For this Black History Month, the Banner reached out to members of our community and asked them to share their thoughts and feelings about our Black history and culture. We think you will find their responses as inspirational as we did. — Ronald Mitchell, Publisher and Editor, Bay State Banner
Our history is what shapes us
by Marita Rivero
My mother once said to me that history is the skeleton inside a living country. It made sense to me that if we haven’t formed a clear understanding of what happened and why, how are we to make good decisions going forward?
I came to Boston first as a college student and then as a young adult exploring a media career. This seemed to be a state where people were interested in working on the cutting edge of their fields. History and storytelling became my tools, and I believed there was power in curiosity and in learning.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s charge is “Tell the full American story.” (Go to savingplaces.org and look for their African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.)
Mass Humanities has found many public ways to lift up storytelling to champion our state’s citizens. Certainly, as people prepare for programs around the 250th and 400th anniversaries of America’s founding, we in Massachusetts need to lean into that opportunity, given our critical role.
In any remembrance of the past, it is easy to look and not see. What is required for a serious student is that we widen the lens to discover that we were all always here, standing right in the story, participating. Anything else is fabrication.
In the 1950s of my youth, two major degree-granting liberal arts schools, Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, and Howard University, in Washington, D.C., were the Harvard -Yale of Black America. Many Boston and Caribbean family names, such as Parham, Taylor, Ravenell and Drayton, show up on the student rosters. My home was on the campus at Lincoln. It was a stimulating place for kids growing up in segregated America.
The percentage of African students was high because of Lincoln’s by then 100-year-old connection to Africa. In 1957, the West African nation Ghana was first among African countries to declare independence. Kwame Nkrumah, a Lincoln man, was its first president. Big celebrations swept the campus. The spirit was akin to the public joy when Mandela walked from South Africa’s Robbin Island Prison. Lincoln men joined the work for and in Ghana, Boston artist Robert Freeman’s father among them. The Lincoln stories and the people who carried them over my young years were like a hidden part of America. We knew, but most people in the country didn’t.
In my family, my Canadian grandmother was from a family line that fled American slavery, and my Cuban grandmother, who was from the African-influenced Santiago de Cuba region, elected to move to Harlem with her two young boys in the early part of the 1900s. My grandfather’s father, freed from enslavement in Virginia, settled in the Richmond area where my grandfather would later practice medicine. Their children — my parents — met in graduate school at Columbia University during the 1930s Harlem Renaissance and made a life at Lincoln University for my brother and me.
The spirit of the school nurtured students; the faculty and staff would do everything they could to launch you into a successful career. It’s the spirit I recognized when I decided to join the Bunker Hill Community College Board and the spirit I felt at Roxbury Community College. My parents had wonderful stories about family history and their work, however, neither the people from my family nor from the Lincoln community existed on television and radio and in magazines and movies. They moved and influenced us in the stories we held and told across time, as our stories must continue to do now.
While I wound up having an important career in media, when I was young, I worked as an employment retraining counselor in San Francisco. People like my clients weren’t in the media either. I thought I’d like to tell their stories, Lincoln’s, family stories, and explorations of the human condition, perhaps for public television. I managed to get interviews with two local TV executives. I told them my eventual goal was to be an executive producer in television. I’d seen that title at the top of the credit roll. The executives both froze and then fell out laughing at the shock of it. This is how bad things were in the 1960s. I didn’t know what else I might do in life, but after that, executive producer was one thing.
Boston’s wonderful Bill Dilday, a local Black media executive at the time, saw my materials and sent them to GBH where I was hired into an appropriate entry position. Years later, having overshot my original ambition, I would hire the executive producer for GBH-PBS’s award-winning “Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery.”
Stories give us the basic textiles we use to weave our lives. They can caution, can instruct, can enliven and delight. We need to savor and nurture our history. If you want to dig in, I can certainly recommend the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award’s list of annual finalists. I fell in love with Howard French’s “Born in Blackness,” which retells the Africa-to-America story. On the youtube.com/gbhnews channel, I was enjoying the lively Kendrick Lamar discussion about his Super Bowl show — now that’s a story — and Saraya Wintersmith’s limited series podcast, “Reparations.”
Our artists, archivists, neighbors and cultural habits themselves speak and encourage us to lean forward. It seems that as we learn our own and one another’s history we can find new ways to be, to free human power, to act.
When Mandela was released from prison, my mother called and asked whether I’d gotten in touch with my son. I replied, “Uh, no.” She said, “He went with you to the Mother’s Day picket in front of the South African Embassy when he was ten.” He did go. He said he’d heard people talking and wanted to go with me that year. “You need to call him and tell him that he is part of freeing Mandela,” she said, adding, If we don’t stop and celebrate our victories, we won’t have the energy to go on. He should know, over time, it is through thousands of small acts by millions of people that we change the world for the better.” She was right about that.
Let me stop now, but I’ll append this. Here are a few of the many wonderful local writers responding to our history: Jarvis Givens with “Fugitive Pedagogy”; Kerri Greenidge with “The Grimkes”; Margaret Burnham’s “By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners”; Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s “Balm in Gilead”; and Kellie Carter Jackson’s “We Refuse.” Tracy Smith, poet; Kendra Field, historian; Michael Jeffries, sociologist; Tiya Miles, historian; and Annette Gordon-Reed, lawyer/historian, also respond.
Marita Rivero is a board member of Mass Humanities.
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