(soft music) - [Michelle] Tonight, the Mayor of Pawtucket on his city's future during a time of uncertainty.

- We have the stadium and a lot of new development coming in.

It's where you need it to be.

It just takes too darn long.

- [Pamela] Then a local college professor makes a rare find, a long forgotten autobiography written by an American slave.

- I knew immediately that this was a once in a lifetime discovery.

- [Michelle] And finally, one Rhode Island family's resilience.

- They had to fight for their lives.

(soft music) (soft music continues) - Good evening and welcome to Rhode Island PBS Weekly.

I'm Michelle San Miguel.

- And I'm Pamela Watts.

We begin tonight in an old mill community that's in the midst of big change.

- That includes a 10,000 seat sports venue, new housing developments, and a new high school on the way.

But it also comes as many of the city schools are failing, one of their most iconic businesses is considering leaving, and people in this largely democratic city are worried about how President Trump's new policies will affect them.

I recently sat down with longtime mayor Donald Grebien, to talk about Pawtucket's future.

- I'm really concerned about the federal changes, you know, how we protect our very highly cultural, diverse and immigration populations.

- [Michelle] As he begins his eighth term, protecting the city's immigrant population is top of mind for Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien.

He says many are fearful over what President Trump's crackdown on undocumented immigrants will mean for them.

- We're always gonna side taking care of the residents, documented or undocumented.

- [Michelle] Federal immigration authorities are now allowed to arrest migrants at places like schools and churches.

But Grebien says.

- There was a lot of misinformation, you know, last couple weeks because of all those executive orders and everybody's reacting and not having a clear picture.

ICE will never tell us when they're coming in, but we won't be participating with them.

- [Michelle] And that's far from Grebien's only concern.

Longtime resident and toy maker, Hasbro, is considering moving its headquarters out of the city.

- They decided that that building from a capital investment is no longer worth investing.

- Hasbro is such a point of pride, not only for people in Pawtucket, but also for people in the state.

What are you doing to persuade the management of Hasbro to stay put?

- And that's hard, right, 'cause it all depends on what their goals are.

And we've done everything we can.

We've put a proposal together and when I say that we have developers who are willing to develop the Hasbro site, put them as a class A tenant.

- [Michelle] Grebien is referring to the site of the former Apex department store.

The city purchased the building and several surrounding properties for more than $17 million in 2021.

Grebien wants the toy maker to be the anchor tenant.

Seeing them leave, he says, would hurt in several ways.

- The financial loss to Pawtucket is a little over a million dollars.

You know, we're not gonna lose all of that because they're still gonna have the property.

They're still gonna have to pay taxes.

But we don't want to vacant building.

You know, we'll be losing some of the tangible tax, which is a smaller number.

So it's not really a major financial hit.

It's an image, it's a pride.

- [Michelle] Saying goodbye to Hasbro would be a big loss for a city that still remembers the blows its suffered when the Paw Sox left McCoy Stadium for Worcester and when Memorial Hospital shut down.

- I tell folks all the time, you wish you could control those, right?

Because it's not on the local government.

It really becomes business.

- Do you say to yourself, what could I and my administration have done differently so that we wouldn't even be having this conversation about Hasbro considering a move?

- Absolutely.

We've talked about that.

We have conversations, the council, even at home with my wife, you start to pull yourself off with our team.

I think that if there's anything that I could do differently, as I probably would've spent more time knocking on the door at Hasbro the old fashioned way, you know, to hold their hand a little more.

- [Michelle] Grebien points to the progress Pawtucket has made as yet another reason why Hasbro should stay in his hometown.

- As we sit here and we are talking today and you see the good things gonna happen and we have the stadium and a lot of new development coming in, it's where you need it to be.

It just takes two darn long.

- [Michelle] This year promises to be a memorable one.

This spring, the stadium at Tidewater Landing will open to the public.

We went with the mayor to the construction site to see how the work is progressing.

- It's exciting times like, you know, as we get through, everybody was questioning the financing and all that stuff.

You know, they're on time, they're on budget now.

It's positive and the community is really getting engaged and excited about it.

