What black history means to me:
We are black abolitionists Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, and rebel slaves Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner.
We are the black scout George W. Bush, who led white settlers into the Oregon Territory in 1844.
We are James Beckwourth and Nat Love and countless other black cowboys and Buffalo Soldiers who helped to pioneer and settle the Old West during the mid- and late 1800s.
We are the many countless and faceless blacks who served with distinction and honor for the Union Army during the Civil War.
What black history means to me:
We are Jan Matzelinger, who in 1883 invented the first machine that manufactured an entire shoe.
We are Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, who in 1893 was the first licensed physician to perform a successful open-heart operation.
We are John Arthur “Jack” Johnson, who pioneered the way for other blacks in modern sports by becoming the first black heavyweight-boxing champion of the world and holding that title from 1908 to 1915.
We are Mathew Henson, who accompanied Commander Robert E. Peary on his North Pole expedition in 1909.
What black history means to me:
We are the budding legends and giants of the Black Renaissance during the 1920s through the 1940s: James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Bessie Smith, Lena Horne, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson and Hattie McDaniels, among others.
We are Carter G. Woodson, organizer of the first black historical association and journal, and founder of Black History Week.
What black history means to me:
We are Mary McLeod Bethune, cofounder of Bethune-Cookman College, and a prominent advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
We are Army Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis Sr., who became the first black person to attain that rank in 1940.
We are Dr. Charles Drew who in 1941 developed and laid the early groundwork for the blood transfusion process and the plasma blood bank.
We are Dorie Miller, Negro American hero of World War II, who shot down four Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
What black history means to me:
We are Ralph Bunche, first black to be awarded a doctorate in political science at Harvard University, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize as a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations in 1950.
We are some of the black legends and superstars of the modern sports world: Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Rafer Johnson, Bob Hayes, Wilma Rudolph, Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, Charles Sifford, Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe, among others.
What black history means to me:
We are the black students of North Carolina A&T College, who introduced the revolutionary civil rights “sit-in” technique at W. T. Grant’s and F. W. Woolworth’s Department Stores in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960.
We are Edward Brooke, Massachusetts senator, elected in 1966, and the first black person since Reconstruction to be elected to the U.S. Senate.
We are Robert Weaver, who became the first black Cabinet chief in 1966, when appointed the secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
What black history means to me:
We are Thurgood Marshall, former solicitor general of the United States, and in 1967 the first black to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
We are Shirley Chisholm, U.S. representative from Brooklyn, New York, the first black to formally run for president of the United States in 1972.
We are Lieutenant Colonel Guion S. Bluford Jr., USAF, American astronaut, the first black to fly into space, as a member of the space shuttle Challenger in 1983.
What black history means to me:
We are Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young Jr., Roy Wilkins, and other names forever enshrined in memory and history.
We are our ancestors and forefathers of times past; we are our men, women and children of today; we are our hopes and dreams for tomorrow.
We are a vehicle of heritage, culture and pride on a journey of love, understanding and acceptance. Yes, we are a beautiful and noble people. We are somebody special.
This is what black history means to me.
John Horton
©2003. Reprinted with permission of Jerry Craft.
2
CELEBRATING
FAMILY
A river can’t rise beyond its source. What’s in the seed determines the fruit.
T. M. Alexander
Remembering Eric
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I’m sure he never expected to see me there. He froze right in his tracks. His big green eyes looked like they might pop out of his head!
There he was—my eleven-year-old son Eric, standing among the crowd of children entering the cafeteria at his school. It was lunchtime. From a distance, I waved. I summoned him out of the lunch line, shaking the familiar fast-food bag I held in my hand. As he eagerly ran toward me with a huge grin on his face, I knew this would be a special time for us. As it turns out, it was one of the most rewarding experiences I remember with my son.
It was a Wednesday morning and probably one of the most hectic days in my office. The telephone was ringing off the hook; there were numerous reports due at the end of the day, and an important meeting to prepare for that afternoon. I had not yet had my first cup of coffee. As I reached into my pocket, searching for my favorite mint, I found a pink paper with a list of things I intended to buy at the grocery store during my lunch hour. There were several more items to add.
I turned it over and discovered it was actually a flyer inviting parents to come to the school and have lunch with their child. How could something like this have slipped my mind? I guess I hadn’t paid much attention to the flyer because my son wasn’t fond of things like that.
But for some reason, I couldn’t seem to get that invitation off of my mind. Eric was a fifth-grader and would be graduating and going to middle school the next year. This would probably be my last opportunity to have lunch with my son. I checked my watch. There was time. I could still make it. Forty-five minutes before the scheduled lunch, I shut down my computer, locked the file cabinets and dashed out to fetch Eric’s favorite double cheeseburger and fries.
