The Abolitionist Who Was Chaplain to Black Civil War Soldiers and Started a College Burned Down by the KKK

History Unplugged Podcast · Nov 10, 2022 · 40m

George Richardson (1824-1911) was a traveling Methodist preacher who rode on a circuit across the antebellum Midwestern frontier and became increasingly caught up in the abolitionist movement. He became a “station master” on the Underground Railroad and served as chaplain to a black regiment during the Civil War. The soldiers under his care were survivors of the Ft. Pillow Massacre, in which the Confederates refused to take black soldiers as prisoners of war and unlawfully executed them instead.

In the 1870s, he founded a college in Texas for the formerly enslaved. When the Ku Klux Klan…