Embedded Files
Lt. Commander Wesley Anthony Brown 'Broke the Color Barrier' at the Naval Academy in 1949
History columnist Don 'Ogbewii' Scott with wife
Billie and President Carter at the Carter Center in Atlanta.
Published Mon., Oct. 22, 2018/Updated Sept. 24, 2021
Remembering my father-in-law with President Carter at The Carter Center
By Don 'Ogbewii Scott'
It’s not every day that you get to shake hands with a global leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U.S. president, the Honorable Jimmy Carter who served from 1977-1981 – and even get a “love” hug.
That’s exactly what happened when a Uber driver picked up my wife Billie and I from the Marriott Marquis Hotel in downtown Atlanta about 8 a.m. on Friday, October 19, for a 20-minute ride to The Carter Center where we were scheduled to meet with President Carter precisely at 8:45 a.m. to discuss her father becoming the first African American to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1949 – effectively “breaking the color barrier” of the venerable institution.
Indeed, before my father-in-law, Lt. Commander Wesley A. Brown, passed away in 2012, just several years after a $54 million athletic center and field house was built and named in his honor, he’d often tell us a life-changing story (that I’ll briefly discuss below) that truly tells just how authentically empathetic Jimmy Carter was as a senior midshipman at the academy where my father-in-law endured as a lower class-man so much racial discrimination, taunts, unjust demerits and the resulting punishments, as well as rooming alone for four years because of his black skin.
As the Uber vehicle, a late Toyota, Camry, whirled us through the Carter Center’s picturesque campus of maturing trees rooted in emerald grass stretching for acres, we were certainly excited and glad to be running ahead of schedule, especially since the facility’s senior director of research and faculty assistant, Dr. Steven Hochman, cautioned us during a Thursday phone call that the president was still on “military time” -- in other words not to get to the appointment late!
Just moments after driving past the palatial presidential library we were dropped off at the main lobby of the center’s sprawling executive suites where we were met by senior aides, including Hochman (also a distinguished presidential historian whom has written extensively about Carter), Phil Wise (a long-time Carter associate and vice president of operations and development), as well as Tony Clark, director of public affairs, who had an outstanding career as a broadcast journalist for the likes of CNN.
After being briefed, with the Secret Service placed at strategic points, we were led to President Carter’s office where he stood just beyond his office doorway with that famous ingratiating grin so familiar on campaign posters and political cartoons.
In his office, adorned with thick beige rugs, global art and pottery, etc., amid pastel-colored furniture, oil-paintings and other images depicting family and others, he welcomed us, shook our hands, and then warmly pulled my wife to him and hugged her, platonically asking her to “give me love!”
Man, that’s the down-home candor and wholesomeness that I so very much miss in today’s presidency.
We conversed with President Carter, today 94-years-old and dressed in a dark buttoned suit, light-blue shirt and turquoise Native-American medallion as a collar tie, about my father-in-law’s time at the academy and career as a civil engineer. He remarked about my dad-in-law’s courageousness after being admitted to the Naval Academy in 1945, one year before the future president from Plains, Ga. would graduate in 1946 and move on to a stellar career as a nuclear submarine officer.
President Carter reminisced about their days on the track field, admitting that Commander Brown was “faster,” following his statement with a slight chuckle, one of the many developments that I wrote for my biography about my father-in-law in the Oxford University Press’ African American National Biography (AANB), edited by professors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Higginbotham of Harvard University.
At least two comprehensive biographies, as well as, Carter’s own memoirs attest to their associations.
My wife thanked him so much for being among a small group of midshipmen and Navy administrators determined to help my father-in-law, sponsored by the famous African-American congressman from Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., to become the first black to graduate from the academy after five other African Americans had been essentially hazed out of the institution starting not long after its founding in 1845 through to the 20th century.
Their paths crossed for only one academic year, but, a monumental interaction with Carter would help provide the fuel that would have historic ramifications.
As the story goes, my father-in-law had a particularly rough day when that evening he was being ostracized in a dormitory. One upper classman walked over to him, put his arm around his shoulder and essentially told my father-in-law that there were people on campus who were very interested in him graduating from the academy.