The shock on Eric’s face mirrored my own. This was not the same child I had sent to school that morning. The son I dropped off wore clean, starched, navy blue slacks and a spotless, button-up white cotton dress shirt. The child before me sported a white mesh football jersey (with no shirt underneath), navy blue fleece shorts (three sizes too big), and a very nice and rather large gold hoop earring. Around his neck was a fancy gold chain with the initial “A” dangling from it. (I only hoped that it was for the grades he intended to earn.) As it turned out, the necklace belonged to a little girl named Ashanti.
As we both recovered, we slowly made our way to the lunch benches to begin our midday meal. Prior to arriving, I feared he would be too embarrassed to have lunch with his mother. After all, it had only been three years earlier when he had adamantly refused to take a picture with me at school in front of his buddies. I prepared myself. I knew he wouldn’t be rude to me, but I thought he might eat as quickly and quietly as possible, and then run off to play with his friends.
But Eric began to tell me what he did in class that day. He told me a story he had read in his social studies book and described in detail a film he watched about Indians. Funny, he didn’t tell me how or when he had changed his clothes. I was enjoying his company so much that I chose not to bring it up.
As he talked, he became the little boy who always drew a picture in preschool to show me. He was the small child who wanted me to kneel at his bedside at n
ight and pray with him. He was my young son yelling in triumph while I clapped my hands as he rode down the street for the first time on his two-wheeler.
As he spoke, ketchup ran down the side of his mouth and proceeded to drip onto his white mesh football jersey. He seemed to neither notice nor care. Young girls passed slowly, at first trying to get his attention, and then to whisper and giggle as they watched him talk at full speed, so unlike the cool jock they all adored.
Although I hated for the lunch to end, we began to gather our trash. He would go back to the playground to finish recess with his classmates. I would go back to my office, this time in much better spirits. Eric actually wanted me there. My son was enjoying my company as much as I was enjoying his. He began a joke but fell out laughing hysterically before he could finish it. His laughter was so contagious I, too, doubled over with giggles, and we laughed so long and so hard I thought we would both lose our lunch.
It really didn’t matter whether or not he finished the joke or even if it was funny. All that mattered was that for twenty minutes, on a Wednesday afternoon, we tuned out the entire world, my son and I, and no one else existed but us. We had made magic memories on the elementary school lunch benches with a $2.99 burger special.
Two weeks after our luncheon together, the child I had prayed for, loved, treasured and adored died during the night, without warning, suddenly and silently of a massive seizure.
There are no more funny stories. There are no more opportunities for me to hug him tightly and kiss his forehead. There will be no new photographs.
Even as I watch his friends grow up, he will always remain that eleven-year-old boy. I still talk to him. I think of him constantly. I miss him terribly. His memory is so precious to me. We shared many things in the short time we had together. But I’ll always be thankful I took the time for that schoolyard lunch we shared; it was one of the most rewarding experiences in my life.
Tracy Clausell-Alexander
My Father’s Son
The measure of a man is how well he provides for his children.
Sidney Poitier
It was one of those excruciatingly cold New England mornings in 1964. A four-day-old snow had turned to ice as it pressed against my bedroom window. In my twelve-year-old sleepiness, I staggered through the dark hallway into the bathroom, hearing the truck’s engine idling audibly outside.
Peering out, I saw his figure—a dark shadow moving against the white background, his breath clouding the air when he exhaled. I heard his work boots crunching the hard snow with his giant steps. I saw his dark face hidden beneath a knit cap, the upturned coat collar, the woolen scarf wrapped around his neck and chin. One gloved hand guided the ice scraper across the truck’s windshield; the other brushed the shavings like a crystal beard from the truck’s old weathered face.
Daddy. Moving with a quick purpose, driven by a commitment and a responsibility taught him thirty-five years earlier in Depression-era Georgia. Daddy. A silent gladiator who was stepping once more into the hostile arena of the day’s battle. Daddy. Awake while the rest of the world slept. And as he slid behind the steering wheel, driving carefully from the driveway onto the street, the truck was swallowed up by dawn’s dimness. As I returned to the warmth of my blankets—in my own bed, in my own room—I knew I could go back to sleep, to dream, because Daddy was outside facing the cold.
Throughout the many junior- and senior-high mornings I watched my father go to work, I never told him how that vision affected me. I simply wondered at his ability to do what he did: keeping the kitchen filled with food, making the payments on my music lessons, covering the car insurance so I could drive during my senior year, piling the Christmas gifts beneath the tree, taking me to Boston to buy new clothes, dragging me to church on Sundays, driving me to visit college campuses on his day off, kissing and teasing my mother in the living room, and nodding off in his easy chair in the middle of a sentence. Perhaps it was because these scenes seemed so ordinary that I never spoke of them, never weighed them beyond my own selfish adolescent needs.
