00:00:03,200	Welcome to History Hotdish. A casual conversation about the historic people and events that give Bismarck its unique flavor. History Hotdish is brought to you by the Bismarck Historical Society, a local nonprofit whose mission is to learn, preserve, and promote the history of Bismarck. Sit back, turn up the volume, and enjoy another helping of History Hotdish.

00:00:22,570	Welcome to another episode of History Hotdish. I'm your host, Kate Waldera, a member of the Bismarck Historical Society's board of directors. Today, our guest is Marvin Jefferson, a scholar who joins us remotely from Newark, new Jersey. Chautauqua is a tradition of American live performance dating back to the 1870s, blending education and entertainment through first person historical portrayal.

00:00:54,630	Performers research a historical figure in depth, then bring them to life on the stage, speaking in their voice, sharing their story, and engaging directly with the audience. To day we're going to talk about York. Familiar to most is Captain William Clark's enslaved servant, who accompanied the Lewis and Clark Expedition from 1804 to 1806.

00:01:22,400	Marvin has researched and will be portraying York at our upcoming Living History event. Venturing with the Vanguard on September 8th at 6:30 p.m. in the National Energy Center building at Bismarck State College.

00:01:41,230	Marvin, for our listeners, tell us a bit about yourself, your educational and professional background, and why you became involved in the Chautauqua tradition. Okay. Thank you very much for having me. I well, I darted, of course, as an actor, I started acting, of course, in high school.

00:02:12,170	Then I went to Rutgers University, where I studied at the Mason Grove School of the Arts. In 1981, I left Rutgers and I formed my own theater company, Ensemble Theater Company of New Jersey theater Company, meaning Actors Equity. And I had the theater company I went to producer, artistic director of the theater company from 1981 to 1996.

00:02:44,330	That's when the company, you know, officially came to a close. And I would say in the latter part of 96. I was approached by my friend and mentor, Doctor Clement Alexander Price, who was a professor at Rutgers of History and was one of the co-founders of the Marion Thompson White Lecture Series, which is the oldest lecture series dealing with African American history in the country.

00:03:18,630	And I had done a monologue of.

00:03:25,400	Booker T Washington, one of his speeches in 1996, early on, and it went very well. So he approached me and said that the other founder of the Marion White Thompson White Lecture series had something for me, and I didn't know what it was. And so this gentleman named Giles, right.

00:03:48,330	And Giles Wright asked me if I wanted to portray Paul Robeson in the Chautauqua format. And I said, what? I had no idea what Chautauqua was. And so he went on to explain to me what Chautauqua was it basically living history. And he explained to me the structure of Chautauqua, and I had to fly out.

00:04:13,470	One of the things I had to do, I, of course, do my own research and reading, and I had to study with someone who was either a scholar of Paul Robeson or someone who was both a scholar and a historian.

00:04:37,600	And I kind of hit the the trifecta, because the gentleman I was supposed to study with, his name was Professor Sterling Stuckey, but he was not able. And he said, well, I know someone who Marvin could study with.

00:04:57,530	And that was a gentleman by the name of Lloyd L Brown, who was all was not just Paul Robeson, dear friend, but also a biographer and assistant, Paul Robeson, on the right hand of his book, here I stand. So I studied with him, I did all my reading, and ultimately I had to go out to West Fargo, North Dakota, to see what Chautauqua actually did. It was great. Plain Chautauqua and I met George Fine and I met Charles Pace, and I saw what the Chautauqua did.

00:05:23,070	And that was, you know, so in 97, I started performing at Paul Robeson. And somehow the Newark Board of Education caught wind of my performances. And they said, well, we need to perform this in the schools.

00:05:52,970	And so for 12 years from 1997, all the way up to 2009, I performed the Paul Robeson Chautauqua for fourth graders, middle school and high schoolers. Okay. It was at that time that I started moving beyond New York and New Jersey and started performing Paul Robeson throughout, you know, the country in 2000. I started I created a Martin Luther King Junior Chautauqua, and in 2012. I was commissioned by the the Ohio Humanity Council, Ohio Chautauqua.

00:06:29,370	And they wanted to do a York because their theme was when Ohio was the Western frontier. And so it was in 2012 that I started portraying York. Okay. And I'd been portraying him, you know, intermittently ever since. Okay, wonderful.

00:06:53,870	And then as likely the first black explorer in the American interior, York generated excitement as he traveled up the Missouri River through present day North Dakota. Can you tell us a little bit more about his life and why you find him a particularly interesting figure in history? I.