And that remarkable midshipman was none other than Jimmy Carter, a young man brought up in segregated Georgia whose own dad was a “segregationist,” despite reportedly having cordial relationships with the black community and whose mother, Lillian, insisted that he treat blacks and whites equally, something that Dr. Hochman discussed with us during a fascinating hour-long tour of the Carter Center following our conversation with President Carter.
Further, Carter’s association with blacks who worked his father’s peanut fields, as well as with Bishop William Decker Johnson of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, helped him to become familiar with the black liberation struggle, although Carter acknowledges that he did not actively participate in the civil rights movement, Hochman said.
And Carter, later on, after his father died, was pressured by local racists to join a group, the White Citizens’ Council, with Ku Klux Klan sympathies, utterly refusing to do so after returning to Plains to take over the family’s peanut farming enterprise, despite serious threats – another clear example of his noble character.
Ultimately, many of Carter’s top cabinet members and advisors were intimately involved in civil rights, including the ambassador to the United Nations, the Rev. Andrew Young, who served eight years as Atlanta’s mayor and was one of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s primary associates, Clark said, as we moved through exhibits in the presidential museum and library (with extensive archives) incorporating splendid graphics, audio-visual presentations, and even an exact replica of Carter’s Oval Office in The White House.
In my book, President Carter is one of the greatest presidents of my lifetime because of his monumental efforts to instill peace in the Middle East via the 1978-1979 Camp David Accords with the Egypt’s leader Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, reputation as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient with remarkable intelligence, as well as staunch believer in African-Americans’ struggles for racial justice.
And he greatly strengthened the voting rights legislation in Georgia and nationally that is being intentionally degraded today, but makes it mandatory that all of us get out to vote during the upcoming Nov. 6 mid-term elections.
His immense Christian faith, powerful 72-year marriage with his remarkable wife, Roslyn Carter, their extensive international peace and health initiatives, as well as inner convictions that helped him to overcome segregationist pressures in the South and even brain cancer, all reflect his awesome qualities.
As I thought about our day at the Carter center that evening, I remembered an exhibit that really caught my eye concerning his early campaigns as governor of Georgia, then president, accentuating that marvelous toothy grin on campaign buttons and posters for a man willing to give so much more – including an embrace of my father-in-law that helped to change the course of American history.
Don ‘Ogbewii’ Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com. More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
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Making history as the first African-American graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy
PUBLISHED: June 14, 2012 at 10:00 p.m. | UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 1:13 a.m.
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
It’s 8 p.m. Sunday, June 3, 2012, and I’ve just completed writing the obituary of my father-in-law, Lieutenant Commander Wesley Anthony Brown (Ret.), for official services scheduled Wednesday, June 6, at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. He graduated on this exact day, June 3, more than 60 years ago and changed the course of American history.
Feeling burdened at first, I wrote the formal obituary over several days with swirling emotions of deep sadness ranging to the blessed joy of getting to know personally an iconic historical figure, the first African American to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy.
But most important, I grew to love him as a dad-in-law and person with remarkable insight, wisdom and a warrior who at times had human frailties.
So, I was very sad, but honored, several weeks ago when he looked me in the eyes at the dinner table and said, “Don, I would like you to write my obituary,” after my wife, Billie, and I finished eating with him and his wife, Crystal, at their Washington, D.C., apartment where they had lived for 30 years. His words were exceptionally hard to take and I know that it was likely not an easy thing for him to request, especially since doctors had given my father-in-law just several weeks to about six months to live with a diagnosis of terminal metastatic cancer.
After all, despite his remarkable accomplishments dad was a mortal human being, regardless of a $50 million field house in 2008 being built and named for him on the academy’s grounds due to his incredible place in history.
In fact, in this space, I don’t want to simply recap his life as was my primary task in his obituary, examining in detail his 1927 birth in Baltimore, upbringing in the inner-city Shaw District of Washington, D.C., matriculation into the academy and worldwide travels as a commanding Naval engineer in charge of massive construction projects after graduating in 1949, despite five previous blacks attempting during the previous century.
Along the way, he’d rub elbows with fellow midshipman and future U.S. President Jimmy Carter, the great jazz singer Sarah Vaughn, legendary actor Henry Fonda, Olympic track star Jesse Owens, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen and visit President Barack Obama at The White House – three times. His funeral was scheduled to feature such primary speakers as an old friend, Marine Corps’ Major-General Charles Bolden who is the chief administrator of the National Aeronautics Space Administration.
