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Bruce Turner, descendant of slave rebel Nat Turner, was about 4 years old living on a farm outside Capron when he crossed paths with a man who taught him about another famous slave who hailed from his native Southampton County.

"I remember meeting a guy in 1952," recalled Turner, a 55-year-old computer consultant living now in Virginia Beach. "He was very, very old. Bent over. Gnarled hands. That was the first time someone mentioned that someone was a slave.

"He had cataracts on his eyes, so most kids were afraid of him. I remember him telling me a story about 'blue bellies' and the 'gray boys' and he talked sort of slurry and had the old way of talking. I don't even know how old he was.

"His name was John Elmer Blow. A family lived down there called the Blows, and one of their slaves was a fellow named Samuel Blow.

"You know him as Dred Scott."

While Nat Turner gets the lion's share of press -- then and now -- for his bloody slave revolt of 1831, it was his contemporary, Scott, who tried to extract freedom using the laws of the land, right up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

He, too, failed famously.

Born in Southampton a year before Turner in 1799, Samuel Blow was taken to St. Louis in 1830 and sold to Dr. John Emerson, a military surgeon. For 12 years, Emerson took Blow with him to posts in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was outlawed. Blow married a fellow slave and had two children.

In 1842, Emerson and his wife returned to Missouri, where Emerson died.

By 1846, Blow had changed his name to Dred Scott, and that year he and his wife sued Mrs. Emerson for their freedom in the St. Louis Circuit Court. The first ruling went against them. In a second trial in 1850, a jury ruled that the Scotts deserved freedom owing to their years of residence in nonslave territories. Mrs. Emerson appealed to the state Supreme Court in 1852 and won.

Abolitionist lawyers made the Scotts their cause celebre. After they lost in U.S. Federal Court in St. Louis, they made a last-ditch appeal to the highest court in the land.

In a crushing blow to the anti-slavery movement, not to mention basic humanity, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1857 that Scott should remain a slave. That slaves were not citizens, but personal property, and property had no right to bring suit in federal court.

Or, as Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote:

"(Blacks are) beings of an inferior order. So far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

(Speaking of inferior beings, Taney was no poster boy for Aryan supremacy. Check out his mug -- and read up on the fascinating Dred Scott case -- at www.sos.mo.gov/archives/ resources/africanamerican/ scott/scott.asp.)

The Dred Scott story ends happily, sort of.

Mrs. Emerson's second husband was a Massachusetts congressman who also happened to be a vocal abolitionist. He became aware late in the game that his sweet bride owned perhaps the most famous slave in America. So in 1857 he transferred ownership back to the Blows, who freed Scott and his family.

Dred Scott died the following year of tuberculosis. A rough road, a hard passage, but he died a free man.


It's not often you meet a guy who can whup you and the horse you rode in on, even if that horse was Seabiscuit.

Karate sensei Teruyuki Okazaki, 72, doesn't look the part. Diminutive, compact, with wire-rimmed glasses and self-deprecating humor, he resembles a businessman more than the toughest Shotokan karate guy on the planet.

The sensei hit town last week for several days of drills, tests and motivational Zen being-ness.

As he put a crowd of sweat-soaked black belts through their paces at the Hampton Roads Shotokan Karate Dojo in Newport News on Sunday, all I could think was, "This guy is a peanut. He's knee-high to Steven Seagal."

Finally, I had the chance to ask him: "You're my size. In a dust-up between you and Steven, who would win?"

Okazaki just giggled. But dojo owner Steve Pohle assured me that Seagal would last about as long as Janet and Justin at the next Super Bowl half-time show.

"This guy is like taking a golf lesson from Tiger Woods," Pohle said. "He's the Babe Ruth of karate."

Okazaki came to the U.S. from Japan in 1961 for a demonstration and has been here ever since. His karate camp outside Philadelphia regularly hosts elite teams from around the world.

The closest he came to putting his karate to famous use was in the '60s when a middleweight boxing champ and his manager wanted to stage a match. When they told Okazaki he couldn't use his kicks, the sensei refused. Okazaki considers it a moral victory -- after the boxer saw the sensei in action, he joined his dojo.

"In this country over 40 years," said Okazaki, "I never use it."

To us unenlightened, that seems like such a waste. Training for a lifetime and never getting that gut-level Mr. Miyagi moment when the unassuming underdog takes down the towering bad boy.

"The idea of karate," Pohle said, "is never to show off."

Okazaki is a ninth-degree black belt master out of a possible 10.

So what do you have to do to get to 10?

"You have to die," Pohle said, explaining it's more a posthumous honorific than a pass/fail test.

"I don't mind," said Okazaki.

"It's the travel, not the destination," Pohle explained. "It's a Zen thing."


Contact me at tdietrich@dailypress.com or 247-7892.

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