00:07:24,670	York's life is both unique and typical, and what I mean by that is that York was born, I would say, between 1772 and 1775. He was, you know, he was born enslaved. He was enslaved by the, you know, the Clark family.

00:07:56,200	And when he became 12 years old, approximately, because that's when enslaved people start, you know, either working as an enslaved person, either for, you know, in the, you know, in the field or in the house. And your father, Old York, who was the body servant to John Clark, who was William Clark, father, basically, you know, trained him to be a body servant. And so in that instance, when he became 12 years old, he became William Clark's body servant. Okay.

00:08:21,670	And, so because William Clark was born in 1770 and so he, you know, thereabouts, that's when he became a body servant, which is one who works in the house.

00:08:47,670	He basically see to the needs of William Clark, you know, make sure he gets the food that William Clark once, make sure he shaved, make sure it clothes all you know, everything that makes.

00:08:53,070	You know the life of William Clark easier. That was, you know, your job, right? Okay. And I would say that if you didn't have the expedition, you would have lived his life out, you know, in that way. But it was the expedition that made your life unique. And how. Yeah.

00:09:21,730	I mean, because of the, you know, because of the indigenous people that he met, because of how he was in many ways treated like the other men and what, you know, had to be held responsible, you know, for doing what he had to do. Right? Like, you know. Yeah.

00:09:44,700	So, that's what made your life unique because, you know, the expedition was one of the great, journeys in American history. Absolutely. He was able to set foot off the plantation and explore a world beyond that. Exactly. And he also saw that there were people, meaning the native people who did not see him as an enslaved person. They saw him as something special, something you know, or inspiring.

00:10:11,200	And that's, you know, in many ways changed York. Yes. It did. Yeah. It gave him a taste of what the life could have been outside of the plantation life. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it gave him an insight of his humanity and let him know. That that's even more important. Yeah, yeah.

00:10:36,300	Let him know that he was more than just someone who was enslaved. Yeah, yeah. A reminder for our guests that have just joined us. You're listening to History Hotdish on Radio Access, 102.5 FM I'm your host, Kate Waldera.

00:11:01,900	And today our guest is Marvin Jefferson, a Chautauqua scholar who has made a study of York and his experiences with the core of discovery, which first arrived in present day North Dakota and the fall of 1804. There is a heartbreaking contrast between York voting on equal terms with the group during the expedition, and then being put back into the brutal life of enslavement upon returning to Saint Louis.

00:11:28,000	As a performer, how do you handle that emotional weight? Bringing York to life, knowing the freedoms that he had in the West were stripped away from him once the journey was done.

00:11:43,630	As an actor, my training was in what they call the Sanford Meisner technique that is being truthful under imaginary circumstances. But in addition to that, York was a human being, and he was a human being in a situation where he had a wife.

00:12:24,600	And when he came back from the expedition, his view of himself changed or deepened and but did not see it that way. And as heroic as Clark was in regard to what him and Lewis did, you know, Clark was still a slave owner and a slave owner by definition, does not see his enslaved as fully human.

00:13:00,230	And so for York, the loss of his wife, of him not being able to live out his life with her, he had no, you know, fancy expectation that he would going to receive land or money. He was hoping that he could be freed.

00:13:26,870	But even when that couldn't happen, or when, you know, Clark refused, that you're at least wanted to live out his life with his wife, even enslaved. And he had offered, you know, to, you know, if I could just work in, in, in, in Louisville next to my wife, I'll work and send you back whatever I earn as long as I could be with her. And Clark said no. Oh.

00:13:47,300	Which I think your saw the betrayal. Not because York had any friends. Fanciful notions of him being, you know, beyond enslavement. But certainly, you know, Clark knew that that that York, you know, felt very deeply about this woman and the fact that he would just refuse.

00:14:11,730	Him that was deeply hurtful. And so, as a Chautauqua and I have to as much as I possibly can, deal with the reality of that hurt the reality of that betrayal. And I, I, you know, that's part of my, you know, part of my performance, that part of, you know what? You know what I do.

00:14:34,200	Now kind of going into the relationship that York and Clark had, I'm sure that the experience of of what the reality that happened after, after the expedition was over, from what you're saying, I have a feeling that that kind of it definitely did damage the relationship that they had.

00:15:00,130	I don't think York would have looked at Clark the same way anymore. No, he didn't. And that's evidenced by the letter that William Clark was writing to his brother Jonathan. There's a book called Dear Jonathan and the letter that William Clark wrote to him and and some of the letters he talking about York.

