Part One, which appeared Sunday, Sept.9, discusses how the slaves went from property to property owners. It tells of their lives in Georgia, their journey to Africa, and their new life as settlers in a Liberian colony.

Today, we focus on William V.S. Tubman, the grandson of two of those Augusta slaves, who was Liberia's president for 27 years. He received a hero's welcome during his historic visit to the United States in 1954.

Part 3 of our series - coming next Sunday - details the death of the colonial settlers' aristocracy, the nation's struggle to rebuild after a bloody civil war and the lives of Tubman descendants today.

The African American

Racing against Hurricane Hazel, the killer tempest that was battering the American South, William V.S. Tubman and his entourage sped across the Atlantic toward the U.S. coast on the ocean liner African Dawn.

In a meeting of white marble and black pride, William V.S. Tubman lays a wreath at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in October 1954. Lincoln was the first American president to officially recognize Liberia. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TUBMAN FAMILY

It was mid-October 1954, and other ships in the Atlantic were meeting with disaster: One was destroyed by mines; another caught fire and sank; and a third capsized near Cape Hatteras. The skipper of Tubman's ship was running full speed, determined not to add his boat to the growing number of wrecked vessels.

Many generations before, Tubman's ancestors had been shipped as captive slaves across the same waters to the same coast. It had been only two generations since Tubman's grandparents, just children at the time, rode the waves east to Africa. They, too, had sailed a chartered vessel as they fled the churning storm of slavery.

Their seven weeks at sea carried them to Africa and to freedom. And now, this grandson of those Augusta slaves was clipping the waves in a luxury liner, zipping across the ocean in just 11 days. He was neither a slave to be bought and sold nor a meek colonist relying on the charity of others.

He was the president of Africa's only black republic, and he sailed because he loved to sail. According to one magazine, his personal yacht back home had the best bar in West Africa.

A warm welcome

William V.S. Tubman, the president of Liberia, was on a mission to attract more American money and business to his country and renew old friendships. It was 1954, and his country was beginning to enjoy, as Tubman said, ''a new place in the galaxy of nations.'' Liberia was cashing in on its rich natural resources - chiefly rubber and iron ore - and its strategic significance in the growing Cold War.

In a presidential pressing of the flesh, Dwight Eisenhower welcomes William V.S. Tubman to the White House on Oct. 18, 1954, where the Liberian head of state would spend the next two nights. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TUBMAN FAMILY

In their haste to escape the storm, Tubman and his group made their way into American waters 36 hours early and had to wait to dock in New York.

That Oct. 16, a Saturday morning, Tubman boarded a Coast Guard cutter that ferried him to a landing point at the foot of the 33rd pier in Brooklyn. Tubman later would remember the ''thunderous'' applause that washed over him as he walked down the gangway to greet the official welcoming party. His oldest son, Shad, who was studying at Harvard, met him.

The president looked his usual dapper self as he greeted the press in a gray business suit. He doffed his blue homburg and waved the hat in the air to hail the crowd as flashbulbs popped. Tubman was known for dressing impeccably, and he looked flawless that morning, even though he conceded that it had been a rough night riding out the fringes of Hurricane Hazel in the harbor.

The New York Fire Department Band played the U.S. and Liberian national anthems as Tubman and his entourage were swept away in a 13-car motorcade with a motorcycle escort to their suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where an official reception was held that night.

The next day, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's private plane, the Columbine, flew Tubman and his aides to Washington, where they were met at the airfield by Vice President Richard Nixon and a review guard from all four branches of the armed forces.

Tubman was honored with a 21-gun salute, and the Army Band played Hail to the Chief before he and Nixon reviewed the troops. At 5 that afternoon, Eisenhower officially received the Liberian president - who was said to refer to himself, jokingly, as the ''Convivial Cannibal from the Downcoast Hinterlands.'' But the laughing cannibal was 100 percent high-society, and he was among peers at the White House reception.

That evening - seated around tables decorated for the autumn affair with yellow roses and snapdragons - the Americans broke bread with their African cousin, and that night he stayed at the White House. He slept in the Lincoln bedroom - decades before it became a national punchline, when it was still revered as the room the Great Emancipator had used as a study.

The next evening, Tubman had a chance to return the favor as host of a dinner at the Liberian Embassy, which was located - by Jim Crow law - miles away from the diplomatic sector, in one of Washington's black neighborhoods.

