RECKONING WITH MY FAMILY’S PAST MARTI TIPPENS MURPHY
As a leader in an educational organization, I think a lot about how we prepare young people to be civically engaged. I believe there are two types of education: formal, what we learn in school, and informal, basically everything else--our families, our experiences, where we grow up, and our culture, to name a few. My grandparents played a huge role in shaping who I am today. They lived in Nashville, and I got to spend summers and Christmas visiting them. They doted on me and my sisters, and we adored them. My grandfather was a fantastic storyteller. He told stories from his childhood, including that time he and his cousin hitchhiked out west in the 1930s to pan for gold. He knew so much about our family history, about the ancestors who first came to the U.S. generations ago, and those who first came to Tennessee. Both he and my grandmother could tell you why someone was a third cousin twice removed and not a second cousin thrice removed--without batting an eye. But most of all, both my grandparents talked about our ancestor Adelicia Hayes Acklen. Adelicia was my great-great-great-great-aunt. Her sister Corinne was my grandfather’s great-grandmother. Adelicia was born in 1817 and was a belle of the antebellum South. She was beautiful and savvy and threw fabulous parties. They said she was at one time the wealthiest woman in the South. In my tenyear-old mind, this was so romantic--visions of Scarlett O’Hara and Gone with the Wind! Adelicia’s home in Nashville was called Belmont--now the site of Belmont College. The home was occupied by the Union during the Civil War, as was her sister Corinne’s house next door. My grandparents spoke with pride about the family’s survival during the war and also with pain about what they endured and lost. I never wondered about how Adelicia became wealthy, except I knew it was through marriage. She was married three times, and they said that one of her husbands also had plantations in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas. As I got older, of course, I realized that plantations meant slavery. I didn’t learn much about slavery in school, either. It wasn’t until I got to college that I started researching Adelicia’s story wondering what might be true--what was embellished? In fact, she was considered one of the wealthiest women of her time. How? Through her marriage to her first husband Isaac Franklin. He was the co-founder of Franklin & Armfield, which became the largest slave trading firm in the United States. It was then I learned that at one time Adelicia and Isaac Franklin enslaved over 750 people. Their largest plantation was called Angola--now the site of the current Louisiana State Penitentiary, the largest maximum security prison in the United States. I was stunned at my own ignorance and at the silence surrounding this part of our family story. How could we know so much about ancestors and descendants but nothing about the over 750 enslaved people and their descendants whose lives are still connected to mine in this world we are living in now? For a long time, I didn’t know what to do with this knowledge and my feelings about our family history. Why bring up such a painful past? To what end? And then, a few years ago, a relative gave me a book that had been passed down in our family for generations. It had been sitting in storage for many years.
