure.”
—Barbara Howar (b. 1934)
“So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)