Black History: Real, Personal, Necessary
My
father was a minister.
He
came to his chosen profession relatively late in his career, during what turned
out to be the last third of his life. For most of his ministry, which lasted
from his ordination and installation in 1953 until his death at 61 in 1974, he
wrote his sermons out in longhand, using a fountain pen and 5” x 8” loose leaf
lined paper. He stored them in a series of thick black leather binders. Later
on, some of his sermons were taped using reel-to-reel technology that preceded
by several iterative generations the digital world we now know.
As
his preaching matured, he would on occasion depart from his printed text. This
would most often occur when he knew that someone in his congregation had been
touched in some deep and personal way — perhaps the death of a spouse or a
child, the loss of a job, or the revelation of a deathly diagnosis. A scholar
of both the Bible and of literature, he had a way of way of relating the
personal to the eternal. Even though his sermons were peppered with quotes from
such abstruse or mystical sources as Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, Tillich, and
Thurman, he nonetheless shared their insights in a way that made sense to the
hardworking middle class strivers and strainers who filled the pews every
Sunday in the 1950s and ‘60s. And he did it so well that people of disparate
backgrounds would come up to shake his hand or receive an embrace in the
narthex after service and tell him they felt his words had been addressed
specifically to them.
They
might have been right, since in those days before mega churches were invented,
he knew every member of his flock, had likely been in their homes, and perhaps
more tellingly, had invited all of them to his home, because it was literally
their home.
You
see, from 1953 until 1967, the year following my mother’s death, our home was
the church parsonage [google it if you are under 40]. He moved into an
apartment after that; a widower with one son in the Air Force and the other
mostly away at school, he didn’t want the space, the memories, or the parsonage
stairs. So he bid goodbye to 9703 Parmelee Avenue in the heart of Glenville and
moved into a new apartment building on the outskirts of the city limits.
But
in the fifties, with a congregation growing by leaps and bounds, he started a
tradition by hosting an Open House for church members and friends on New Year’s
Day. Hundreds of people of all ages, sizes, and dispositions trekked to that
three-bedroom colonial to eat, drink [punch], socialize, satisfy their
curiosity about how their pastor lived [very modestly], and sometimes plop down
to watch one of the classic bowl games [Rose, Sugar, Orange, or Cotton]. I
thought those Open Houses were one of the coolest perks of being a preacher’s
kid.
I
didn’t know I was going to write any of this when I sat down. I just finished
listening to the broadcast of today’s Civic Commons show, which ends with my
trying to accelerate the pace of my mellifluous drawl in order to cram 500
words about black history into my allotted three minutes. At the conclusion of
the show, one of the hosts says that you can find my just-delivered commentary
in this space. And that evoked this reverie.
My
dad understood that writing a message for the ear is different than writing for
the eye. It was principally for this reason that he never wanted his sermons
published. A second reason was that he occasionally departed from prepared
text.
Many
of the sermons that survived him in physical form [the notebooks and the tapes]
now rest in the archives of his alma mater, the Howard University Divinity
School in Washington, DC. One day I discovered a few of his written sermons in
my possession. I sat down and transcribed them over a fortnight or so. As I did
so, I could hear him speaking. Where the handwriting was near indecipherable [he was a converted left hander], I had
the filial satisfaction of knowing that I was a sympathetic editor.
I
think it is partially by virtue of the experience of having typed out those
sermons that while my memory of my mother is visual and tactile, my sense of my
father is aural.
Well,
I have now subjected the more loyal or physically fit of my readers to a
preamble to a commentary on black history that is longer than the commentary
itself. If you are still with me, you can read the commentary below, or listen to it at the end of this podcast [the discussion about sustainability that
precedes my commentary is pretty good, too!].
I’ll
be back later today [I promise!] with my thoughts about who should be the next
prosecutor in Cuyahoga County.
• • •
Remarks prepared for airing at 12:30PM February 28, 2012 on
the Civic Commons Radio, WJCU 88.7 FM. [podcast on iTunes]
Warning!!
Dangerous Curves Ahead! We are about to discuss Black History. Don’t worry:
there won’t be a lot of dates to learn. This is more a discussion about your attitude towards black history.
From one perspective,
these are the best of times. To begin with, there is that brilliant, handsome,
Christian, family-centered, hard-working, compassionate, high achieving black
man in the White House. His very presence there connotes the progress now possible for the descendants of the
captured peoples brought chained together through the terrible Middle Passage
to an unimaginably bleak future, their histories, identities and lives stolen
and tossed overboard.
By some cultural
alchemy President Obama has internalized and represents that history even
though his hereditary tree is not the typical African American one.
Through perseverance
and scholarship, a good portion of black and African history continues to be
recovered, even as black history continues to be made. New achievements abound
for Africans in America on almost every civic, cultural, commercial and social
front. New identities have also been established, tied to the old in ways we
don’t always comprehend.
We especially don’t
understand them when we consider that these are also the worst of times, with
so many fellow citizens chained to plantations where the new slave quarters are
poisonous schools that multiply ignorance, ghettos whose zip codes are
predictors of ill health and quickened existence, and where too many pathways
are pipelines to despair and incarceration.
This new Jim Crow is
also part of our American history.
When our great
grandchildren study our era, they will learn that underneath an America of
wealth and privilege and unprecedented possibility for some, there existed
another, mostly darker, America with virtually no access to those prizes at any
point from birth to death.
They will learn these
things only if their history books are more inclusive than the ones I saw in
the nation’s best schools. In those books notions of Manifest Destiny basically
kicked to the gutter anything that didn’t support the United States as the home
of the free and the land of the brave.
It was that narrow
chauvinism, admittedly present in just about every society, that led Frederick
Douglass in 1851 to ask, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, to say on
that Independence Day in Rochester, New York: “Fellow citizens, above your
national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains,
heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the
jubilant shouts that reach them.”
A similarly informed
understanding led W. E. B. DuBois in 1903 to write in The Souls of Black Folk of the “double consciousness” of black
people, and prompted Carter G. Woodson in 1926 to establish the Negro History
Week that has now become Black History Month which may one day be known as
African American Heritage Month.
Until
all Americans consider this month’s focus to be a part of their history, this annual
period of celebration and study will be needed.
• • •
