Meet the Family
Up from Buxton Episode One
The precursor to Black History Month was created in 1926 in the United States, when historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) announced the second week of February to be "Negro History Week".[8] (Thanks to Wikipedia for that introduction)
My mother’s family (the Porters and Thompsons) left the Monroe county town known as Buxton about 4 years earlier and settled in Fort Dodge, Iowa Webster county. If you haven’t been introduced to Grandmother Lettie Thompson yet, you should start here.
In the 307th year of their involuntary migration to these American shores, the ancestors were waking up to the possibilities for advancement put forward by Woodson and W.E.B. Dubois and other intellectual leaders of their age. Against all social and legislative odds, our ancestors worked their way to the kind of acceptance you receive as a result of your personal integrity and the mastery of your vocational requirements.
Carter Woodson contended that the teaching of Black History was essential to ensure the physical and intellectual survival of Blacks within broader society:
If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated. [13]
Like beacons pointing the way, Carter Woodson, Dubois, and educator Mary Church Terrell and others maintained that education—of self, of history would provide the path toward attaining some version of the American Dream® for African Americans.
That was the guiding philosophy of the Ones That Brought Me Here
This month is dedicated to them. Heroes and Heroines alike. Not in the bombastic way but in the way of the quiet faithful. Those who came before my brothers and I sought to instill faith and a work ethic worthy of inspiration to future generations. Unnoticed except to those with a discerning eye for integrity. (btw: you don’t get integrity without some grit and the Thompsons and Porters and Browns were never, ever going to forsake that mission.