 I'm Marcia Joyner, and we are navigating the journey, and again it is a journey that is far, far away and a little long time ago. The last show about Harriet Tubman, and it was a Maryland story, I promised you we would venture across the Delaware Bay to Kate May. So, I have with me my guest, and to be frank and upward about this, he is my first cousin, Jake Oliver. Jake, say hello. Hello. Hi. Jake is involved more. And Jake lived in Kate May, with his mother and father, when he was a youngster, and I just had to visit Kate May, so when we discovered this story about Harriet Tubman crossing the Delaware Bay to go to Kate May, it was new to both of us. So, I asked Jake if we could talk about Kate May, his memories, and what all of this means. So, Eric, can we see Harriet Tubman crossing the Delaware Bay? 16 miles in an open boat, 16 miles to freedom across the dark bay. The freedom rung began at 10 o'clock on a June night in 1860. Six slaves, men and women, found their way to the Maryland shore. They had a boat and planned to cross the Delaware Bay following the beam of the Kate May Lighthouse. They hadn't gone far when five white men in another boat attacked them. Hit with oars, then pierced by bullets, the determined freedom seekers still made their escape. Feeling fiercely, despite their wounds, they made it across the dark waters and landed on the Jersey shore. The young women were very sick. The men were tried to their last extremity. They were not far from Kate May Lighthouse. Whim still, Philadelphia regional coordinator of the Underground Railroad. In the decade before the Civil War, many people fleeing slavery in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia made their way to freedom across the Delaware Bay. But they were not the only ones coming to Kate May, a very popular seaside resort at the southern tip of New Jersey. Steamers brought southern planters escaping the summer heat, and abolitionists and underground railroad leaders from Philadelphia. Kate May was the meeting place of north and south. They came for the ocean and the large luxurious hotels, but there were tense times too. Fights broke out among slavers and abolitionists and the hundreds of free blacks working in the hotels. Into this scene walked 30-year-old Harriet Tubman, a freedom seeker from Maryland's eastern shore. Kate came to earn money to return to Maryland to free her family and friends. I was free, but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land. And my home, after all, was down in the old cabin quarter with the old folks and my sisters and brothers. But to this solemn resolution I came. I was free, and they should be free also. Harriet Tubman. Despite the price on her head, Tubman worked as a cook in Kate May the summer of 1852, perhaps earlier as well. In the fall of 1852 she left Kate May. She crossed the bay, rescued nine people on the eastern shore, and led them to freedom in Canada. At the time, Kate May was alive with discussions and meetings of leading Philadelphia abolitionists and underground railroad leaders. There was the remarkable Stephen Smith, who had bought his freedom and become one of the richest black men in the country. Because of him, hundreds of enslaved people reached freedom, traveling in the secret compartments he built in his railroad cars. He built a summer home on Lafayette and Franklin Street. Right beside Smith's home was the Banneker House Hotel. Free black abolitionists from Philadelphia stayed there, and in its rooms they wrote resolutions denouncing slavery, which were circulated by Frederick Douglass in his newspaper. Across the street from Smith's house was a white Baptist church known for issuing anti-slavery resolutions. One prominent member was Joseph Leach, the local newspaper editor who reported on slave escapes to Kate May. We glory in the spunk of our ebony friends, he wrote. Another long-time summer visitor to Kate May was a white Unitarian minister from Philadelphia, William Furness, who was known as a leading abolitionist. Furness called the fight over slavery a battle between barbarism and civilization. In the years after the Civil War, especially in the first half of the 20th century, the area around Smith's house became a vibrant African-American community. In the 1960s and 70s, Kate May restored its distinctive Victorian architecture and history. But at the same time, it lost much of its African-American history, particularly through urban renewal. The Stephen Smith House barely survived, saved only by an emergency telegram from its owner to President Lyndon Johnson. Today, there is an effort by concerned Kate May residents to resurrect that history. The National Park Service has recently recognized Kate May's African-American past, accepting two Kate May contributions related to the Underground Railroad into its network to freedom. They are the Kate May Underground Railroad Trolley Tour and the Stephen Smith House. The Tubman Museum is key to this revival. Macedonia Baptist Church and the Mullick family, owners of the historic Chow Funt Hotel, plan to showcase this past in the Harriet Tubman Museum, scheduled to open in 2020. We need your help to create the Harriet Tubman Museum. It will be located in the 19th century home of Quaker businessman George Howell, which is now owned by Macedonia Church and in need of restoration. The plan is to create several display rooms and a large two-story exhibit area, as well as two meeting rooms. The Harriet Tubman Museum is at the center of a neighborhood that tells more than 150 years of the African-American struggle for civil rights and Kate May's part in it. The Howell House is across the street from Stephen Smith's home and steps from the AME Church