I remember Wesley Brown as an optimistic and analytical man who was very practical, extremely organized and disciplined, as well as uncommonly caring and down-to-earth. And although I’m sure he loved his four children equally, he and my wife, Billie, (his eldest sibling) enjoyed an extraordinary bond. Perhaps, that’s why a few months before the end, he’d talk increasingly about his desire to be cremated and ashes returned to the U.S. Naval Academy’s columbarium to rest for the ages. He was preparing us and himself for the inevitable.
Dad, a medium-chocolate complexioned man with inquisitive grayish-brown eyes that would glisten with intelligence when he laughed (which was often), even told us about where he’d want his prized books concerning many topics sent after he ascended to what he called his “just desserts” in his very calm – almost soothing – baritone voice.
For instance, the Naval Academy would receive many of his volumes concerning Navy history. And I could take some of his black history books, he said, a few that he loaned to me over the years to read such as a biography about Charles Young, the third African American to graduate in 1889 from West Point through persistence, hard work and dedication – qualities dad surely emulated.
In fact, during our many long conversations about black history and even contemporary politics, as well as the Great Depression, that he remembered very well as a child, I realized his tremendous concern for the underprivileged, even when he insisted during the 2008 dedication ceremony for his building that a group of inner-city students receive royal treatment.
In fact, when one of his so-called tormentors from his midshipman days would approach him in recent years and apologize, Commander Brown would tell them to forget about the incident because it was something that he simply did not recall or dwell on. He was a consummate gentleman of the highest honor and realized that as he opened the doors for thousands of diverse warriors, hatred would impede success.
Yet, the commander could very occasionally be a piercing critic, especially if he thought someone was being unjust, biased or, for lack of better terminology, intentionally stupid. His sarcasm, sometimes, could be intense, but in my humble opinion, mostly very-well placed and wonderfully humorous. Commander Brown was not perfect. He was human.
And that’s what I loved about him.
Even with his frailties the commander set laudable examples of how to achieve greatness, even if your start in life is humble. Beneath his tremendous armor of courage, as the end came, I could sense some anxiety about his impending transition. Yet, he revealed his strong warrior traits as we moved him and his beloved Crystal out of their D.C. abode and into a Maryland assisted-living facility.
When dad arrived in his new apartment setting, he seemed a bit unsettled, but at times was alert and cognizant before one day drifting into unconsciousness and then to his “just desserts.”
During his final days and hours Lieutenant-Commander Wesley Anthony Brown, at age 85, even showed us how to honorably die.
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PUBLISHED: March 25, 2015 at 10:00 p.m. | UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 12:19 p.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: The man who broke the ‘color barrier’
at the U.S. Naval Academy
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
Not to be bragging, but it’s not everyone who gets the opportunity to meet and become quite close to a living legend.
Yet, that’s exactly what happened to me almost 20 years ago shortly after I met my future and quite distinctive wife, Billie, at the old, but now razed, Adam’s Mark Hotel on City Line Avenue in Bala Cynwyd.
During that dreamlike winter evening, in 1996, we first spotted each other near the hotel’s entrance, began conversing and then boogied at a disco-club there before settling down for refreshments at an eatery adjoining the sprawling lobby.
She dazzled me with her soulfulness, beauty, intelligence and down-to-earth humor, as well as incredible antecdotes about her earlier career in the recording industry producing and leading “artist development” for the likes of Quincy Jones, the Jackson Five and Earth, Wind & Fire – my absolute favorite group.
And that’s when Billie, a tannish lady with a grin that melted my core, told me that her dad, Wesley Anthony Brown, became in 1949 the first black graduate of the United States Naval Academy and that he was alive and well, living in Washington, D.C.
Yet, the poignant story of Commander Brown – after more than a century and following the often treacherous forcing out of five previous blacks – graduating from the academy that was founded 1845 in Annapolis, Md., is much deeper than a history timeline entry.
It’s about a man who actually broke the “color barrier” and other obstacles at one of the most distinguished U.S. institutions. And it is concerning the love of a daughter who refused to see her father languish decades after his historic feats.
