A timeline of sacrifice and survival

Commentary: Black history has unfolded in our own lifetimes, too

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During February, champions of Black history are heralded in student essays, recitations and public presentations. Information resides abundantly online to whet appetites about this aspect of America’s experience. For instance, “The 1619 Project,” published by The New York Times in 2019, chronicles 400 years of life in the U.S. for African Americans since the arrival of the first ship of human beings abducted as chattel from Africa.

Since 1619, Black history has been a continuous tale of survival and sacrifice. I’ve noted some of those stories here, the latter of which parallel my life.

Araminta Ross was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland around 1820. She later became Harriet (her mother’s name) after marrying John Tubman. This distant cousin of Delaware native Dr. Reba Ross Hollingsworth (a force in her own right and member of my Whatcoat United Methodist Church faith family) risked her life many times between 1849-60 to help other slaves navigate the Underground Railroad’s Delaware-Pennsylvania pathway to freedom.

Meanwhile, Dred and Harriet Scott fought for and won their freedom in 1847 at the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis, then the site of slave auctions and later my birthplace. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision changed that in 1857, determining that slaves were not people and had no right to sue for their freedom. The Scotts were finally freed by owners in May of that year; Dred enjoyed only nine months as a free man.

After constitutional amendments 13-15; after the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling weakened those constitutional gains; after Brown v. Board of Education reversed the Plessy ruling in 1954; after 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered in 1955 in Money, Mississippi; and after Rosa Parks took a stand by sitting on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus four months later, Black residents of Birmingham, Alabama, coined the term “Bombingham” to define their reality of racial animus. On Sept. 15, 1963, 14 months before my birth and less than a month after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. shared his dream with the world, four young friends prepared for Sunday services at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. Instantly, a bomb destroyed the church, robbing the 16th Street congregation of God’s peace in his sanctuary and robbing Addie May Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Rosamond Robertson of their lives. Their deaths helped catalyze the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed July 2 of that year by President Lyndon B. Johnson. When MLK eulogized the four little girls, it was less than a month after the bodies of Freedom Summer volunteers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman (New York) and James Chaney (Mississippi) were found murdered in Mississippi.

When Dr. King led the march across Alabama’s Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 21, 1965, I was 4 months old. The march of at least 2,000 freedom-seeking people was the impetus for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and included a young John Lewis. Lewis was severely beaten by Alabama state troopers after a previous bridge crossing, and his later congressional career and call for “good trouble” still inspire people who admire his decades-long commitment to civil rights, even months after his passing.

When Shirley Chisholm ran for U.S. president in 1972, the first African American and woman to do so, I was in second grade. While I don’t personally recall Ms. Chisholm’s platform or news coverage, etched in my mind are the images of determination and confidence that she exuded on the covers of publications like Ebony and Jet magazines, coffee-table conversation starters that powerhouse publisher John H. Johnson used to chronicle Black life and to provide us with positive images of ourselves.

When Mrs. Clealyn B. Wilson of Dover became the first African American Teacher of the Year for Delaware (1992-93 school year), my husband and I had just begun our parenting journey with our beautiful daughter. That journey would later include our loving son, and our intentional modeling of achievement, born of empathy and personal sacrifice. Our children have witnessed the election of this nation’s first Black president; the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement to address lingering systemic racism; and now, our first female, African American and south Asian vice president. As young adults, they have each cultivated multicultural friend groups — all awake, all aware and all determined to celebrate content of character, while appreciating the uniqueness of culture and color.

Like MLK, I dream a better and safer world for my children and yours. Here’s hoping that dream is deferred no longer.

Troy Darden is a Christian, a wife, a mom, a daughter and a friend living in Felton.

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