Black History

By James Oliver Horton

One of the most effective organizers of a formal segment of the Underground Railroad was a free African American named William Still. His father, Levin Still, had purchased his own freedom. His mother, Sidney, and his two brothers and two sisters, remained enslaved in Maryland, however. Sidney and the children managed to escape once but were captured and returned to Maryland.

Aware that all five could not escape together again, Sidney made one of the most difficult decisions any mother could make. In 1807, leaving the two older boys behind with their grandmother (who was also a slave), Sidney struck out for freedom again. This time, she took only the two younger girls. They succeeded, and she was reunited with her husband. To conceal their identities, they changed Sidney’s name to Charity and the family name to Still. Fourteen years later, William Still was born free in New Jersey.

At age 23, Still moved to Philadelphia, where he worked as a mail clerk and a janitor for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. He educated himself, became a businessman, and eventually was appointed head of the General Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia, a group dedicated to defending and assisting fugitive slaves seeking refuge in the city.

Over the next few years, Still and his associates worked to organize an extensive network of safe houses and conductors that soon became the foundation of one of the most effective Underground Railroad systems in the country. The group raised money to help fugitives and kept an eye on the movements of slave catchers throughout Pennsylvania. Still’s work became quite personal when he was introduced to a middle-aged man from Alabama in search of information.

In a letter written on August 8, 1850, from his office in Philadelphia, William Still described an amazing encounter with a man who called himself Peter Freedman. Freedman sought information about his family, who had come north some years before. As his story unfolded, Still recognized much of the detail. “My feelings were unutterable,” he said. “I could see in the face of my newfound brother, the likeness of my mother.” Peter Freedman was Still’s brother. He had been left in slavery when his mother escaped. The brothers had never met.

“I told him I could tell him all about his kinfolk,” Still recalled. The next day, Peter was reunited with his family. Their father was dead by this time, but Freedman met five brothers and three sisters whom he had never known. “I shall not attempt to describe the feelings of my mother and the family on learning the fact that Peter was one of us,” Still wrote.

The family’s struggle was not over, however. When Freedman left Alabama, he had left behind a wife and children whom he was determined to free.

Members of the Underground Railroad secured their escape to Indiana, but they were recaptured and returned to slavery. When Freedman attempted to purchase their freedom, their master demanded the seemingly impossible sum of $5,000. With the help of Still’s abolitionist friends, he began a lecture tour, telling the story of his enslaved family to raise money for their freedom. It took four years of fundraising. In October 1854, he accomplished his goal. Once free, Peter Still (the name he now used) and his family settled on a 10-acre farm in Burlington, New Jersey, where they lived until Peter died of pneumonia in 1868.

William Still continued his Underground Railroad activities and worked for civil rights in Philadelphia throughout the Civil War. During and after the war, he raised funds to assist former slaves who had gained their freedom in the South. He also served on Philadelphia’s board of trade and helped establish a Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) for the city’s African Americans. In his work, Still met Frederick Douglass and became good friends with Harriet Tubman. He kept detailed records of his organization’s activities and of the almost 800 fugitives it helped in the years before the Civil War ended slavery. In 1872, he published his records along with the stories of hundreds of runaways in The Underground Railroad. William Still died in 1901.

Many descendants of the Still family continue to live in southern New Jersey, where they hold regular family reunions. Their story, like that of the Underground Railroad and the story of the abolition movement, is a freedom story, an all-American story of the many who refused to accept the denial of freedom.

Original Article: http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/narratives/bio_william_still.htm

Patrick Healy was born 27 February 1830 on a cotton plantation near Macon, Georgia, to Michael and Mary Eliza Healy. A former Irish soldier who emigrated to America by way of Canada after the war of 1812, Michael was a planter. In 1829, Michael fell in love with Mary Eliza, a mixed-race domestic slave, and purchased her from her former owner, Sam Griswold. Georgia’s laws at the time prohibited interracial marriages, but the two are believed to have been married by a traveling preacher, and lived their blended life as wedded man and wife.

Family of outcasts. Considered both illegitimate and slaves at birth under the law, Patrick and his siblings were forbidden from attending school in their home state. Wanting their children to be educated, the Healys sent Patrick and his brothers Hugh and James to Quaker schools in the north, first in Flushing, New York, then in Burlington New Jersey, where they studied in the 1840’s under the instruction of Adeline Glover. Despite the Quaker emphasis on equality, the boys met with some discrimination throughout their school years, based not only on their race, but also on their Irish heritage and the fact that their father owned slaves – something local Quakers found unconscionable.