During my courting of Billie and subsequent marriage in 1998, often visiting her parents over the years in the District where my wife lived before moving to these parts to take a job as a health agency executive, I confirmed that a person’s positive strength of character and determination is what really makes the world a better place.
It’s not the celebrity and other high-flown stuff that counts much.
You see, although I thoroughly enjoyed attending scores of events with Billie and her kinfolk where I met top Navy officers and government officials, as well as fraternized with some of the most powerful and interesting people in this country, the simple one-on-one discussions with dad over the years about history, politics and social conditions and witnessing Billie’s endearing relationship with him are what touched me the most.
That’s not to minimize that after graduating in 1949, there would be worldwide publicity for “dad,” including his own account of making history in the Saturday Evening Post and other articles in publications around the globe detailing the racism and hatred that he overcame. Many of those accounts also acknowledged that some of his classmates, as well as superior officers, supported and encouraged him to graduate, including former President Jimmy Carter.
And because of his lofty accomplishment, he’d sign autographs for the likes of the black Olympic champion Jesse Owens, party or rub elbows with such iconic entertainers as Henry Fonda and Sarah Vaughn, as well as return repeatedly to the Naval Academy to speak to his beloved midshipmen, today consisting of diverse men and women from many parts of the world who’ve followed Commander Brown’s path.
Eventually, during the mid-1980s, dad would retire after an impressive career in the Navy as a commanding engineer in the famed SEABEES charged with directing massive building projects in virtually every corner of the world, including in Africa, the Philippines and throughout the United States.
Yet, even after all that, as the years passed and Billie – born at the Philadelphia Naval Yard near where her father was stationed during the early 1950s – returned from the West Coast to live near her parents in Washington, she realized that her father was “withering on a vine,” as Billie once put it.
To her, dad seemed depressed and unmotivated, as well as felt unrecognized. So as an adoring daughter, Billie refused to let her father’s flame burn out. She’d throw a party in his honor in 1989 not far from once-segregated Annapolis in Highland Beach, a historic black community founded by a son of the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass where Billie’s father found refuge while on leave from the academy during the 1940s.
Word about the party spread like wildfire, and before Billie knew it, the affair had grown to huge proportions, including television camera crews, dozens of old classmates, as well as black graduates and others who had benefited from her father’s courage. There were even salutations from the likes of President Carter.
Incredibly, before his death in 2012, my father-in-law lived to see the new $54 million Wesley A. Brown Field House built in his honor on the academy’s grounds, at least two major books that focus on his historic accomplishments, as well as visited the White House twice to be recognized by the nation’s first black commander-in-chief, President Barack Obama.
And just to think – all that sparked by a daughter’s simple and very deep affection for her dad, with an ingratiating heart and smile that also lit my heart ablaze at a place called the Adam’s Mark.
To learn more about the life of Commander Wesley A. Brown, please consider attending a talk by my wife at the Berean Presbyterian Church, 2101 N. Broad St., on Saturday, April 11, during a meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) Philadelphia Heritage Branch.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@aol.com.
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PUBLISHED: July 26, 2019 at 7:32 a.m. | UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:46 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: ‘Little Women’ author Louisa May Alcott was Germantown native
By Don 'Ogbewii’ Scott
One of the spunkiest historical figures with local roots who throughout her hard life took “the bull by the horns” was Louisa May Alcott, the famed author of the groundbreaking novel “Little Women.”
Born in Germantown on Nov. 29, 1832 – the same day that her progressive educator dad, Amos Bronson Alcott, came to the world in 1799 – Louisa was primarily home-schooled by him, a pioneering transcendentalist, with help from powerhouse friends such as writers and philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne after the family returned to New England two years later.
When Louisa was born in a house on what today is Germantown Ave. “where the Masonic Hall now stands, between Coulter and Mill Streets,” reminisced Mary B. Houston Williams in an address to the Site and Relic Society of Germantown on April 18, 1902, her father Amos was ecstatic about his daughter’s birth in a letter to a “Colonel May”: “She was born at half-past 12 this morning, on my birthday (33), and is a very fine healthful child, and has a fine foundation for health and energy of character,” Amos wrote, according to Williams, adding that his wife “Abbainclines to have her called Louisa May, a name to her full of every association connected with amiable benevolence and exalted worth.”
