February each year is designated as Black History Month. It gives us an incentive to reflect on the history of our Black neighbors and friends. I will cite a few stories that reveal their survival and struggles for freedom, justice, and equality.
The first enslaved Africans arrived in the New World during August 1619, at Point Comfort, Virginia. Those twenty souls were the first of many thousands who were captured, sold, and shipped to our shores. By 1830, nearly 320,000 slaves were working on the plantations, growing tobacco, rice, cotton, and sugar cane (history.com/topics/ black-history/slavery).
One of the earliest accounts of what plantation life was like for slaves was written by Julian Niemcewicz, a Polish poet. He spent two weeks at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s plantation, and described what he saw there.
“We entered some negroes’ huts, for their habitations cannot be called houses. They are far more miserable than the cottages of our peasants. The husband and his wife sleep on a miserable bed, the children on the floor. A very poor chimney, a little kitchen furniture stands amid this misery, a teakettle and cups. A boy about fifteen was lying on the floor with an attack of dreadful convulsions. The general had sent to Alexandria for a physician. A small orchard with vegetables was situated close to the hut. Five or six hens, each with ten or fifteen chickens, walked there. That is the only pleasure allowed to negroes.… They receive a peck of Indian corn every week, and half of it is for the children….They received a cotton jacket and a pair of breeches yearly. The general possesses 300 negroes, excepting women and children of which a part belongs to Mrs. Washington….” (Julius Lester, “To Be A Slave,” New York, N.Y.: Puffin Books, 1998, p. 63).
The auction block was a dreadful thing slaves faced. Children were sold and taken away from their mothers. Families were separated, never to be reunited. Prince Bee talked about his experience. “I don’t know how old I was when I found myself standing on the toppen part of a high stump with a lot of white folks walking around looking at the little scared boy that was me (Julius Lester).
In the late 1840’s, William Henry Seward, who is remembered for his negotiating the purchase of Alaska, made a trip to the mid-South. He saw little children tied to one another being driven into a courtyard inn. He watched as they were watered at a horse trough and then driven into sheds to cry themselves to sleep. They would never see their mothers again. They were being sent in chains to the Gulf States, to King Cotton. Seward would never forget (Gene Smith, High Crimes & Misdemeanors, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson, New York, N.Y.: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1976, p.11).
Such brave people as Harriet Tubman developed the Underground Railroad that helped many thousands of slaves escape to freedom in the North. There were White people, called Abolitionists, who also worked to end slavery. Senator Charles Sumner spoke ardently and often about the evils of the system that treated Black humans as mere chattel. It nearly cost him his life when Representative Preston Brooks came up behind him in the Capitol and beat him severely with a heavy cane, nearly killing him. This showed the wide chasm between the two opposing sides that eventually led to the Civil War.
After Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, slavery ended.
The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizenship to Black persons. President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Still, there was a long history of racism. The Ku Klux Klan used fear and violence against Blacks. During the Jim Crow days, continued lynchings, intimidation, and strict segregation prevented Black citizens from reaching their Constitutional and God-given potential.
The spirit of Black men and women could not be extinguished, however. Threats and more violence did not cause them to give up their struggles for justice.
Jesse Owens’ spectacular Olympic victories in the 1936 Berlin Olympics stunned the Aryan Hitler and brought pride to Americans. This helped overcome prejudice against Black athletes. Music and the arts have been enriched by Black performers. America is blessed to have Black authors, politicians, business leaders, educators, doctors, astronauts, and lawyers. The oratory of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech will live as long as Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” in the annals of American history.
Something happened in 1951 during my ninth grade in our rural school. I will never forget it. One of the black families in our community had school-age children. They could not attend our all-white school, but were permitted to ride my bus to the school district line where the larger town had a school for Blacks. They waited there at a corner, out in the open with no shelter, for the bus that would take them to their school. One cold, rainy day, our driver stopped, let them out of the bus, then drove off.
I looked back at those children standing in the rain and felt a deep pain in my heart. When I arrived at my school, I told the principal what I had seen and asked, “Why can’t they come here?” He angrily shouted, “Henry, you are a radical!” I didn’t know what that word meant, but I am pleased to see my question was answered at last. The Supreme Court finally ruled in 1954 that schools must integrate.
Dr. King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We see the truth of that when Michelle Obama, the Black wife of the first Black President of the United States of America, spoke of how she felt living in the White House that Black slaves built. Black history is a living testimonial to this reality. It is good to remember these things.