00:15:21,970	And, you know, he, you know, he had to get past this thing with his wife and he's serviceable to me. And if he continued to act this way, and I had to beat him at one point in time and I threw him in jail at another, you know, so the relationship deteriorated, because Clark

00:15:41,530	simply did not see York as a full human being, which is one of the tragedy of enslavement. It not only damages the enslaved, but it also damages the enslaver, whether they knew it. And that's the sad part, because that was that was the mindset of the time, you know, in York had tasted it.

00:16:06,900	It would be like giving somebody, you know, a prize and then taking that prize away from them and expecting them to go back to the life that they had, you know, as if the new life had never happened, you know? So that definitely would not encourage the relationship to continue in the same vein as it had.

00:16:30,200	It got very bad. It really deteriorated. And it was never the same after that. Absolutely. And this kind of segues into the next question that we have for you. The Chautauqua audiences oftentimes will bring modern political debates or biases into a historical discussion.

00:16:59,630	And how do you handle those difficult or controversial questions while staying true to York's 19th century perspective? Yeah, I you know, I have to remind people that as living historian. Or as a historian in general, you know, it's easy to become.

00:17:24,370	Judgmental. Certainly, you know, I've had people say, well, why didn't he, you know, run away? Well, why didn't he, you know, beat William Clark up or why didn't he? And. Those things were just not done. Exactly without repercussions, you know? Yeah. Again, this would be for, you know, Frederick Douglass. This would be for Harriet Tubman.

00:17:55,330	This would be for. I'm not suggesting that there was not abolitionist, ferment. But, you know, that was not liquid, not the height of the Underground Railroad. This was in, you know, it was in slavery was in full effect here. And so even when ultimately York was freed, in like 1816, thereabouts.

00:18:26,570	Freedom is not well, you can just go wherever you want and do whatever you want to do. You know, it was very structured in regard to where your goes, what your does, who your, you know, fraternize it with. It was and I have to constantly remind people that this was the world then. Yeah that was the mindset.

00:18:56,970	Yeah, yeah. And now there is a question mark after 1816. And we don't know definitively what happened to York. In 1832, you know, William Washington Irving interviewed William Clark. And, you know, Irving asked, you know, you know, Clark.

00:19:29,470	Well, you know, what happened to your manservant, what happened to York? And Clark says, well, I freed him and gave him some horses and made him responsible for business. And it didn't go well because York was illiterate. He repeated, you know, he would you know, he would basically, quote unquote, lazy and didn't do the job. And York allegedly said, damn this freedom. I've never had a decent day since I've had it.

00:19:54,930	And according to a clerk, he was trying to get back to William Clark. But he contracted cholera in Tennessee and died. Oh, okay. Now, the problem with that particular story is that slave owners felt that black people wanted to be slaves, that they didn't want to be free.

00:20:15,170	So we don't know how much ego went into that particular story. Maybe that happened, maybe it didn't. But then there's another story in 18 again, 1832, where a mountain man by the name of Zenith Leonard had was exploring the Rocky Mountains. He came across a crow, you know, nation. And he saw a black man there.

00:20:43,470	And this black man had a number of wives could, you know, could speak the language rather fluently. And, you know, genus Leonard had asked this black man, well, where did you I mean, how did you arrive here? And the black man said, well, he first arrived here, you know, through his travels with Lewis and Clark.

00:21:04,570	So the suggestion is that this may have been York, but there were a number of, you know, Black Mountain men in the area. So it could have been someone saying that they were York, or it could have been York. Nothing definitively is known. So we don't know. We don't know it. He kind of disappeared, so. To speak.

00:21:31,770	Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I my, my thing is in, in, in getting more specific about your question, what I also remind people of is that this is where the quote typical of York's life comes in. Both my father and my father in law were drafted in, fought in World War two.

00:22:07,530	My father fought, came back and he didn't receive his GI Bill. And despite his service, my father in law, my wife, father, fought, did receive a GI Bill. But my father in law, his he fought with distinction because he would part of of patent trucking unit that was involved in the liberation of of of Buchenwald book and concentration camp.

00:22:39,970	He was, as they call, a black angel. But when he came back, he was told that, well, don't get happy. You didn't really do anything. And so the point I'm making is that when York came back, the what he had done and how he assisted the expedition were treated as nothing.

00:23:05,070	When my father came back, what he had done was treated as nothing was. My father in law came back. What he had done were treated it nothing. And it was my wife who had to.

00:23:27,700	Once my father, my father in law said, what happened to him? She did the excavation and the detective work and found out that, yes, in fact, he was part of a patent trucking unit. And yes, in fact, he was a black angel and she did a mini documentary on him. And that story is now part of the of the National Holocaust Museum.