- You'll be at the first home game?

- Oh yes, I'll be at the first.

I haven't bought my ticket yet, but I will be at the first home game.

- [Michelle] The multi-use soccer stadium will be home to the Rhode Island Futbol Club overlooking the Seekonk River.

Developers also plan to build out the riverfront over the coming years and create much needed housing.

- We're looking at about 600 units of a mixed use, mostly residential and a couple of storefronts.

So that becomes the active zone.

You have the bike path, you have the water access, and Blackstone Valley Tourism honestly was just in the other day talking about, okay, how do we get a dock down there so we can get the boats in?

And so it's gonna be that life center style.

- It's building on what Grebien describes as a renaissance in Pawtucket.

Two years ago, the Pawtucket Central Falls Transit Center opened, making it easier for many Rhode Islanders traveling to and from Boston.

One block from there, a mixed use apartment and retail center is being built with 150 apartments.

The mayor says about a quarter of them will be affordable housing, the rest will be market rate.

There are people who say that some of these projects are too focused on bringing in affluent commuters and they're worried that these projects will price people out of Pawtucket who've been here for years.

Do you share in those concerns about rising rents, rising home prices?

- Yeah, I mean that is truly a factor of, right now Pawtucket is a moderate to low income community, so we need to get some of those dollars in, but we need to protect all of the folks that are here as well.

You know, now with the new housing legislation, it's helpful to keep people in their homes.

You know, we need to start looking at what we do to control some rents.

In the last two weeks, I have senior citizens who have 70-year-old, or have been in their homes renting for 30 years and they're getting priced out, right?

So there's a balance.

As much as I love my community, we are considered a distress community.

We have been for years and based on our populations, so we need to get a little more of that in, but balance and protect.

- Another point of concern for the mayor, the quality of the city school district.

Five schools including William Tolman Senior High School, are in comprehensive support and improvement status, meaning they're in the bottom 5% for academic achievement and growth.

Grebien says the district is working with RIDE, the Rhode Island Department of Education, to turn things around.

Are you worried about a state takeover with the schools?

- I don't get concerned, though, I don't think we're at a potential of a takeover.

I think there could be, you know, if we as a community or as the superintendent doesn't get the organization together, there are concerns about that.

Having said that, you know, I'm not worried.

I don't think RIDE will be coming in tomorrow to take over.

- The future hope of the city schools comes back to a property that today is a scar of recent loss.

The old McCoy Stadium will be demolished and the site will be turned into a new unified high school bringing Tolman and Shea Senior High School onto one campus.

Grebien estimates it'll take five to six years before it's open.

You have now been in office 14 years, you have two years, and then we'll see what happens.

What else do you aspire to do?

- People always ask you, "Are you gonna run for a state office?

Are you gonna do this?"

You know, I tell everybody, "Would I love to run for state office?

It's never never, I don't know what the next step would be."

You know, if I had my way, you know, you're looking at the Lieutenant Governor or Secretary of State, not against anybody that's there.

- [Michelle] Whatever the future holds, Grebien says one thing is for sure, he'll never be able to sit still.

- If I could and the voters would have me, I would love to retire from here and continue to make those changes.

It really is about hoping that people remember that at the end of the day, we provided a better quality life for them.

- Up next, there are few first person accounts by slaves about their experience in America, but a local college professor stumbled upon a rare find, an autobiography that had been all but lost.

To honor African American Heritage Month, we learned more about this rediscovered narrative and efforts to keep one man's story alive.

- I think my head exploded and I think that my immediate response to my head exploding was, this can't be real.

- [Pamela] But it was.

Author Jonathan Schroeder discovered a real life, rare story far from the fiction he lectures on at Rhode Island School of Design.

Schroeder teaches sci-fi and fantasy literature, but while doing some research, he stumbled upon an African American's autobiography printed in a newspaper in 1855.

- So I had to click on the document and kind of hold my breath and scroll through.

- So when you found this, what went through your mind?

Did you know you'd made a big discovery?

- I knew immediately that this was a once in a lifetime discovery.