The Alcotts had traveled to Philly from New England so that Amos could set-up a liberal school without the rigid rules of the period. “The school he taught at in Germantown was the third school he had started, this time with aid from a wealthy benefactor [Reuben Haines] who paid the tuition of many of the students,” notes historynet.com, but soon died, prompting the Alcotts to return to Boston in 1834.
Although destined to become the family’s primary breadwinner due to her father’s financial ineptitude – despite his obvious genius in book learning and philosophy – Louisa very early became quite supportive of women’s rights because of the immense pressures that her mother Abby May Alcott experienced regarding her dad’s lackadaisical employment attitude, impoverishing the family of several girls: Anna Bronson Alcott (b. 1831), Elizabeth Sewell (b. 1835) and Abigail May (b. 1840).
Louisa, the second of the four daughters, also became an ardent anti-slavery abolitionist who greatly respected such local women as the Quaker minister Lucretia Mott of Cheltenham, at one point with her family helping escaped slaves via the Underground Railroad.
And even though father Amos seemed incapable of providing financial stability, he gave his girls and other students an extraordinary liberal education, avoiding punishment while emphasizing conversational techniques – making him an impressive educational reformist.
Establishing in 1834 a so-called “model community” called Fruitlands in “Harvard Massachusetts,” Amos “[made] use of no animal products or labor, except, as [wife] Abigail Alcott observed, for that of women,” according to the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail’s online article, “Louisa May Alcott (1832-88).”
By age 15, Alcott worked as a governess, seamstress and teacher while pursuing writing to help support her family then living in Concord, Mass. “In Boston, Louisa also encountered some of the greatest reformers of the nineteenth century,” including Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison, says the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail.
Meanwhile, “Louisa’s stories were finally beginning to sell,” including for such publications as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newsletter, earning her $100 in 1863 for “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” as the Civil War raged. She also began writing novels.
Alcott’s “brief service as a Civil War nurse inspired her to write ‘Hospital Sketches’ which appeared in the Boston Commonwealth as a series and as a book in 1863,” that became “enormously popular” based on the often graphic, but poignant stories, of the war’s wounded. Sadly, Alcott during the war contracted typhoid and pneumonia, so was treated with a mercury compound, causing periodic hallucinations, disorientation and other illnesses.
After touring in Europe and returning to Boston, “she accepted the editorship of Merry’s Museum, a children’s magazine. She became its major contributor. In 1867,” following the war, “the magazine’s editor, Thomas Niles, asked her to write a book especially for girls. The result was part one of ‘Little Women,'” partially based on the struggles she had encountered, as well as her sisters, mother and other women, becoming “a best seller” and propelling her to worldwide fame. The book was translated into a variety of languages.
By the time she died at age 55 on March 6, 1888 in Boston after never marrying, just two days following her father’s death, Louisa May Alcott had written hundreds of articles, numerous books and lifted her family out of poverty.
Upon returning to Germantown before her passing, she gave a presentation at Germantown Academy to a bunch of ingratiating, wide-eyed students, followed up by a few groups of them visiting the famous author staying at a nearby residence along or near School House Lane.
After all, “we realize that she is one of our very own people,” confessed Mary Williams to the Germantown Relic Society in 1902, “and not to Boston, nor to Concord, but to Germantown belongs the honor of being her birth-place.”
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com. More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
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PUBLISHED: August 2, 2019 at 1:49 p.m. | UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:46 a.m.
A Place in History: Botanist’s dedication would do well against climate change crisis
By Don ‘Ogbewii’ Scott
When the Jenkintown-born botanist and horticulturalist Mary Gibson Henry at age 82 died of heart disease on April 16, 1967 in Wilmington N.C. while on a field trip, according to her death certificate that I found online via Ancestry.com, she had lived an extraordinary life of intrepid traveling to far-flung places, leaving behind a legacy of preserving “unusual species” of the Earth’s plant ecosystems.
So, during this modern age of global warming that threatens our planet as the Trump administration largely ignores the dire consequences of uncontrolled flooding, extreme weather, deforestation and runaway fires, Henry’s determination and dedication are prime examples of what’s needed to literally save our planet.