00:23:52,500	But again, you know, it wasn't until I think, 22,001 where Bill Clinton had made a York and Sacajawea honorary sergeant of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, because both of them, you know, when they came back, it was like, well. You know, they want. And you're right, you know, I'm sitting here thinking of it in the modern day mindset and having to remind myself, you know, initially I say, well, that is terrible.

00:24:17,730	I mean, how could they be treated that way? But as you said, you have to look back at the time in which they lived and the mindsets that the people, so to speak, in power had and, and, and you just have to remember that even though it's abhorrent to you, as, as we sit here,

00:24:38,570	it was normal back then. It would normally. Which is it was not it wasn't. An exception. It was it was the rule. Yeah, absolutely. And that's the part I have a hard time with. But again, it's my own modern day concept versus what it would have been, you know, 50, 100 years ago. It was drastically different.

00:25:01,330	Yeah. Yeah. And people have to remember that, that it was different and they can't imprint their own idea on the way it should be, because that's the way it was. Not the way it was. That's the history. And that, you know, we I have to be true to that.

00:25:19,730	And I have to kind of remind people because people have these notions and it's like, no, that's not what it does. No. And you can't you can't judge, you know, you can't judge how people respond to that type of thing because we don't know how we respond. No, you. Know, you don't. Yeah, you absolutely don't. That's the way it was.

00:25:40,470	And that's and that's what we're studying is the way it was. Exactly. Yeah. Is there anything other aspects of York that we haven't already touched about that would that you find interesting or unique?

00:25:58,700	Is you in studying about him and the various things that was said about him? My portrayal is take place in a tavern because it was, stated, you know, through the oral tradition that York, you know, when he came back to, you know, Saint Louis and Clark had, you know, allowed him to go into the taverns

00:26:32,500	and even, I'm sure when he was, you know, as a free man, he would go into the taverns. And because he was part of something that at the time would tantamount to men going to the moon.

00:26:49,300	It just wasn't done. Yeah. Yeah. No one had done that. And so the, the members of the expedition were seen as these astronauts, I mean, you know, and so York would go into the taverns and have a drink or two and, and talk about the things during the expedition that happened. And no one could really challenge him.

00:27:17,100	No. Absolutely not. They could. They were there. They weren't there. Exactly. Yeah. That. Yeah. And I let that aspect of of of him. Of. You know, that that's very human. And that's also. Very much in keeping with, you know, the frontier and you know, they talking the tales and. You know. You know, it goes. Back to them.

00:27:39,030	Yeah. They can tell their stories and what they've done and, and that, you know, and that doubly makes it so sad because again, that alludes to what we've already talked about that he had a chance to experience almost being equal. Yeah.

00:27:59,200	And then when the expedition was done and he and Clark went back home, he didn't have that anymore. And he had had that taste, that sweet taste, and it was taken away. Yeah. And like any human being, once you get a taste of freedom. You. You literally can't go back. No you can't. Once you've had it, you cannot go back. And that's it. Yeah.

00:28:24,270	And that makes and that makes it unfortunate. But again, it was the mindset of the time. You know that in. Yes. Yeah. Well I want to go ahead. I'm sorry. No no no. No no no that was that was it. Well, I want to thank you, Marvin. It's been delightful talking about York and learning more about him.

00:28:47,170	And I know we're eagerly waiting for the event on September 8th, where we can watch you portray York. And so to close out the program, we would like to encourage anyone interested in learning more about York and his time here in present day North Dakota to attend our upcoming Living History event, venturing with the Vanguard.

00:29:12,300	It is a Chautauqua performance being held on Tuesday, September 8th at 6:30 p.m. in the National Energy Center building at Bismarck State College. The event is free to the public and is funded by a North Dakota 250 grant, and full details can be found at Bismarck History or the study. And and again.

00:29:40,530	Marvin, thank you so much for your time. I've so enjoyed this conversation that we've had. Thank you. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Can't wait to come out. Yes. And we're excited to see you. Yep. Thank you for listening to History Hotdish. If you like what you heard.

00:29:57,530	The Bismarck Historical Society hosts programs and events throughout the year. We welcome all those with an interest in local history to join us. For more information about programs or membership, visit our website, Bismarck History or find us on Facebook. You can find History Hotdish on 102.5 FM Radio Access and anywhere you find great podcasts.

00:30:20,630	History Hotdish is produced by the Bismarck Historical Society in partnership with Dakota Media Access.