What I had like no clue about was how do you bring something like this back into the world in a way that does justice to its author?

- [Pamela] That author was John Swanson Jacobs.

This is the only known portrait of Jacobs.

- John Jacobs was born around 1815 in Edenton, North Carolina.

He and his sister, Harriet Jacobs were six generation slaves and both of them would become over the course of their lives, the first members of their family to be able to tell their story of over 150 years in slavery.

- [Pamela] Harriet Jacobs is noted for her book called "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl."

She and her brother escaped bondage and came via providence to New Bedford, a Quaker capital of anti-slavery resistance.

There they met famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

What they gleaned in collaboration with him.

- The possibility for decrying slavery by calling out slave owners and politicians and American law by their names.

And that's very different than the more conventional autobiographical slave narrative.

- [Pamela] Jacobs found work on the New Bedford Docks and he escaped a second time on a whaling ship.

Schroeder says many African Americans did this to elude slave catchers.

- We signed up for a ship called the Francis Henrietta and sailed around Cape Horn and into the Pacific.

- It was aboard that ship, voyaging all over the world, that Jacobs had time to practice reading and writing skills learned in New Bedford.

He eventually became a gold prospector in Australia.

You did not set out to find him.

How did you unravel his story?

- I was just looking for information on Harry Jacobs's son who had gone to Australia in 1852 with his uncle John, who was not the major character that I was following.

- [Pamela] Turns out Harriet's son Joseph had died of fever.

Schroeder was digging into that story online when he happened upon the two part article.

- [Schroeder] This is it.

- [Pamela] Written by John Jacobs and published in "The Empire," an anti-slavery Australian newspaper.

- John Jacobs just walked in one day and initially said, "Can I borrow the a copy of the Constitution and a copy of this history of the United States?"

And in the course of talking to them, he used his rhetorical and elocutionary skills and he persuaded them not simply to loan a couple books to him, but to publish his life story.

It was published over the course of two days in "The Empire."

Single page of "The Empire" would be about twice the size of a single page of the New York Times today.

The editors say in their short introduction that they scarcely altered a word.

- That rediscovered narrative written by a fugitive was titled "The United States Governed by 600,000 Despots, A true Story of Slavery."

It is republished in Schroeder's new book along with Jacob's full biography.

What makes John Jacobs story so extraordinary?

- I think the fact that he is writing from outside the United States without fear of reprisal and with the ability to, you know, write, we would say, speak his mind write in an unfiltered, unapologetic manner.

- [Pamela] Schroeder says the document illustrates the former slave's ability to critique the laws of the United States as well as its citizens.

- The 600,000 despots refers to the slave owners and their families who owned the three or three million plus enslaved people in the United States in 1850.

He names almost all of the prominent politicians who were responsible with four compromises, with the southern slave holding states leading through 1850.

And he calls out the wealthy planters of the region of North Carolina where he was from.

- [Pamela] Schroeder says, the most remarkable part is.

- You are asked to stare directly at those who are responsible for enslaving others and for making slavery possible if you are a white American, whether you're southern, if you're a southerner or a northerner, you are also going to have to ask yourself, are you implicitly responsible for maintaining slavery in the United States?

- [Pamela] Schroeder reads a quote from Jacob's article published so long ago.

- "They can no longer say, 'This sin does not lie at my door.'

They can no longer say, 'I am not my brother's keeper.'

The blood of your colored countrymen cries out against you."

- And this story lay buried in the newspaper with very little effect for over a century.

- I don't think it was ever remembered from a few days after it was published.

I haven't found any mention of it after April 26th, 1855, and so it went to live wherever stacks of this old newspaper went.

- [Pamela] Jacobs died at age 58.

His grave marker bears the simple inscription, "Brother."

He is buried near his sister Harriet and other family members at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Schroeder is currently researching another branch of Jacob's story.

The author has uncovered how Quakers from Rhode Island, including abolitionist, Moses Brown, helped Jacob's grandparents escaped to Smithfield, where they work spinning yarn in a textile mill.

For some unknown reason, the family returned to the South.

