elizabeth keckley is a dressmaker, so she outfits her in elaborate dress, but she is also a confidanteot about the life of free black people in washington from lizzie keckley. >> elizabeth keckley was very active in washington, d.c.'s african-american community. and she with a number of other african-american women founded the contraband relief association, which was a society of women who raise money, collect food, collect clothing, try to find shelter for people who are escaping slavery and coming into washington, d.c. >> and pretty soon mary is donating and asking her husband to donate to the cause of sheltering freed enslaved people. >> and mary lincoln allowed elizabeth keckley to use her name publicly when she went around raising money for the association. >> so there is a way in which mary todd lincoln could commiserate with, bond with a freed woman of color on an equal plain. so i think she is more complex than people cut her out to be. >> as mary lincoln and elizabeth keckley work to find a play for free african-americans abraham lincoln works to navigate their place on the ba

circle there are three or four books on lincoln and on lincoln and douglas and yet the woman elizabeth keckley who he saw every day is first slade who he was very very involved with he used to take his son to play days. i mean the black community in washington was very involved in lincoln and as you point out, you know, there there was this importance of connecting lincoln to that legacy and i think harriet tubman is a part of the larger broader portrait of doing that in this particular film was one of the first now i will say a lot of my colleagues have problems with abraham lincoln vampire hunter and mike and justifiably so catherine any film that brings together harriet tubman and mary lincoln working together to win the battle of gettysburg. you've got to see it to believe it. i i think you know with something like abraham lincoln the web vampire hunter what has to take it as an allegory. it's a metaphor obviously, right? i love the fact that they show the confederate such vampires. i think it's a great metaphor that they were empires like literally sucking on the blood of people or black

she explains to her dressmaker and good friend, elizabeth keckley, it's important for me to dress properlyuse the public pays attention to what i wear, and it's important for us to be respected. and she breaks down in tears, and so her dressmaker says, well, don't you think your husband should know about these bills? oh, no, no. he would be mortified if he knew that i had misbehaved this way. so it was high stakes for her. >> with limited options, mary decides to monetize the only assets she has -- information and influence. >> she was engaged in something akin to extortion against members of her husband's administration, who had bribed her in order to receive political appointment at her recommendation. for example, one fellow wanted to have a very lucrative position in the new york custom house. so this one fellow, isaac henderson, sends a diamond broach to give to a jeweler and says give this to mrs. lincoln if she can persuade her husband to name me a high-ranking official. so mrs. lincoln goes to the president and says, dear, won't you promote isaac henderson to this position? so hend

such as elizabeth keckley, seamstress and confident of mary todd lincoln and a maryann, america's firstheadstones from a cemetery 60 miles up river in washington, d.c., end up here? well, about 60 years ago, that cemetery was sold. and all those headstones were either sold or given away as scrap. a previous owner here bought truckloads of them to shore up this river bank. today, there's a metro station where the headstones once stood. the only recognition a plaque that reads many distinguished black citizens, including civil war veterans were buried in this cemetery the bodies now rest in the new national harmony memorial park in maryland. but most were reburied without headstones so the precise locations of the bodies are lost forever. >> it's an ugly thing and it's ugly because cemeteries are a mark of humanity. >> reporter: professor michael blaky, director of the institute for historical biology at william and mary said there's a long history in america of what he calls dehumanization of black cemeteries. >> it's casual the humanization at this point. it's a kind of disregard. >> re