“Often one has to shove one’s self through or wriggle under briars, with awkward results to clothing,” Henry once said, according to the article, “Mary Gibson Henry, Plants woman Extraordinaire,” by Mary Harrison at http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.edu. “Wading usually bare legged through countless rattlesnake infested swamps adds immensely to the interest of the day’s work … On several occasions I have been so deeply mired I had to be pulled out.”
Henry’s first trip to the Southeast U.S. “covered 2,000 miles,” traveling “along the Atlantic Coastal Plain, on the Piedmont Plateau, in Appalachia, and in the mountains of east Tennessee and Alabama,” Harrison noted, as well as to northern British Columbia while she acquainted herself with such early botanists as John and William Bartram. During one trip, in fact, she and a daughter were reportedly held up by bandits but managed to escape unharmed.
Born 1884 at her grandparents’ Jenkintown home to John Howard Gibson and Susan Worrell Pepper, Henry’s maternal “family were Quakers who had come from England with William Penn and taken part in the founding of Philadelphia,” Harrison noted. “Horticulture was a traditional pursuit on both sides of the family.”
And although Henry had only attended the Agnes Irwin School in Philly for just six years, departing in 1902, she gravitated to plants as her father took the family on excursions to Moosehead Lake in Maine, says Harrison, where the luscious “twin flower (Linnaea Borealis)” on “a dwarf evergreen shrub” caught her eye and “awakened in her ‘not only a love for and appreciation of the absolute perfection of the flower itself, but also for the dark, silent forest that shelters such treasures.'”
By 1909, she married John Norman Henry, “a physician who later became Philadelphia’s director of public health,” with the couple taking up residence in Philadelphia, but eventually purchasing residences in Maryland and a 90-acre estate in Pennsylvania’s Gladwyne, outside of Philadelphia.
Even after giving birth to five children, Henry traveled extensively and corresponded with well-known botanists and horticulturalists to become one of the most respected experts in the world, all with the encouragement of her husband who even provided her with a specially-outfitted Lincoln, Continental featuring plant-preserving mechanisms, a portable illuminating desk and chauffeur.
In fact, Henry was very concerned about the depletion of natural habitats worldwide due to human-induced environmental hazards and likely would have been quite upset about current inefficient government policies to preserve such habitats and associated species.
Recent reports indicate deforestation rapidly increasing globally in the Amazon forests of Brazil and Peru via greenhouse gases, etc., consequently hurting woodlands in Indonesia, Russia, Mexico and Papua New Guinea while Africa’s Sudan and Nigeria are being devastated. Only an abysmal six percent of Nigeria’s forests still exist.
Meanwhile, artic wildfires due to increasingly dry conditions are raging throughout the region, incinerating forests in Greenland, Siberia and parts of Alaska, as well as several U.S. western states. Such fires are releasing a record amount of CO2 or carbon dioxide into the air, further depleting the Earth’s upper atmosphere and adding to global warming that leads to more flooding and erratic weather patterns.
Closer to home, in 1949, Mary Gibson Henry’s prized “garden was threatened with destruction when the State of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Army Engineers decided to use Gladwyne,” according to Harrison, as a place to deposit sewage and silt from the nearby Schuylkill River.
Henry’s fierce appeal and organizing, that included letters from distinguished supporters, saved her estate and led to the establishment of what’s today the Henry Foundation for Botanical Research … on 50 acres of gardens and plants – many of them rare – where visitors can relish the work of a woman dedicated to saving some of the Earth’s most important and delicate resources.
Don ‘Ogbewii’ Scott can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com. More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-
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PUBLISHED: September 23, 2019 at 7:43 a.m. | UPDATED: September 23, 2021 at 9:17 a.m.
A Place in History: Tracing roots from Philadelphia to Africa
By Don ‘Ogbewii’ Scott
I exchanged notes with an African “DNA cousin” living in America via Ancestry.com’s message center several weeks ago confirming that many of her ancestors hailed from Nimba County in Africa’s Liberia after the genealogy titan processed our saliva by way of home-delivered kits.
And that’s so exciting to me because a prior DNA evaluation via AfricanAncestry.com of my mother’s paternal line with roots to America’s Gullah-Geechee people — descendants of West African slaves living in coastal South Carolina and Georgia who retain various Africanisms via music, art and cuisine — revealed some of them were the Kpelle people of Liberia.
