07/29/2024
Greetings all!
It's been quite a while since we have posted on FB as we have been very busy! In 2022 we were featured in a documentary entitled, "The Price of Silence, the Forgotten Story of New Jersey's Enslaved People (go to Truehart Productions to view) and in 2023 we finished our second book, "African Americans of Central New Jersey: A History of Harmony and Hostility," which launched in September, 2023. Also in 2023 we were humbled to be invited to spearhead the History of Slavery Committee (one of eight committees) on behalf of the NJ Institute for Social Justice. The end result will be a report to be submitted in 2025 requesting NJ legislatures to consider enacting legislation to create a Reparations Task Force. If this succeeds, NJ will be second in the nation to do so after California. Also in 2023 we were asked by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to participate on a task force which has been formed to study the effects of structural racism on people of color in New Jersey. Since 2016, we have been co-founders of the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum in Skillman and serve on its Advisory Board. For the past eight years the museum has grown and flourished and we couldn't be happier!
So the purpose of this post is to send our thanks and love to all who have supported us throughout the years. We've missed you and will make sure we will check in more frequently. Meanwhile, we wanted to repost a Friday Memory that we posted back in 2019 (we can't believe it's been that long) when Kamala Harris first came on the national scene. She fascinated us then and continues to fascinate us now. We cannot help but think about the countless numbers of African American women throughout our history who have sought change in this country. For many of these women they will forever remain anonymous while others may become well known. So, we decided to repost this Friday memory not only to pay homage to one of our personal heroines (Fannie Lou Hamer) but to also declare our support for Kamala Harris.
We're proud, we're enthused, we're inspired and, most importantly, we're up for the fight!
Harris and Hamer – Women Who Would Not Be Silenced
A Friday Memory by Elaine Buck and Beverly Mills
On Martin Luther King Day Kamala Harris set a CNN viewing record. Poised and impeccably dressed, Senator Harris stood before a crowd of 20,000 supporters at an Oakland rally and declared “We are better than this” as she announced her candidacy for President of the United States. Kamala, a woman of color as she has self-identified, stood before seven large American flags and openly challenged the country’s current political climate vowing to be a president such as Lincoln, “Of the people, by the people, and for all people.”
Now travel back fifty-seven years to 1962 when Fannie Lou Hamer, a forty-five year old uneducated sharecropper from Mississippi, volunteered to go to the courthouse to register to vote. Prior to her involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Hamer said she had no idea that Black people could register to vote as first class citizens. She went on to say, “But what was the point of being scared, the only thing the whites could do was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.” Fannie Lou along with sixteen others set out to register to vote. She was given a literacy test, which she failed, but told the clerk she would be back. On her way home Fannie was stopped and harassed by the police. What she didn’t know is that she had already been evicted from her home where she sharecropped. And later sixteen bullets were shot through the windows of the home where she was staying after her eviction.
Fifty seven years ago Fannie Lou Hamer challenged an American president by speaking her truth to power. In l964 President Lyndon Johnson was threatened by Fannie Lou in her role as a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party because he knew she had a story to tell. When Fannie Lou strode onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention in her cotton print dress and white purse she specifically came to challenge the all White delegation from Mississippi which was stocked with ardent segregationists. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party came to the convention to demand that they be heard instead of the all white delegation and Fannie Lou was not going to leave until they were recognized. President Johnson, however, knew he had to silence this illiterate woman because he needed the southern democratic vote to win re-election. But Fannie was relentless and elbowed her way through a hostile crowd to the microphone. Fighting back tears as she recounted, without notes, the beatings she and others received in a Mississippi jail all because they dared to sit at lunch counter to be served. The severity of the numerous beatings Fannie Lou received inflicted permanent injury which caused her to walk with a limp and to develop a blood clot behind her eye which plagued her until the day she died. In desperation, President Johnson called an impromptu press conference which he knew would preempt Fannie Lou’s testimony since TV stations would break away from their coverage of the Democratic Convention. He went on air to tell America that it was the nine month anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. But Johnson’s maneuver backfired and Fannie Lou’s testimony was later played not once but several times on the evening news and beyond.
In 2019 Kamala Harris has entered the stage in a navy blue power suit and stood before a cheering crowd in Oakland, California as she announced her candidacy. Her announcement was on Martin Luther King holiday – the significance not only to pay homage to King but also because it was forty-seven years ago when Shirley Chisolm launched her presidential campaign as the first African American female to do so.
Today we already have a diverse slate of Democratic hopefuls and we’ll just have to wait and see how things will turn out for Kamala Harris. But what we do know for sure is that Kamala is not shy about speaking out and neither was Fannie Lou. We will also have to wait and see how the President Trump will fare should he be required to come before her as a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence. I’m sure she will not be silenced.
