Two years ago in February, I wrote a series of 4 profiles on African Americans, 3 of which were little known. While their exploits were dramatic in all four instances, they were simply fundamentally, even stunningly life altering in some cases.
We live in an age in which, despite the ubiquitous nature of the Internet and the pervasiveness of the 24-7 news cycle, the names, exploits, and accomplishments of luminaries such as Henrietta Lacks, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Alexander Manly are enmeshed in an historical nebula; present, but barely known or visible.
By contrast, speak or write the name Barack Obama, and due to a variety of factors, almost anyone you meet in the civilized world is capable of spouting off a vast array of factoids, real, imagined, true or false. While POTUS has certainly earned all the notoriety he has amassed, the relative lack of knowledge about Lacks, Brown, and Manly is in no way a function of their relative importance. All made important contribution to life as we know it in
Alex Manly, who was African American, was also a descendent of Charles Manly,
· “our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than the white men with the colored women."
The rest is history; it took three months, but in November, after the August editorial that included that quote,
Charlotte Hawkins Brown was a native North Carolinian who was educated in
Ms. Brown made her mark fostering and improving African American achievement, especially among women. Her considerable legacy includes:
· Retired in 1952 as President of the Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute, better known as Palmer Memorial Institute (PMI), the school she founded in 1902
· Ultimately responsible for educating more than 1,000 African American students who attended PMI between 1902 and 1970, when it closed
Henrietta Lacks is not from
· Researchers at Johns Hopkins
Of course the Barack Obama story is one that most Americans are familiar with, at least tangentially. President Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother, was born in Hawaii, graduated from Columbia University, and Harvard University Law School, and went on to become a Chicago community organizer. Oh yeah, on November 4, 2008, he was elected President of the United States. As such:
· He became the 44th American to serve as our nation’s President. POTUS is at the epicenter of national and world news coverage on a daily basis. His address, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, is among the most famous in the world; his title, Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces is one of the most revered. As President of the United States most people consider him the most powerful man on the planet.
One of President Obama’s historic appointments was the selection of Eric Holder as Attorney General. That would hold special significance this month anyway, as Mr. Holder is African American. It has taken on an added dimension however, as Dr. Sharon Malone, Mr. Holder’s wife, distinguished in her own right, shares a part of her family history in a PBS Special, in which she details how her Uncle Henry, born nearly 30 after slavery ended officially, was one of thousands of black men arrested on fabricated charges and forced into labor camps and compelled to work without pay. As Dr. Malone tells the story, she asks you to:
· Imagine that this "convict leasing" system saw the groups of prisoners sold to private parties - like plantation owners or corporations - and that it was not only tolerated by both the North and South, but largely ignored by the U.S. Justice Department.
· Now, imagine that nearly a century after your uncle served 366 days in this penal labor system, you find yourself married to the head of the U.S. Justice Department, who, ironically, just so happens to be the first African American in the position.
There are many reasons why this information is not just historically significant, but contemporarily relevant. None is more compelling than debunking the idea that the vagaries and vicissitudes of slavery and its variant offshoots no longer plague our society in general and African Americans in particular. As Dr. Malone put it:
- “I want people to understand that this is not something that’s divorced and separate, and this doesn’t have anything to do with them. If you were a black person who grew up in the South, some way or the other – whether or not you were directly involved in the system as my uncle was – you knew somebody who was, or your daily lives were circumscribed by those circumstances.”
I’m done; holla back!
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