Schroeder says he's determined John Jacob's story will never again be lost to history.

- I see this project as being kind of part and parcel of a longer term project of bringing the Jacobs family back into the public eye.

- Jonathan Schroeder has just received two fellowships to write a new book tracing 11 generations of the Jacobs family.

Finally, tonight we take another look at a story about one of the many cultures that call Rhode Island home.

Hmong people are an ethnic group that originated in China with a diaspora reaching across the globe.

Their journey to the United States began after one of the longest and most divisive wars in American history came to an end.

In October, producer Isabella Gabillion interviewed a Hmong family about their history.

This story is part of our continuing series, "My Take."

- It's really good to make a soup.

(soft music) - Very few times my mom and dad have told me they love me, but I know based on how they show me and based how they feed me.

When they feed you, it's a sign of love.

(Johnny clapping) My name is Johnny Kue and this is my take on growing up Hmong.

The term Hmong means free man.

I would describe it as an ethnic group.

We don't have our own country, we have our own language.

Hmong, I guess the best way I can say it is we're not a place, we are a people.

In the Hmong tradition, a lot of our history was passed down through oral history or through tapestry.

In our culture, we call this the Pandau.

This one in particular explains my family's journey exactly.

My mother and father grew up in Laos and it was around the time the Vietnam War happened that my father was recruited to join the Vietnam War.

- [Narrator] Laos, the strategic key to Southeast Asia's richest areas.

- The United States did not know how to navigate the jungles and because the Hmongs were familiar with the jungles and the terrain, they were sort of like navigators in the jungles.

When my dad was first recruited into the secret army, he was about 15 years old.

When the U.S. left the war, they had to fight for their lives.

They were enemies of Laos and the orders were to kill the Hmong families on site or to put them in reeducation camps.

(soft music) When my family were in the concentration camp and they were slated for either reeducation or they were slated to be executed, my sister, my oldest sister at the time, she was so skinny that she was able to get a hand untied from the ropes and after she got her hand free, she was able to untie my family.

They were able to escape those camps.

They decided to flee Laos.

The only way was to cross the river that was adjacent to Laos in Thailand.

There were soldiers that were guarding the rivers.

My sister at the time, she was probably one years old, she was on my mom's back and she slipped off and my father just said that if we go back for her, that there's a chance that we all might be dead.

But my mother was able to rescue her and they thankfully they were able to get across the river safely.

Eventually they did settle into Thailand where they stayed for a while until the United States offered them political refuge.

We lived in South Providence near the West end, about one block away from the Knight Memorial Library.

I have a really, really big family, seven siblings.

Four were born in Laos and Thailand, and three of us were born in the United States.

I am the last of the seven.

I am the baby of the family.

My father was an immigration caseworker and he would help get a lot of immigrants into Rhode Island.

A lot of the folks coming in did not have a voice and there was a lot of fear for the refugees coming in for the first time.

And my father did a lot of work with community leaders to help ease those fears and to help those early refugee settlers to become a part of the community.

So the Hmong community was always tight knit.

My father told me, if you're traveling somewhere and you're tired and it's late and you have nowhere to stay, find a phone book and you look up the last name Kue.

And you say, "Listen, I am so-and-so's son from Rhode Island.

Is it okay if we stay at your house tonight?"

And he said that would open up their home for you.

And that's just the community that I've been taught.

There was definitely a time in my life where I was trying to suppress like who I was because I was trying to fit in.

But as I got older, I realized how important my culture was and I realized how important I need to pass this on to my son.

It became evident that, you know, everything that my family has done to raise me the right way is because of our Hmong values.

(soft music) (family chattering) (Johnny clapping) My name is Johnny Kue and this was my take on growing up Hmong.

- That's our broadcast this evening.

Thank you for joining us, I'm Michelle San Miguel.

- And I'm Pamela Watts.

We'll be back next week with another edition of "Rhode Island PBS Weekly."

Until then, please follow us on Facebook and YouTube and visit us online to see all of our stories and past episodes at ripbs.org/weekly.

Or listen to our podcast on your favorite streaming platform.

Goodnight.

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