“When Willa Brown, a shapely young brownskin woman, wearing white jodhpurs, a form fitting white jacket and white boots, strode into our newsroom, in 1936, she made such a stunning appearance that all the typewriters suddenly went silent…Unlike most visitors, [she] wasn’t at all bewildered. She had a confident bearing and there was an undercurrent of determination in her husky voice as she announced, not asked, that she wanted to see me.” — Enoch P. Waters, Editor, Chicago Defender
American aviator, lobbyist, teacher, and civil rights activist. She was the first African American woman to earn a pilot’s license in the United States, the first African American woman to run for the United States Congress, first African American officer in the Civil Air Patrol, and first woman in the U.S. to have both a pilot’s license and an aircraft mechanic’s license. Some credit her with teaching the first wave of “Tuskegee Airman” before a formal program was created.
“A people without knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots”
Marcus Grvey
I don’t need to believe I was descended from kings to believe I am great. Stripped and whipped, we put down roots that are undeniable, that support who we are today and who we will be tomorrow. We invent culture and history everyday because we have no choice.
We spend too much time trying to know the unknowable, fighting against a narrative they will never relinquish. Let’s spend the time creating solid foundations and futures where we are the tellers of history.
I was told the guy third from the left looks a lot like my Great Uncle Robert. Grandma almost never talked about him but he’s the reason she and her two sisters came north. Slavery may have ended but the conditions in the south got continually worse after the Civil War. By the turn of the century, what had been Plantation Law was now the Law of the Land. There was the Constitution, Jim Crow, and the Black Codes, all separate and not equal.
Whippings, rape and murder were always plantation practices. Now there were no “owners” but the practices and, most importantly, the rules had only slightly changed and not for the better. You weren’t owned but you weren’t free. You sharecropped, barely fed your family and got nowhere. Even if you died, the family was responsible for your debt and debt was just another name for slavery.
Being in prison was worse than being on a plantation. In prison, you were locked in a cage and only allowed out to work. There was no male/female interaction. You worked until you died or they killed you. There are few records on how many men survived a southern prison sentence. Any infraction could get you killed and almost no one cared. You were a criminal with no rights. You labored everyday. It wasn’t slave labor. It was Convict Labor, the new term to cover this new status. Master was now Warden.
So the bits and pieces suggest Great Uncle Bob was arrested as a vagrant even though he worked harder than most. It was Sunday and he was on his way to see how mom and his sisters were getting on now that he worked six days a week in town as a blacksmith’s helper mostly mucking out the town stable. He generally slept in the barn so he’d be there, working, at dawn. He was accosted, by “patrollers”, arrested and sentenced to 6 months hard labor. Three months later great grandma heard he was dead. Upon hearing her hopes and first born were gone with no inkling how he was killed or even if he had been buried she died. She was sure he had been killed. She always felt he was the type of man that would be murdered.
So his sisters knew it was time to leave Maryland. There was nothing to keep the in the south. That was Spring 1900. Two of Great Uncle Robert’s sisters wound up on Long Island and Cornelia, my grandmother, the youngest girl, that could pass if she wanted to, landed in Harlem. A story for another day.
Fried Chicken & Philosophy 