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680 The Kentucky Anthology Wade Hall from The Rest of the Dream: The Black Odyssey of Lyman Johnson The abolition of slavery in 1863 and 1865 did not make the freedmen and freedwomen full citizens of the United States. It took another hundred years for full equality to become the law of the land.Two of Louisville’s prominent African American leaders after World War II were Lyman Tefft Johnson and Mae Street Kidd. Both were subjects of oral biographies that I wrote with their cooperation in the 1980s and 1990s. Johnson was born in 1906 in Columbia, Tennessee, where his father was principal of the local school for blacks and one of the best-educated men in Columbia, black or white. After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in history from Virginia Union University and the University of Michigan, Johnson came to Louisville in 1933 and began a thirty-three-year career at all-black Central High School. Almost immediately he began to fight for equal rights, and in 1949 he was the plaintiff in the lawsuit that opened the University of Kentucky to African Americans. In 1979 the university that fought to keep him out awarded him an honorary doctor of letters degree. He died in Louisville in 1997. In the following passage Dr. Johnson tells how his grandfather obtained his freedom and his wife’s freedom before the Civil War. h My father’s father was a carpenter and a slave. He never learned to read or write, but he was an excellent carpenter so he must have known how to figure. He had to have a lot of native ability to pick up a trade like that and excel in it. People could tell him what they wanted built, and he could build it. He was a smart man—smart enough to buy himself out of slavery. He did such good work that his master hired him out to work for other people repairing and building houses. When the master got paid for my grandfather’s work, he would sometimes share part of it with him to keep his incentive up. My grandfather quietly saved what he was given. Of course, he didn’t have access to banks, so he must have hidden it in little cans under the apple trees or some place like that. One day, apparently kidding his master, he must have said: “Massa, would you sell me? If somebody offered you a good price, would you sell me?” The master said, “Oh, yeah.” My grandfather said: “I thought you liked me. I didn’t think you’d sell me.” The master said: “Oh, yes I would. If the price was right, you’d go like all the rest of my slaves. But 680 Wade Hall 681 don’t worry right now. As long as you satisfy the people you’re working for and as long as you behave yourself, I won’t put you on the block.” My grandfather brought up the subject several times, and finally the master admitted that if anybody offered him $1,300 he would sell him. This was around 1849. One day my grandfather walked in and said to the master, “There’s a fellow I know that wants to buy me.” The master said, “Well, tell him to send me $1,300 and he can have you.” My grandfather was all set. In a few days, he came to the master and said, “That man I told you about that wants to buy me, well, he sent you $1,300.” So he counted out $1,300 that he’d picked up out of those cans under those trees. The master took his money and said: “Well, if he trusted you with this much money, I’ll trust you to go on over there and turn yourself in to him. You’re through here. Get going.” “Yes sir,” my newly freed grandfather said, “but the man said he’d like to have a receipt.” So the white man sat down to write a receipt. He looked up at the freedman. “Now, whose name do I put down as your new owner?” My grandfather said, “Put down ‘Dyer Johnson!’” The man started to write it down, then looked up suddenly and said, “But that’s you.” “That’s right,” Grandfather said. “Put my name down as my new owner!” So the slaveowner said, “Well, I said I’d sell you for $1,300 and so I will.” He wrote...

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