The Kpelle, in fact, do have a presence in Nimba County which seems to indicate that my co-descendants live there today as my “DNA cousin” confirmed in her note.
Such news is stellar for African Americans because it narrows down the possibility that we’ve found co-descendants and ancestors that relatives were separated from during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It can even allow us to possibly identify the very village from which an ancestor was born, thereby reversing some of the traumatic impacts of the so-called Middle Passage.
Most historians and social-psychologists agree that out of all the horrific harm that came from American slavery, the family separations have had the most detrimental consequences.
As the largest ethnic group in Liberia (founded 1822 by ex-slaves from the United States), Kpelle people via DNA analysis also include the likes of the media tycoon Oprah Winfrey.
And it also includes my mom’s late father, Bill or William Mitchell, who after migrating with his family during the early 1900s from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, settled in nearby Abington Township’s Crestmont area for a spell before finding work at the Philadelphia waterfront as a longshoreman, a job he held in South Carolina’s Charleston and Savannah, Ga.
Meanwhile, follow-up messages from my “DNA cousin” and family-tree evaluations revealed the surnames of her various ancestral lineages, including Gbor and Massaquoi, extending back to a few generations.
In fact, further research indicates remarkably that there is a Gbor District — one of 17 in Nimba County — likely providing even more evidence of my Kpelle origins in Liberia.
So now I’ve been on a mission to learn all that I can about Kpelle culture, even finding music on the Web of women from a rice planting co-operative in a place called Gborola that can be purchased online via Smithsonian Folkways Recordings or listened to via Youtube.
It was so gratifying to listen to the rhythmic, call-and-response songs in the Kpelle’s tonal language that my ancestors likely sang in Africa and on the rice plantations of South Carolina where they were enslaved at such places as Charleston’s Middleton Place, St. Helena, Hilton Head, Callawassie Island and the Edwards’ family estate on Spring Island in Beaufort County.
Notably, my progenitors and other Africans were likely snatched from Africa due to their rice-growing and metal-making skills, largely building the foundation of the most powerful nation known to humankind, America.
“Dry swidden rice is the Kpelle staple and the focus of Kpelle life,” says UCLA’s sscnet.ucla.edu website. “The Kpelle conceptualize the word ‘work’ to mean ‘rice cultivation,'” something that makes me smile since grandpa Bill Mitchell was said to have rice with nearly every meal even if there were other starches on the plate such as potatoes!
“The Kpelle also grow a variety of other foodstuffs, including yams, potatoes, plantains, greens, peanuts, eggplants, okra,” and even consume fish, something that my mom often fed us four boys while growing up in Philly’s Nicetown, West Oak Lane and East Mount Airy.
To this very day, as a special treat, I’ll purchase a few pounds of Porgies from the store, and fry them up with one primary intention — to devour them with no mercy.
Further, although my maternal family practices Christianity and Islam (to a smaller degree), “some 10 to 20 percent of the Kpelle are nominal Christians (usually Lutheran) in those areas where missionaries are very active, and whereas a handful embrace Islam, the vast majority hold traditional animistic beliefs,” says the UCLA article. “Witchcraft and sorcery figure prominently in the belief system,” as well as religious-based secret societies, paralleling the beliefs of some of my Gullah-Geechee ancestors who eventually became members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church with roots to Philadelphia.
Although I still have much more to learn and confirm about my Kpelle ancestry, I found it quite irresistible to search for the surname of my Kpelle compatriot, Oprah Winfrey, in the family trees of my DNA matches via Ancestry.com’s computerized filtering system.
So, Oprah, I have very exciting news for you! I received hits indicating four of my DNA cousins have your surname in their family trees.
I wonder if I can finally retire and take a worldwide trip, including to Liberia, that I’ve been dreaming about?
Don ‘Ogbewii’ Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com. More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:46 a.m.
A Place in History: Black Pennsylvanians who joined the 54th Volunteer infantry warriors of the Civil War
Among the [650] courageous blacks from Pennsylvania — some from Montgomery County — who joined the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer infantry during the Civil War (1861-1865) starting in Spring 1863 and immortalized in the 1989 film “Glory” was Norristown’s Albanus S. Fisher, a sergeant in Co. I who survived the regiment’s July 18, 1863 storming of the Confederates’ Fort Wagner on Morris Island, S.C.
