HISTORY, HERITAGE & HOPE

Over the years I've heard writers say they write the books they need to read. Over the next few weeks that’s exactly what I’ll be doing: finishing my next book.  I can’t wait to share it with you.

But, with the devilment and distractions of recent weeks, it’s the story behind my first book that I want to share with you in this special edition of the Sunday Journal. Published in 1995, Glory Days: 365 Inspired Moments in African American History is out-of- print. Come 2024, there’ll be a whole new edition for a whole new time. OMG, do I need to read it now—and for much the same reason I did back then. 

My friends wanted it. My children, their friends, and the times demanded it. Each of us was feeling the earth quake with near-daily eruptions of racial hatred and renewed hardship. Regardless of our zip codes, income brackets, or political party affiliations, we were feeling the kind of hardship that comes when words like dark  and black creep back into the lexicon to stand for all things negative and threatening; the kind of hardship that American history has been known to usher in on the coattails of demagogues and demigods; the kind that penetrates to the bone and destroys a nation's soul.

But it is also the kind of hardship over which Black people have triumphed many times before. This much we know. We’ve heard it in the Spirituals, seen it in the faces of our elders; read it in the eyes of our newest born. What many don’t know is how this triumph took place, day by day. How had we done it? Thus the idea for Glory Days was born.

Rooted in three specific events, I set out to pay homage to three specific gifts: history, heritage, and hope.

One day a group of my friends were discussing the growing racism, possible ways to overcome it; how to survive and thrive in spite of it. I watched as our host's father began to hang his head, mourning the notion that, as he said, his generation had "done so little" to ensure that our generation would not have to suffer this pain. We tried to tell him that this wasn't so, tried to soothe his pain as he had wished to soothe ours, but Mr. Bailey didn't and couldn't know all that his generation and forebears had really done. He had never had the privilege of studying African American history. In a very real sense, he did not know what he was missing.

He is a man who enjoys building things, but he knew nothing of the civilizations Africans built millennia before the United States was even an idea. He’d never heard of the Great Zimbabwe, a city-state renowned for its structures in-the-round. He’d heard of Egypt’s pyramids, but his knowledge of them was obscured by such terms as “The Middle East.” He had no idea that such UN-declared World Heritage treasures were built by Black civilizations, by African people. The prized artistry of the Benin Bronzes did not exist for him. He had no idea that Africans founded and built the world’s first and longest continuously-operating university in 857-859 AD: Al-Karaouine in Fez, Morocco.

Because denials of Black achievement still plague America, Mr. Bailey did not know all that “he” had really done. I wrote Glory Days to recognize his unrecognized history.

The second event that inspired Glory Days occurred when my mother and I were talking about what her parents had endured during the Great Depression as they raised their three daughters. How did centuries of parents make it? As a mother, and as a daughter, I needed to know.

Researching their stories, I found that at a time when insurance companies would only underwrite a Black life if it was owned by a White one, a group of Philadelphians formed the Free African Society in 1787. They’d insured their members and ensured the cohesion of their community. Within a few years that community founded one of the nation's first public libraries―spreading the wealth, so to speak.

We have a long, deep heritage and what it produced was pure gold, like the world our ancestors built in a distant time and home. In 1067, an Arab geographer recorded the scene as Tenkamenin, the Ghanaian king, held court. “To listen to [his people], he sits in a pavilion around which stand his horses caparisoned in cloth of gold.” The key to Ghana’s wealth was control of its own resources with a thriving land-based economy strong in agriculture, in the manufacture of products derived from its mineral wealth, in goldsmithing, and in international trade. Europe did not “bring civilization” to Africa; it sought to dominate and profit from Africans’ existing success.  As African Americans we have known what it means to be lost, but because of the legacies of our heritage, we have never lost our sense of direction.

And the third event: a speech to a historical society. I shared an authentic slave ledger with the predominantly African American audience; only to watch them sink, dejected. Then a miracle happened. They realized that their ancestors had not been slaves; rather, their ancestors had been enslaved. Something horrific was done to those people. As that recognition dawned, I watched the group's spirits rise and felt my own spirit soar. Together we had come to a wondrous truth. Ours was a mighty people who had gone through so much, endured so much, and yet we were here to tell the tale. How we got ovah, the hymn is sung. My soul looks back in wonder, how we got ovah.

Confronting history (and herstory) gave me a whole new life. “Writing,” as Alice Walker has said, “saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.” That too.

For centuries, African Americans have been demeaned as slaves; as though the shame of those who would enslave us could take the measure of our lives.

We have been segregated as less-than; as though the blindness of those who would mock us could share the vision of all we survey. 

We have known the depths of despair; yet we lift ourselves up through the legacy of our past and the promise of our future.

O ye sons and daughters of Africa, congratulations!

O ye sons and daughters of conscience of every race, ability, gender identity, faith and imagination, congratulations! 

Do you know what a mighty people WE are?

*  *  *

Pictured top:  Building More Stately Mansions (1944). Aaron Douglas. Reprinted on the cover of Glory Days by permission of the Permanent Collection of the Fisk University Department of Art.

 BOOK A TALK

50 BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE STORY OF AFRICAN AMERICA: a recommended reading list

Glory Days is also this week’s installment of 50 BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE STORY OF AFRICAN AMERICA. 

Changing the way African American history was told and understood with its reader-centered day-by-day approach, McDonald’s licensed the book for its “McDonald’s Presents Glory Days” campaign in 1998 and 1999, reaching more than 3.1 million customers in the New York metropolitan region alone.  

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Harambee!

Janus

* Harambee is a Ki-Swahili term popularized by the Kenyan Independence Movement meaning "let's all pull together!"

Emmy Award-winning journalist, author, historian, keynote speaker, 

Dr. Janus Adams is publisher of BackPaxKids.com and host of public radio’s

“The Janus Adams Show” and podcast.

www.JanusAdams.com

www.BackPaxKids.com