I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother…
LANGSTON HUGHES beautiful poem resonates in my mind after visiting the African American museum in Philadelphia. The museum reopened last weekend with a massive exhibition called ‘Audacious Freedom’. The exhibit details the lives of African Americans in Philadelphia from 1776 up to 1876. It gives a cross-section of the African American presence in Philadelphia during the years that most people assume all Blacks were enslaved. The truth is that there were many free men living, working and prospering in Philadelphia during those years.
I’m always confronted with the fantastic stories of African Americans who are unknown champions for the Black experience here in this country. There were so many people who were not enslaved yet they risked everything for their fellow brothers in bondage. Not just African Americans either but all people who believed in justice. Philadelphia is an important city in this struggle because of their proximity to southern states and their access to shipping and trading routes. If you made the dangerous trek from the south to Philadelphia you were free.
Being Negro / Black / African in America is filled with so many untold stories of heroism and simply just real life stories. This exhibition is about the discovery of African Americans who were the unknown founders of the civil rights movement nearly two hundred years before the march on Selma. Free men, unfree men, abolitionists, entreprenuers and all African Americans.
this is great stuff
DP– thanks for coincidental nudge, I’ll do a drop soon-ish on Frederick Douglass in Philadelphia and the white Brooklyn man who was the ONLY person at this (political) event who would stand with Douglass (the only black man there).
Historically, there’s two sides to this story:
1) as you say, is the still largely untold story of free, recently freed and/or still-virtually-enslaved blacks in the racist north (thus Frederick Douglass’ trouble in Philly, among many other stories).
2) the REALLY hard to grapple with reality that there were some free blacks in the South and even a few black slaveowners. I’m not expert on this latter subject but it’s a mind-blower to consider.