And then at college, away from him—when his presence became merely the voice over the phone during weekend calls or the name scribbled at the bottom of the weekly letter stuffed with a ten-dollar bill—I thought other men were more significant than Daddy. Those men who taught my classes in polysyllabic words, wrote articles in journals and explained complex theorems and philosophies. Daddy never did any of that—he couldn’t with only a high school education. My hero worship made me a disciple to Ivy League scholars who ignited my dormant ideas and dead men whose names were printed on book covers, buildings and the currency I hungered to possess.
Then, as I traveled to Europe in my later college years, I realized I had seen more, had traveled farther and had achieved greater distinctions than Daddy ever had. I was filled with a sense of self-importance, puffed up with grad-school grants, deluded with degrees and accolades assigned to my name.
Then, I entered the formidable arena—the job, the relationships, the creditors, the pressures and the indignities of racial politics. As I reached my late twenties, I looked forward to returning home, talking with Daddy, sharing a ball game, watching an old Western on television, drinking a beer, listening to a story about his childhood days in Georgia and hearing his warm, fulfilling laughter. I rediscovered Daddy again—not as a boy in awe, but with respect as a man. And I realized a truth that I could not articulate as a child—Daddy was always there for me. Unlike the professors, the books, the celebrity heroes, the mentors, he was always there. He was my father, a man who committed himself to a thankless job in a society that had written him off with statistics and stereotypes.
When I reached my early thirties, when I became a father myself, I saw my own father with greater clarity. As I awoke in the early morning hours, compromised my wants, dealt with insults and worked overtime in order to give my son his own room—with his own bed and his own dreams—I realized I was able to do those things because my father had done them for me.
And now, at age forty-seven, when I spend precious moments with my own thirteen-year-old son, when we spend fleeting moments together at a movie, on a basketball court, in church or on the highway, I wonder what he thinks of me. At what point will I slip away from his world of important men, and will there be a point when he’ll return to me with a nod of understanding? How will he measure my weaknesses and strengths, my flaws and distinctions, my nightmares and dreams? Will he claim me in the name of love and respect?
Sometimes the simple lessons are the most difficult to teach. Sometimes the most essential truths are the most difficult to learn. I hope my son will one day cherish all the lessons and truths that have flowed to him, through me, from his grandfather. And as my son grows older, I believe that he, too, will measure his steps by the strides I have made for him, just as I have achieved my goals because of the strides my father has made for me. When my son does this, perhaps he will feel the same pride and fulfillment that I do when I say, “I am my father’s son.”
Mel Donalson
Denied the Prize
Excellence is the best deterrent to racism.
Jesse Jackson
In the mid-seventies, a door of opportunity opened to those who had been asking for years to be let in. It didn’t open for the asking; it opened because it was torn down by a mighty hand. For those of us who walked through there was no welcome mat outside nor a cordial welcome from inside. We became professional firefighters, and we had to prove ourselves, just as all new firefighters, but we had an extra mile to go—up a steeper hill, with a heavier load. The heavier load made us stronger.
At the time of my hire, I was father to a seven-year-old son and four-year-old daughter. In my third year I became father to my little buddy, Enson. By then the men and I had forged a professional respect for one another. I’d say friendship, of a sort. We just understood we wouldn’t be buddies off the job.
My regular inner-city duty was Engine House Eighteen. It became necessary
at times to send a firefighter to another station in our battalion to balance the manpower. Often it was Station Seven. This was one such day.
At about 2:00 A.M., we were returning from the local campus where we extinguished several Dumpsters that maladjusted college students had lit on fire for kicks. It was summer—warm with a light breeze. Head down and bobbing around, I anticipated finding my way back to my bunk. Instead, I heard the siren come on and the adrenaline rush caused me to snap to. The emergency lights spun, and we accelerated toward downtown.
The lieutenant slid the window back, “Prepare yourself. We’ve just been dispatched to an apartment fire in a high-rise downtown.”
I began the exercise of breathing control as my heart raced and I pulled the straps on my air tank harness snug.
As the building came into view I could make out black smoke escaping from second-story windows. Normally, we were the second or third engine company on the scene downtown, but since we were already on the street we were going to be first. It was a classic fire with people pouring out of the building and calling with sobbing voices for loved ones.
A frantic man stormed us with an anguished plea, “Please hurry! My daughter is up there in the apartment that’s on fire. Please . . . please get her out!”
The lieutenant radioed the situation to the command center, the driver put the pumper in operation, all eyes were on me because rescue was my job. With no time for thought or fear I entered the building against the current of people.
As I reached the second floor landing, I noticed a few tenants attempting entry into the apartment. They managed to knock one of the panels of the door out, which gave a view of the fire inside and provided an air source for the fire to breathe.