One of Savannah’s greatest intellectuals was William Brown Hodgson. He was born on September 1, 1801 in Washington DC. His father died when he was a little boy. After his father died he was taken under the tutorship of the Reverend James Carnahan who was to become the president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). There must have been some magic in the school because even though he would never attend college he became one of America’s leading scholars. 

The great Kentucky statesman Henry Clay would see his promise and secured for him his first prominent position in the diplomatic corps. As Secretary of State Clay assigned him to the Barbary States of northern Africa as an assistant to the consul general in Algiers, Algeria. His job was to learn the language to assist the United States in their diplomatic endeavors with Algeria.

Hodgson it was discovered had an affinity for language and learned eventually thirteen languages including Sanskrit which was considered by most normal linguist indecipherable. He would serve the US in Egypt, Peru, Tunisia, London, and Paris after his stint in Algeria. Significantly, it was on his way to Tunis he met the love of his life Margaret Telfair of the Telfairs of Savannah. The Telfair were one of America’s richest families. The patriarch Edward Telfair was a governor of Georgia and a prominent patriot during the American Revolution. Margaret who was an intellectual herself was in her forties when she met him. She had never married. Knowing the reputation of her sister Mary she probably had never been able to find a man who could keep up with her fertile mind.

They married in 1842 in London and as he had promised he gave up his Tunis assignment and returned with her to Savannah.  The newly married couple settled with her sister Mary in the Telfair Mansion that is now the home of the Telfair Academy. His heart was in the pursuits of the mind so it was no surprise to find him immediately becoming involved in the intellectual life of Savannah. His connection with the Georgia Historical Society led to him being elected its curator in 1845. A position he held for over twenty years.

Hodgson also expanded his ethnological and linguistic scholarship with the slaves of the Telfair plantations. He ran the plantations and noticed the diverse population of the slaves. He distinguish among the slaves persons from the Mandingo, Ebo, Gullah, Fula, and Guinea. Because of his time in Africa he was able to speak to the slaves in their own languages. He would write a linguistic and ethnological studies of these slaves that as a scholarly work is still valued and read today. He also would write a scholarly paper to the National Institute in Washington on the organic remains and geology of the Georgia coast. This proved his prowess in the physical sciences as well as the linguistic and ethnological studies.

During his day Hodgson was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Oriental Society. He was known throughout the world for his scholarly aptitude and was elected to membership in the ethnological societies of New York City, London, and Paris, as well as to the geographical societies of London and Paris. He was one of the first Americans to be awarded the French Legion of Honor. He even received an honorary doctor of law degree from Princeton University.

Hodgson died on a trip to New York City in June of 1871. He is buried in the Telfair family crypt at Bonaventure Cemetery. Margaret Telfair Hodgson to honor him and their marriage of thirty years gave money for the headquarters and library of the Georgia Historical Society to be built in 1873. The building today is called Hodgson Hall and maintains its original function. A portrait of Hodgson by the first Director of the Telfair Academy, Carl Brandt, hangs in the hall.

​
 
​

Savannah is one of America’s great cities. Yet she is a creature of the South. Which means a lot of her wealth was built on the brawn and brains of slaves. It is our shameful history. This history has repercussions unto this very day. One of the saddest, criminal slave incidents in the United States occurred here in our City.

It is called the ‘Weeping Time”. It was the largest sale of human beings in the history of the United States. It was in March 1857 when Pierce Butler, an inheritor of his family’s Georgia plantations, sold 436 men, women, and children. He had squandered his inheritance of over three quarter of a million dollars and found himself in deep debt. The creditors were breathing down his neck and he was not able to live the rich lifestyle to which he was accustomed. So a board of trustees had stepped in to pay his debtors by liquidating his capital and help him recover the lifestyle he felt he deserved.

