In examining his family history, LeRoy Potts Jr. ’85 found similarities in the situations of African Americans who sought refuge during the Civil War and today’s asylum seekers.
For years, I have worked in positions focused on documenting human rights abuses and detailing atrocities that cause people to leave their countries of origin. During the Gulf War in 1991, I tracked the movement of more than one million refugees who fled to Turkey and Iran, many facing imminent death after sheltering in the mountains without food or cover. On the grounds of an empty school compound in Uganda in 2012, my U.S. Department of Homeland Security colleagues and I spent several weeks interviewing hundreds of refugees from Somalia, Eritrea, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Morning to night, as we set in motion the process of bringing these individuals and families to safety in the states, we listened to their horrifying stories of violence, loss, and flight.
I know the U.S. can be a welcoming nation. I saw it during the Gulf War, my days in Uganda, and in those long years of conflict following 9/11. But this compassionate side of America is hard to reconcile with the low number of refugees and asylum seekers the United States now admits — in part, a consequence of some 472 changes to immigration laws and policy that the previous administration instituted.
While not all directed at refugees and asylum seekers, the policy changes ended the dreams of many immigrants of color. The Biden administration is working to rescind many of these changes, but the damage to U.S. refugee and asylum programs was profound, and recovery will take years. While reflecting on the damage and how to move forward, I felt compelled as an African American to engage in a deeper examination and conversation with U.S. history, foreign policy, migration, immigration, protection, and their intersection with race and my family’s story.
Our Own History
When I began researching my genealogy a few years ago, I saw U.S. history converge with my family story and my work. While scanning U.S. Census records looking for information on my paternal grandmother, I discovered that she and her older sister were orphans at ages 5 and 11 and were placed in an orphanage known as the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children in Washington, D.C. (“the Home”). During the Civil War, fighting displaced hundreds of thousands of African Americans, who desperately searched for safety. Their journeys led abolitionists to create an informal network of “asylums” or homes to care for them. My grandmother, Edna Wineberg, and my great-aunt, Bess Wineberg, were recorded as residents in the Home in 1910.
The circumstances surrounding their placement in the orphanage remain a family mystery. Eager to learn what I could of their childhood, I continued to research the origins of the orphanage. The Home was established in 1863 during the Civil War as “a response to the crisis of orphaned refugee slaves in Washington.” The National Home was one of a handful of institutions established to care for African American refugees trying to find safety and protection behind Union lines.
Sadly, the refugees who survived the journey out of enslavement through the war-torn South found little safety, protection, food, or shelter, even when they reached places like Washington, D.C. Between 1862–66, thousands of African American refugees entered Washington, but perhaps as many as a third died from unsanitary conditions in the shanties and makeshift camps they inhabited. If I had been alive at the time to interview these refugees, I wonder what similarities I might have heard between their stories and those I heard from the refugees I interviewed in Uganda.
The Home opened at Burleith, a Georgetown mansion owned by Richard S. Cox, who abandoned his property to join the Confederacy. Established by prominent abolitionists, the Home received 64 formerly enslaved persons, most of them children. One would think, for those refugee children, acceptance into the Home would have been the end to their tribulations. But Reconstruction laws allowed Cox to petition the U.S. government for a pardon and to have his estate returned to him. On Dec. 3, 1866, having received his pardon, Cox and several associates forcibly evicted the women and children from Burleith.
Though influential and well connected, the abolitionists had anticipated an unfavorable outcome such as this and had begun constructing a new asylum near Howard University — but the refugees’ eviction came before the new building’s completion. The children were forced to occupy an unfinished facility that left them exposed to winter weather just days before Christmas.
African American history is intertwined with migration stories, which are alternately painful and triumphant. Few knew that better than artist Jacob Lawrence, who in the 1940s painted a 60-panel series portraying the Great Migration, the flight of more than a million African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North following the outbreak of World War I.
Past Is Prologue
As I continue to explore this early asylum movement, I see its potential for expanding narratives and understanding of today’s asylum seekers and refugees in both the U.S. and Canada.
America has had a complex and episodic history concerning protection. Americans can take pride in the successful programs operating across various departments and agencies. Our asylum and refugee programs represent our core values and reflect our nation’s commitment to building a more stable world after WWII. However, these programs remain vulnerable to partisan politics when fundamental human rights ought to receive universal support. Moreover, when tied to U.S. foreign policy and national security debates, Americans see U.S. protection programs merely as a good deed performed beyond our borders. Rarely have we given thought to the opportunity our protection programs provide us to reflect on our history or reckon with the harm we have caused within our borders.
Rarely have we given thought to the opportunity our protection programs provide us to reflect on our history or reckon with the harm we have caused within our borders.
LeRoy G. Potts Jr. ’85
A process of atonement might start with an in-depth examination of the personal impact those 472 changes to immigration law had on asylum-seeking families and individuals. Though arguably race-neutral, these changes undoubtedly fell hardest on people of color, especially Black refugees and asylum seekers. As legislators and policy makers consider options for repairing our broken immigration system, for me, its successful revisioning rests upon a reckoning with historic racist and anti-immigrant acts. A reckoning should begin with the State Department and Department of Homeland Security developing content on their websites and within their publications that will inform employees and the public alike about historical and contemporary errors. It is also critically important that institutions create space to teach the public about the harm done to America’s Indigenous populations and the thousands of formerly enslaved women and children who died seeking asylum during the Civil War.
Indeed, I am disappointed that my work — regardless of the continent or the era — has operated in a place that is disconnected and unaware of our nation’s role in displacing African Americans.
Reckoning with racism requires effort by government, democratic institutions, the private sector, and citizens — whether your family has been in the United States for generations or you recently arrived. If we confront the tragedies at home, we can begin to make amends to the African American men, women, and children we failed to protect and better assist today’s refugees and asylum seekers.
— LeRoy G. Potts Jr. ’85 wrote this essay during his Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship in Montreal, Canada, during 2020–21. Potts is chief of research in the Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations Directorate at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a component agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He specializes in providing country conditions research to the agency’s officers who decide refugee and asylum cases. Before joining USCIS in 2008, he was a foreign affairs officer at the Department of State. This essay reflects his personal views, not the viewpoint of USCIS or the federal government.
Potts is one of the co-founders of the Colgate Alumni of Color organization, which celebrates its 35th anniversary this year.