Smith-founded. It's also next door to a relic of segregation, the Franklin Street School. Long vacant, city and county officials now plan to convert it into a library and community center, a place of inclusion. Each of these buildings is at a pivotal point of preservation. The Tubman Museum will be an anchor in this effort to create a lasting reminder and tribute to Kate May's fight for freedom and civil rights. We need your help to create the Harriet Tubman Museum. Hello, huh? And we're back. And I promised you we would go close the bay to Kate May and see what Kate May looked like or what it did look like. And so I'm going to... Jake went to live in Kate May. Like I said, I only visited in the summer, but Kate May, mother and father, my uncle and aunt, had a place in Kate May at a time when African-Americans from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and some of the places there. Jake, tell us about Kate May. Kate May was the... For us, the Oliver family, it was a place for me and my sister and our childhood friends who would be taken by my mother primarily. The day after school closed and for the entire summer, we would spend in Kate May playing at the beach and just doing things that kids do in the summertime. Play baseball and go to Wildwood and get entertained with all the rides there. But we started, Kate May, we started to go to Kate May in the summertime in 1950. And over the many years, as we were growing up, we spent every summer there until my sister and I were adults. And it was a lot of fun, but it was also, in retrospect, it's very interesting. Thinking about how Kate May has evolved and changed. And the excitement that has been generated by the realization of Harriet Tubman's involvement in Kate May on many levels is shocking to many, particularly many black folks who really had no clue as to the involvement of this important historic personality character in Kate May's history as well. So we knew about her in black history, but the fact that she was part of Kate May is really something that people are very excited about. When I discovered it, I have to tell our audience, when I discovered it, I called Jake immediately and sent him the clip, and he called me back in the morning, because you blew my mind. I didn't know any of this. And so here we are discovering, or rediscovering Kate May and all of the historic implications of Kate May. And when you look at the video and it shows the film in the clip, the 16 miles across the Delaware, it made sense. It made sense to row the boat 15 miles, and there's no telling how many other people made that same escape. So... It's a direct line. Nowadays you can catch a ferry from loose Delaware straight into Kate May. And when you are on that ferry, it really isn't a very long ride at all. And, you know, the Delaware Bay is a large body of water, but not that large to really be an impediment in connection with a journey that, obviously, Harriet Tubman and her team were taking back in the day. It's exciting to stand on the beach at Kate May Point and just look across the bay at Delaware. Well, let me say this one more. Our listening audience probably does not know anything about this. The geography. There's the Atlantic Ocean, and then there's the Delmarva Peninsula, and then there's the Despeak Bay. At the top of the bay is the Delaware. Now, the reason it's called Delmarva is it's the top of it where it has a landmass to Delaware. And then as you go down the peninsula, it's Maryland, the state of Maryland, and then the final tip is Virginia. That's the word Delmarva. So, it makes sense when you think of geography that coming from Cambridge, Maryland, up the peninsula, up to where she got to the tip, where she could cross from the Delaware across the bay, Kate May. It just, when you look at the geography, it makes sense. In fact, it makes more sense than trying to go inland across. You know, to figure out how, until when was it Jake in the 60s, I guess, before they left the bridge from Baltimore to the eastern shore? Yeah, you have to catch the ferry. You have to catch the ferry, yeah. Yeah, I mean, when you get to Delaware, which is the bridge today, is the Delaware Memorial Bridge. You cross that and you're in Jersey. But that, you're leaving Delaware, crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and that takes you to Jersey. And then you travel south for about 60 miles to the, to the very tip of New Jersey, which is where Kate May is located. And Kate May ends at a place called Kate May Point, which is the very tip end of New Jersey. New Jersey is shaped like a peanut, but it comes to a sharp point at the southernmost part of the state. And that point is Kate May, but the point is Kate May Point. And you can stand on the beach at Kate May Point. And really, on one side, you have the Atlantic Ocean. On the right side, you have the Delaware Bay. Yes. And that's, that is, I don't know, I guess it was there, we don't have a map. But for all of you that go to Kate May, and you can see the configuration, and you see how the tip of Delaware goes into Maryland, and it only makes sense coming from the eastern shore of Maryland up there. That looks like the best escape route. Anything else would have to cross the Chesapeake. And from Baltimore to the eastern shore, until the fifties, I guess it was, there was no bridge. We had to go back there. So I guess if we thought this through before now, we would have figured out that Kate May was the logical place to go. To take an example about the fact that this was a huge community of well-to-do black people that came from all over the United States to Kate May in the summer. Some people stayed all year. Like, a father was there all