They sold his Philadelphia mansion and other properties but this was not enough. All that was left were the plantation and the slaves. The estate had nine hundred slaves. 450 would go to his now deceased brother’s estate, he would be able to maintain twenty slaves, and the other 429 slaves would be sold.  
​
Philadelphia socialite Sidney George Fisher noted in his diary,

‘It is a dreadful affair, however, selling these hereditary Negroes. . . . Families will not be separated, that is to say, husbands and wives, parents and young children. But brothers and sisters of mature age, parents and children of mature age, all other relations and the ties of home and long association will be violently severed. It will be a hard thing for Butler to witness and it is a monstrous thing to do. Yet it is done every day in the South. It is one among the many frightful consequences of slavery and contradicts our civilization, our Christianity, or [do you mean our here] Republicanism. Can such a system endure, is it consistent with humanity, with moral progress? These are difficult questions, and still more difficult is it to say, what can be done? The Negroes of the South must be slaves or the South will be Africanized. Slavery is better for them and for us than such a possibility,

The sale was at the Savannah racetrack (one of the few places big enough to hold such an event) outside the downtown area. For two days people and families who had grown up together were sold. At the end of the sale he had netted $303,850.  Although it was said Pierce Butler was sad about having to sell the slaves, after the last slave was sold champagne bottles popped in celebration.  Pierce Butler took a trip to Europe and was able to return home to Philadelphia in high style.
​
Today in a small park stands a historical plaque marking the greatest sale of humans in the United States. It stands as a reminder of the fact that Savannah’s wealth, to a large extent, is a result of slavery. One can only hope that the “Weeping Time” for such a horrid event will never stop.

Savannah has always had a strong and influential black community. So it comes as no surprise that they have had a significant influence on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), nationally and regionally. One such figure was Earl T. Shinhoster. Shinhoster was born in Yamacraw Village July 5, 1950. At the early age of thirteen, he became a member of the Savannah NAACP chapter, joining its energetic youth council that formed the vanguard of Savannah's civil rights movement. The Savannah NAACP was led by the renowned civil rights leader W. W. Law at the time. Shinhoster was elected president of the Savannah NAACP Youth Council just three years later.

Shinhoster left Savannah to attend Morehouse College and Cleveland State University. After college he returned to Georgia in 1975 to join Georgia governor George Busbee's staff as director of the Office of Human Affairs. He returned to a leadership position of the NAACP in 1977 when he was named director of the NAACP's southeast region office in Atlanta. He held this position until he left in 1994-95 to serve as Interim Executive Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). During his interim status he was a strong candidate to serve as the permanent director but eventually lost out to Benjamin Chavis. Instead he was named national field secretary of the NAACP. As it turned out the Chavis chapter as leader of the NAACP would be short lived.

The organization, which had fallen on hard times, saw its financial condition worsened under Chavis's command. He was forced to resign after a little more than a year. The board named Shinhoster acting executive director. Shinhoster, during this time, distinguished himself as an adept administrator. He slashed the organization's debt by $1 million and increased the membership from 600,000 to nearly 1 million in little more than a year. But once again it was not his time; the board selected Kweisi Mfume to fill the NAACP's top position in December 1995.

Shinhoster parted ways with the NAACP at this time. He worked as a field director with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Ghana. He then worked promoting voter education for Georgia's secretary of state office in 1996. Shinhoster finally returned to the NAACP as the national director of voter empowerment in 2000.

Unfortunately, his time had come. Shinhoster was killed in a car accident near Montgomery, Alabama. He was escorting the First Lady of Liberia when his vehicle, a Ford Explorer with Firestone tires, experienced a tire blowout and rolled over. Similar Ford and Firestone tire blowouts throughout the country caused a recall of the tires. The families of the victims of the tire blowout sued Ford and Firestone, which ended in a settlement out of court.

In 2001 the Georgia legislature designated the Earl T. Shinhoster Interchange and the Earl T. Shinhoster Bridge to honor him of him here in Savannah. In 2001 the Women's Organizational Movement for Equality Now erected a memorial in Alabama to Shinhoster and dedicated the stretch of Interstate 85 where he died as the "Earl T. Shinhoster Parkway."
 
