SAN ANTONIO — Kathleen Campbell Montgomery said she returned to San Antonio at the end of May to complete a pilgrimage. She hand-delivered bills of sale from enslavement from family archives to the city's only African-American museum.
"I'm not ashamed of him. I'm ashamed of that particular aspect," Montgomery said. "I just find that repugnant."
The 73-year-old reached out to the San Antonio African-American Community Archive and Museum in March after searching out a place for the family documents to be donated.
"We were excited from an institution standpoint because those types of things are challenging for small institutions to get," Deborah Omowale Jarmon said.
Jarmon is SAACAM's CEO. She provided KENS 5 with a nearly 54-minute interview with SAACAM archivist Kenneth Stewart with Montgomery's recollection of her family tree, enslavement receipts, and other accounts from the past. Montgomery declined to be interviewed by KENS 5.
"This isn't going to make what Thomas Grayson did right," she said. "But somehow, it can bring some type of resolution that these documents are now where they belong."
According to Montgomery, she is the great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Wigg Grayson. The steamboat captain and ship owner is widely known for contributing to the Texas Revolution---ferrying supplies and troops on the Brazos River in the mid-1830s.
He later became a prominent figure who lived in Austin, Selma, and San Antonio.
Montgomery said Bennie Grayson Campbell was her great-grandmother. Grayson-Campbell became a Campbell after her first husband, John Pirie, was killed. Her grandfather, Thomas Grayson Campbell, was one of their children. He married Sarah Holbrook Gibbs; her father, Thomas Grayson Campbell Jr, was one of their children. Montgomery was born to her Army father, a Texas A&M alumnus.
"My parents always have teased me that I'm the only Yankee in the family because everyone else is from Texas," Montgomery said. "But courtesy of the United States Army. I was born in San Francisco."
Her great-grandmother also had a daughter who was her namesake. Montgomery's Aunt Bennie Campbell passed many family documents to Montgomery's father, Thomas Grayson Junior---her favorite nephew.
"We are all products of our past. We are products of our family history," Montgomery said. "And so I know that a lot of the privilege and a lot of what I have today is a result of Thomas Grayson, who was an accomplished man and he was a slave owner. And I have to own that."
According to Montgomery, downsizing and her son Ian stirred up the thought of the donation. The family had a chance to profit from the historical documents, but in the recording with SAAACAM, she called that gain 'blood money.'
She gave the museum four bills of sale from Bexar County in the mid-1800s made out to her great-great-grandfather Thomas Wigg Grayson and his wife, Tabitha Childress Grayson.
"They're no longer just names on a piece of paper to me," she said. "They've kind of jumped off of that paper, and I can almost feel them sitting in the room with us as we talk about it."
The Graysons also bought, as the document describes, a Negro woman named Caroline for $740--- an enslaved person for life. Then, there's a family: Les, an unnamed woman, and their infant for $2,000. Another purchase was for three Black boys ages 16, 7, and 5.
"Wash and Harry and Silas were purchased at the same time of several head of livestock," Montgomery said. "It's really bone-chilling when you see that they were just treated as a commodity."
Montgomery said the enslavement was repugnant and a shameful aspect of her family's history. But she was still proud of her great-great-grandfather's accomplishments.
"The more I read them, and I've read them over and over and over again, the sadder I got," Jarmon said.
General Order Number 3 would make them all free by June 19, 1865---two years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The order carried by Union General Gordon Granger advised the once-enslaved to remain at their present homes and work for wages. And the newly freed would not be supported in gatherings anywhere. Jarmon said free but needed a financial source to survive and land to call their own.
"There are so many people that recognize how important history is. How important true history is, how we do need to heal."
Jamon said Montgomery's donation is a significant step in that direction. She is hoping more people give from their family's archives. The Grayson documents now become SAAACAM's oldest relic.
"We take all of those stories as puzzle pieces, and we use them to create a finished picture of San Antonio Black history," Jarmon said. "So these were significant pieces in that puzzle."
Jarmon said the documents will get digitized for online viewing in three to four months. She said public inspection of the enslavement receipts could happen in a month. The museum still needs to set a date for an exhibition.
Meantime, Montgomery is back in California. She said her family enslaved people on New Sulphur Springs Rd---land no longer belonging to them. So, leaving the bills of sales in San Antonio seemed like the right thing to do.
"This is where the atrocity took place. And this is where we can educate people," she said.