The Liberians served fresh caviar with sour cream and a six-course dinner, including lobster Americaine and roast partridge with truffles. Seated around the tables was a who's who of 1950s America: Ike and Mamie Eisenhower, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and their wives. Joint chiefs and military aides. Generals and ambassadors. Cabinet members and captains of industry. They enjoyed a dessert of baked Alaska crowned with black cherries au Kirsch flambee.

Here was William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman, the grandson of slaves, received like a king: reviewing the troops, a 21-gun salute, a White House dinner, the key to the city and honorary degrees. A ticker-tape parade was planned in New York. It never would have been possible if his grandparents hadn't boarded a ship and left America behind.

The Tubmans had to go away to be accepted as equals. Had his grandparents' families stayed put on the Tubmans' plantation in Appling, who would William V.S. Tubman be? A tailor, as his father had wanted? A preacher or rock mason as his father had been? How many black Augusta tailors or preachers were inviting Eisenhower over for lobster Americaine when he came to play golf at Augusta National Golf Club in the 1950s?

At the time, Liberia and Haiti were the world's only free black nations. Virtually every other black person on Earth was ruled by whites. From the moment he hit the pier in Brooklyn to the time he left America, Tubman was fending off questions about race and station. What did he think of integration, reporters asked.

In the 1950s, the fuse on the powder keg of civil rights was burning shorter and shorter. A few months before Tubman's arrival, the Supreme Court had handed down its ruling on Brown vs. the Board of Education, declaring segregated schools unconstitutional. When asked about the landmark decision, Tubman said it would not be proper for him to comment on another nation's affairs.

Tubman usually managed to sidestep questions about American integration.

''I personally feel,'' he said at his dockside welcome, ''that discrimination and segregation in any form anywhere is iniquitous.''

An inescapable question

After four days in Washington, Tubman and his aides boarded a train bound for the Midwest. In Akron, he toured the Firestone plant where workers made American tires from Liberian rubber. Then it was on to Illinois, where Tubman laid a wreath at Lincoln's tomb - a show of respect for the man who freed the slaves and the first American president to recognize Liberia as a sovereign state. After stops at Ford Motor Co. near Detroit and Republic Steel in Cleveland, Tubman headed back to New York.

Glasses raised in a champagne summit, William V.S. Tubman toasts Harvey Firestone, Jr., at a dinner in the Terrace Room of the Mayflower Hotel in Akron, Ohio in October 1954. Firestone was arguably the second most powerful man in Liberia, given the singular importance of his rubber operation on the Liberian economy. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TUBMAN FAMILY

But after New York, his itinerary was still in question. Would he travel to Georgia? A visit to his ancestral home could allow him to return to the land of his forefathers as the ultimate local boy made good. Or, his aides warned, it could be an opportunity for ''race-baiting Gov. Herman Talmadge,'' as the black newspapers referred to him, to snub arguably the most powerful black man in the world.

Tubman arrived back in New York on a Southwest Limited train out of St. Louis, and a reporter for Atlanta Daily World noted that he ''shunned the crowds at Grand Central Station,'' retiring to his suite at the Waldorf Astoria.

He wouldn't avoid the crowds for long, however, as 100,000 or more New Yorkers (some black newspapers put the number at a half-million) greeted him with a lunchtime, ticker-tape welcome in the great gray canyon of Broadway.

The next day, Tubman spoke to the U. N. General Assembly, of which Liberia was a charter member. He made a case for smaller cases to play a larger part in solving their own problems.

''Might and power are not necessarily synonymous with right and righteousness,'' he told the assembly. It was a point he had been making to reporters since his arrival. He had told a press luncheon the week before that the big powers seemed to feel that problems in developing countries were ''only theirs for solution,'' The New York Times reported.

The ''far-from-filled'' hall at the U.N. applauded warmly as he told the listeners that the prayers and hopes of the peoples of the Earth were upon them, the Daily World reported: ''You hold in your hands keys to the doorway of freedom and human progress.''

The eloquent Liberian was clearly in his element. For two weeks, he had traded toasts with the toast of America - Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Firestone. Black and white. Rich and filthy rich. They recruited one another deeper and deeper into their already select fraternity of world power and big money.

Still he was dogged by questions about the racism of the South. Reports were winding northward that President Tubman had not been invited to stay, as other visiting heads of state would have been, at the governor's mansion in Atlanta. Was it true he would be quartered at Atlanta University, the black college?

A wire service report out of Atlanta said that Talmadge had never officially invited Tubman to be his personal guest in Georgia but had said simply that he could come down to witness ''the progress the Negroes have made here.''

Tubman already knew all about the progress of the Negroes. He was living proof.