Gifted and talented. In the mid-1840s, Michael Healy transferred the boys to the newly-founded Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, where they excelled academically. Patrick’s brothers were in the first graduating class of 1849. Their younger brothers, Michael and Sherwood, followed them to Holy Cross. After his graduation a year later, Patrick continued his education at Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, where in 1863 he may have been the second African-American to earn his Ph.D. – his brother Sherwood reportedly received a doctorate in Canon Law from the North American College in Rome in 1860.

Second Founder of Georgetown College. Ordained as a Jesuit priest, Father Healy served as Georgetown Colleges’s prefect of studies from 1868 to 1878, and its president from 1873 to 1881 – the first African-American president of a predominantly white university. Called the “second founder” of Georgetown by some, he reformed the curriculum, oversaw the construction of a multi-use building which now bears his name, expanded programs in medicine and law, and founded the alumni association. It was under Healy’s tenure that Georgetown attained University status.

Source: http://robtshepherd.tripod.com/healy.html

Each year at my daughter’s school I am asked if I would like to help with the Kwanzaa display at school. Being one of two African American families at our school I guess I should be excited to share a part of African American history with the student body – after all I am a champion for multi cultural education (right??). The issue is that Kwanzaa has never been a part of my history. I never celebrated Kwanzaa growing up and only briefly celebrated it while I was in college. I don’t know any of the seven principles unless I google it first and other than a salad bowl and a mudcloth I received in college we have no Kwanzaa paraphernalia that we can even use if we chose to celebrate Kwanzaa.

Why We Don’t Celebrate:

There are many reasons why individuals do not celebrate Kwanzaa. Some out right refuse to celebrate Kwanzaa for a few reasons and some of us are just ambivalent. I’ve heard many emphasize that Kwanzaa is a “fake” or “made up” holiday and refuse to celebrate for that reason alone. Others critique Karenga – Kwanzaa’s founder. While some that straddle both camps decide not to celebrate Kwanzaa out of the growing commercialism of the holiday. In recent years Kwanzaa has developed into a much more widely accepted media-friendly holiday than one that is actually practiced by African American families.

Why We Celebrate:

How can anything that was created to uplift and support our community be viewed as “stupid” (recent comment posted on Clutch Magazine)? Those that celebrate often were actively involved in the 60’s movement and adopted Kwanzaa principles while also adopting a new perspective on life where African heritage was central in their self identity. I informed my husband this morning that we will begin celebrating Kwanzaa. Reading a friend’s blog post this morning I realized that all of the work I’ve done this year in attempting to redefine our Christmas celebration highlights very similar principles as Kwanzaa.

Today I will buy a kinara and tonight we will light it in celebration.

The Seven Principles of Kwanzaa:

• Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
• Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves stand up.
• Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems, and to solve them together.
• Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
• Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
• Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
• Imani (Faith): To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

Share with us why your family does or does not celebrate Kwanzaa and other views you may want to share about this holiday.

Kwame Ture was born on June 29, 1941 (a.k.a Stokely Carmichael). He was a Trinidadian-American Black activist who rose to prominence as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later as a leader in the Black Panther Party. Carmichael popularized the term “Black Power”.

He attended Howard University in 1960 and at 19 years of age he participated in the Freedom Rides of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). After entering a “white” cafeteria in Jackson he and members of his group were convicted of disturbing the peace and were sent to jail and eventually transferred to Parchman State Prison Farm where Carmichael gained notoriety for being a witty and hard nosed leader among the prisoners. At 19 years old he became the youngest detainee in the summer of 1961.

He worked as a SNCC activist in Alabama and helped to increase the number of registered voters from 70 – 2600 (300 more than the number of white registered voters).

Following the shooting of James Meredith during his solitary March Against Fear, Carmichael joined Dr. Martin Luther King and others to continue Meredith’s march. He was arrested once again during the march and, upon his release, he gave his first “Black Power” speech urging those in attendance to embrace Black pride and socio-economic independence:

It is a call for Black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for Black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.

While the concept of Black Power was not new, this became a rallying cry for young Blacks across the country. Everywhere that Black Power spread, credit was given to Carmichael.

Carmichael stepped down from SNCC in 1967, the same year he published his book, “Black Power” and became more focused on what he perceived to be the helplessness of Blacks participating in the non-violent movement as he witnessed Black demonstrators being beaten and shocked with cattle prods by the police. In response to this Carmichael became the “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party.

Carmichael later moved to Guinea. It was during his time in Guinea that he renamed himself Kwame Toure.

On November 15, 1998, at the age of 57, Stokely Carmichael died of prostate cancer.

His life and legacy will always be remembered.

Click here fore more information on Stokely Carmichael.