Negro History Week—A World Far Away from Where We Live

Negro History Week could be summed up this way in 1968:

Lincoln, the law, and promised lands

Peanuts, and a plans,

A madam and money,

A march, a man,

One Justice

And trains running through time.

In 1968, I was the age of my character Addy Walker when introduced in Meet Addy. Nine. Living in the projects in Lackawanna, NY, a small steel town nestled just south of Buffalo, I learned about the past of Negros. My people. By this time, we were making that change, hawks on the wind, eagles on the rise, climbing from Colored to Black. I was in the fourth grade at Roosevelt Elementary, and while the snow swirled outside the huge, drafty windows, and the tall radiators sputtered below them, this was the week I learned what we always did during this week: about President Lincoln, the Thirteenth Amendment, the 40 acres and the mule, and Harlem. George Washington Carver and his peanut plants. W.E.B. Du Buois’ and Booker T. Washington’s plans for our education. Madam C. J. Walker making a million dollars on the hot comb—the bane of my existence. Martin Luther King, his dream, and the March on Washington.?Thurgood Marshall appointed to the Supreme Court. Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad, Frederick Douglass, and the real train he took to freedom, and that “A Train” conducted by Duke Ellington. Fifty-six years ago, these were the facts of our Black lives, the brick and mortar that built the reality of our people, that defined skylines of a world far away from the one in which I lived.

I am one of nine children, and at that time, there were seven of us and our parents in our three-bedroom apartment in the Baker Homes. I knew we were poor, how poor I did not know because no one around us had money. But we were poor. The other side of the tracks poor. Sleep two to a bed poor. Salad dressing or syrup sandwich at the end of the month poor. Free clinic poor. No phone, no car poor. But we were also rich. Read library books side by side in bed rich. Walk to Sunday school and afterwards spend five cents on penny candy rich. Southern mama and daddy blessed rich. Daddy and mama raised in the Great Depression resilient rich. Mama sent us children out to school, to church, in chic, clean homemade clothes. Our faces Vaselined, shining like new copper pennies. My sisters’ hair and mine Dixie Peached and pressed bone straight thanks to Madam C.J. Walker, never mind that dodged the hot comb every time I felt the heat of it radiate off my scalp. Our father would hustle to make ends meet that would seldom meet. A man with a sixth-grade education, mental illness and a debilitating stutter, who, on the first of the month would stock our house with food. Carry in 50-pound bags of potatoes. Bags of flour and sugar and rice. Gallons of milk. Boxes of cereal. Loaves of light bread. Crisco and corn meal, peanut butter, bologna, and hotdogs. Crackers and jelly and cans of cane syrup. Beans and beans and beans. Greens by the bunch. Cabbage by the head. He bought every part of a pig sold at the market. Feet, ears, tails, chitlins, hocks, salt pork, neck bones and pork chops. We ate high and low on the hog. Until. The end of the month. When no matter how well he shopped, or frugally my mama cooked, there was only so much food to stretch over so many mouths.

From where I lived, when I looked out the window of the bedroom I shared, I could see the horizon of my world. An alley. A project building beyond that. And beyond that, columns of smoke rising from the vast Bethlehem Steel plant that stretched the length of our Lackawanna ward. Even at nine, I knew I wanted to be part of a world larger than the one I could see. The Negro history that I learned of seemed so far away. Those oft repeated stories of greatness, of struggle and achievement were part of a world I could only imagine.

Hunkered down that February under the gray skies of a Buffalo winter, I, and no one else had any idea that by spring, that events that would reshape the skylines of the current and future worlds would revolve around Black lives.

In the early evening of April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. On a small, black and white TV, my family and I watched the news. My father stood behind us, angry and sputtering. Stuttering. My mother seated, was crying, holding my three-year-old baby sister on her lap. The rest of us kids were on the floor. What we were seeing did not seem real. Blue was still in the sky when Walter Cronkite told us Dr. King was dead. How could someone like him, a king, a dreamer, a man who built the world—die? But since Walter Cronkite said he had been killed, it was gospel. For the nearly a week, the glass of the tiny window of light projected rage and anger into the shadows of our house. I watched the riots. Looting. Fires. Living walls of flames fire devouring cities, transforming skylines. Washington D.C., Baltimore, New York, Detroit, Trenton, Cincinnati, Kansas City. And then there was the dying. We Black people. We were dying. I was so afraid at night in bed, the core of my body shook. I could not cry. I was afraid to sleep and trembled in the dark as I lay close to an older sister in our twin bed, worried that the fires would come to us. The death would come to us. I did not know the skylines of the world I was seeing, or how far away they were.

Martin Luther King was buried in Atlanta on April 9. An image from his funeral, the moment I identified with the most was five-year old Bernice King laying in her mother’s lap. She was wearing a Sunday school dress, ribbons in the two ponytails of her straightened hair. Seeing her sad face, her eyes that looked like she had been crying, made Dr. King seem less like a figure I studied one week a year. He was man who had been killed, and he was her father.

Dr. King and those others I studied in Negro History Week who built our world, were men and women. Colored like me. Negro like me. Black like me. I did not know then that the emerging world that left me trembling after his death, would offer more historic firsts, more opportunities than I could dream of at nine.

But before the school year ended in late June, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. My mother cried again, and again in history there was a train. On TV we watched this one carry the body of Bobby Kennedy from New York City to Washington D.C. Standing along the route, framed by skylines along the way, we saw America. Black and white. In black and white. Lineup to honor him.

By summer, my siblings and I were ready to burst into the brief warmth and expansive dome of blue sky that marked it. Running. Screaming. We were those streetlights kids who split popsicles, on the back stoop ate watermelon out of pie plates. We ran and played kick ball, hide and seek, skated and jumped rope until we were exhausted and smelled like outside and cut onions. For the Fouth of July neighbors played music in the alleys. In August, James Brown dropped the summer’s anthem,“Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” On September 9, five months to the day Dr. King was buried, Arthur Ash became the first Black man to win the U.S. Open. In the fall, Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a fisted glove of protest at the Olympics in Mexico City. Later in the fall, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black, female member of Congress.

***

It was not until 1976, the Bicentennial year, that Black History Month was fully born. Looking back on the little history that was available to me in Negro History Week in 1968, to what a nine-year-old has a view of now, I see a world I never imagined. One I would have thought would have taken a rocket to reach. We have more history, and that in the making that it cannot be contained within one month. An African American president, a vice president. An African American female justice on the Supreme Court. Venus and Serena having ruled the courts. The brilliance of Nikki Giovanni. Toni Morrison. August Wilson. Whitney Houston. The Marsalis brothers. The blessing of living legends. Gladys Knight. The O’Jays. But we will still take this month to celebrate our history. Set it aside to allow us to remember. To recognize. To cherish. And to ride the trains running through it.

?