 His contribution was noted by then NAACP president and CEO Kweisi Mfume when he said “Earl was one of the NAACP leaders who made this organization work he was part of the NAACP family for all of his adult life and he will surely be missed.'' Shinhoster will be remembered as one of Savannah’s proud sons of the civil rights movement. He was in the direct NAACP lineage of Savannah’s remarkable civil rights leaders Ralph Mark Gilbert and W.W. Law.
​

​It might come as a surprise to some but Savannah has a metal making history. Chatham Steel has a long history in steel and was/is the mainstay of one of Savannah’s celebrated families: the Tennabaums (not related to the Royal Tennabaums). But it is the Irish iron maker William Kehoe I want to talk about today.

Kehoe was born and raised in Wexford Ireland on Aug. 21, 1842, Ireland. Wexford was known for its part in the United Irish Rebellion of 1798. It was home to Esmonde Kyan a famed leader of this rebellion. He was baptized in a Catholic church where Father John Murphy worked a key martyr of the 1798 rebellion. The stories and the hopes of that rebellion were surely taught to young William.

At the age of ten he immigrated to America. It was 1842 when his family settled in the Old Fort District of Savannah an Irish district. William became an apprentice in an iron foundry. He would eventually buy the foundry, which was at that time, located east of Broughton Street. He became one of Savannah’s great business man. It was said of the Kehoe Iron Foundry it was “the largest and best equipped plant south of Newport News [Virginia]……”

His business interest and leadership in Savannah were enormous. He was one of the organizers and founders of the Chatham Savings and Loan Company and its president at the time of his death. You could say he put Tybee Island on the map. He was an originator of the Tybee Railroad, in fact he held the first bond of the Tybee railroad. He served as president of the Tybee Beach Company and the famous resort ‘Hotel Tybee’ Company. He also serve as a member of the town council of Tybee for 25 years. In Savannah he served as the director of the National Bank of Savannah and as a member of the Board of Commissioners of Chatham County from 1893-1898.

Yet he never forgot where he came from in Ireland. He was a supporter of the Irish cause from afar. In 1916, he helped established the Catholic Laymen’s Association of Georgia. The group produced propaganda to counter the call, by the Ku Klux Klan and others, for a boycott of Catholic businesses when an anti-Irish sentiment had crept into Savannah’s body politic. Kehoe also was responsible for what had become known as the Irish Green on Bay Street in honor of a United Irish hero: the Protestant Robert Emmet. Today it still is known as Emmet Park.

On Independence Day of 1881 he organized an event in honor of John Howard Parnell brother of the man leading the pro-tenant Irish National Land League, which had several Savannah branches. Kehoe gave the name Francis Parnell Kehoe to one of his sons. He also served on the Irish committee to establish the Sgt. Jasper Monument in 1888 here in Savannah. It is believed the Irish of Savannah were keen to have a monument here in Savannah celebrating an Irish revolutionary hero to encourage folks back home to continue to fight for their freedom.

His empire left two important architectural monuments in Savannah. The first was his home completed in 1892. It was designed by  Andrew Dewitt Bruyn one of Savannah’s greatest architects. It is called the Kehoe house today. It was built for his wife and ten children.  It is one of Savannah’s mansions on Columbia Square. Alabama and New York Jets football star, Joe Namath owned the property for a brief time before selling it in 1990. The property now is a historic bed and breakfast inn named The William Kehoe House. It is considered one of Savannah’s best bed and breakfast inns.

The other architectural gem is found in the Trustees Garden area. It is the Kehoe Iron Works Building. Savannah entrepreneur Charles Morris is restoring the large comples of Kehoe’s Iron Works complex, repurposing it to be used for arts-and-culture happenings, conventions, and more.  
 
Kehoe would die on Dec. 29, 1929. He was one of many Irish who came to Savannah and helped build this city.