year until the last time I saw him. Yeah, well, he retired in Kate May. Yes, Kate May. But most of his life, he basically worked in Baltimore, and his wife and kids, the Kate May for three months in the summertime. Yeah. But anybody that... His father, my mother's brother, was one of my very favorite all of my uncles, and we had lots of uncles. But he was my favorite. And Jake, I don't know if you... The last conversation I had with your father was in February of the year he passed. And he asked me if I would be his Valentine. And every time I think about him, I still fly. Nobody else has ever asked me to be their Valentine. Yeah. I can't believe that, Marcia, as pretty as you are, I'm pretty sure you had lots of requests. Oh, yes, you are. See, that's what happens with cousins. They take a nice thing. Yeah. Now, tell me again back through this culture in Kate May. Well, Kate May was doing the time when I... We were there in the summertime growing up. It was occupied by middle-class African-Americans who rented or were fortunate enough to buy houses of their summer homes there. Now, Kate May is occupied mostly by hotels because it's a resort. And because there were so many hotels, not only did you have a large middle-class, black middle-class for the summer, but you also had a lot of young black, mostly college kids coming up from the south and other places to work in these hotels at the summer. And in the early days, when we first started going to Kate May in the 1950s, Kate May was... Well, it was like being in the south and it was, of course, a southern Jersey as well. But the point was Kate May was segregated like just about a lot of places around there. And so there were very few places that black folks could really go, but we found that there were restaurants. There were hotels. And as a matter of fact, one of the first places that we stayed when we visited Kate May was a black hotel, but it was only for blacks. And we couldn't, more or less, stay at any of the other large hotels which were employing many of the young African-American college kids who were coming up for summer jobs. Kate May was serving multiple levels of purposes. It was a resort. We had a beach. Grand Street Beach was the black beach. We had a black lifeguard. And everybody knew that when you get to Kate May, you look for the Grand Street Beach because that was the only beach that you could really go to. Of course, as the years swirled on, it opened up and it became more diverse and more integrated. And it really, I don't really have a sense that Kate May had any major problems becoming integrated, but initially, as a kid, I remember that there were limitations that we had to deal with. But Kate May, nevertheless, is mostly, from my perspective, is remembered as being, number one, a very beautiful location at Pleasant Weather, a great beach, and lots of things to do. They even had a zoo in Kate May, which most people didn't even realize. I don't remember that, but I don't know if it's still there, but it was off the beaten path. It wasn't anything big like the Baltimore Zoo, the Bronx Zoo, but it was a zoo and they had some animals there, and people would go there. But no, Kate May was a resort net. It was lots of fun. Now, from the black's perspective, the black enclaves where we lived, most of the blacks lived, a lot of us, lived in West Kate May. West Kate May was heavily populated by African-Americans. And everybody knew everybody else, from 2nd Avenue through up to 6th Avenue. And bicycling was the best way to get around because Kate May was so small, you could really cover a lot of distances in a short period of time on your bicycle. And as kids, we were always exploring, but also Kate May being on the Atlantic Ocean, it had great fish, great seafood, and the restaurants were really quite good. As a kid, growing up through my teenage years, I think I worked at mostly, most of the large hotels down to Kate May. Well, I would think so. That just makes sense. There's work hotels. Well, that's where you get to know more people. I work as a cook's helper or as a dishwasher. And in the course of that, you meet all the people who were coming up from North Carolina, who were in college, and you really began to develop quite an extensive network of, and getting to learn, you know, other blacks and what they're like and what they're doing in other places that you haven't more or less visited. And when Kate May started to become more integrated then you really started to, you know, stretch out. By the time, I guess, 1963, 64, I mean, some of my friends were from Canada who I was working with, and they were not black. But we would explore and, you know, just have a good time during the summer when we weren't working at whatever hotel or restaurant or bakery that we happened to be employed at that time. Kate May was fun. And to know and to learn that it's really an important location in African-American history makes it even more, stand out more. And particularly my memory, and I can't help but believe that it has walked the realization of many of the people that I know who grew up in Kate May. What I share with them, the articles about Harriet Tubman's involvement in Kate May and the photos of Harriet Tubman's locations that had some importance in her, with her presence in the Kate May area, most people are absolutely floored and excited. And eager to learn more. Well, you know, when I discovered I called you immediately because I was, wow! This is, sweetheart. We are just about out of time, but it's been a pleasure spending this time with you and we'll have to do this again. I look forward to it, Marcia. Thank you. And good opportunity. Aloha and we'll see you next time. Okay.