There was also West Chester’s Solomon Hazzard, a farmer who was wounded as a private in Co. B of the 54th, eventually moving to Norristown following the war and living quite a colorful life, according to Judith Meier’s 1994 article in The Bulletin of the Historical Society of Montgomery County, “Citizen Soldiers of Color: Biographical Sketches of Montgomery County’s Black Soldiers in the Civil War.”
Both men, among many others memorialized at Pennsylvania monuments or cemeteries, are buried at the Treemount Cemetery in Norristown. Others rest at the likes of the Philadelphia National Cemetery in nearby northwest Philly.
I’m in awe about the courage and sacrifices of such warriors, many of them ex-slaves who benefited little as they preserved our Union, despite ongoing racism that’s quite notable as our nation today recognizes American slavery arguably beginning 400 years ago with blacks’ 1619 arrival in Jamestown, Va.
More than 650 black Pennsylvanians joined the Mass. 54th Volunteer Infantry by trekking to Massachusetts because – echoing President Abraham Lincoln’s initial rationale – our state’s officials refused to recruit them fearing white protests despite several prior attempts to enlist African Americans by such Philadelphia black leaders as Octavius Valentine Catto.
So, blacks such as the Rev. Samuel Harrison, 45, a Philadelphia ex-slave born 1818 and recruited in October 1863 as the 54th’s first chaplain, enlisted at Fort Meigs in Readville, Massachusetts (outside of Boston) after fellow blacks were captured and enslaved as Rebel forces threatening Harrisburg, Philly and even Washington, D.C., invaded central Pennsylvania during 1863’s summer, igniting the battle of Gettysburg from July 1 to 3.
Meanwhile, white officers were recruited and trained locally in late Spring of 1863 via President Lincoln’s new Bureau of United States Colored Troops (USCT), eventually swelling to about 180,000 black soldiers and 175 federal regiments.
The largest contingent of those warriors trained outside of Philadelphia at Camp William Penn in what’s today Cheltenham Township consisting of 11 federal regiments and about 10,500 soldiers after the state-sponsored 54th Massachusetts had already marched off to war with the likes of the famed black abolitionist Frederick Douglass serving as a primary recruiter and whose sons Charles and Lewis joined the 54th.
Douglass likely addressed the black troops at Camp Penn when the 54th charged Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863….
Other Pennsylvania volunteers who joined the 54th at least several months before Chaplain Harrison included farmer George Price, a Montrose, Pa. native in Company C, but was killed at Fort Wagner. His hometown compatriot, Charles A. Smith, would survive.
Solomon E. Anderson, a married farmer from West Chester, Pa., was captured at Fort Wagner and imprisoned at the notorious Confederate prison, Andersonville, where he died in horrendous conditions.
Harrison’s sojourn to serve such warriors started from his birth as a slave in 1818 to parents enslaved by the Savannah, Georgia-based Bolton family, according to his memoirs and other sources.
After the Boltons liberated Harrison’s family and other slaves about 1820, Samuel lived in New York City with his mother (still employed by the Boltons) and Philadelphia where he resided as a shoe-making apprentice with an uncle until he reached manhood.
When his mother relocated back to Philly, Harrison’s hunger for the gospel and education soared.
Despite financial hardships that required him to drop out of what’s today Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, Harrison returned to Philadelphia where he married Ellen Rhodes, eventually having 13 children over 20 years.
By 1850, as Congress’ notorious Fugitive Slave Act took effect, Harrison and his family moved to Pittsfield, Mass., where he continued shoe making and became an ordained preacher of the Second Congregational Church of Pittsfield.
Harrison was recruited by Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew in July 1863 just after the 54th gallantly, but unsuccessfully, tried to take the Confederates’ Fort Wagner where many of its black soldiers and white commander Robert Gould Shaw were killed and buried in a mass grave. Frederick Douglass’s son, Lewis, was severely wounded, but survived.
The ferociousness of the fighting was evident via the gallantry of the 54th’s William Carney, the first African American to earn the Medal of Honor.
Bedford County, Pa.-native William Tecumseh Barks (1840-1906) was among the Mass. 54th Pennsylvanians who fought at Fort Wagner, enlisting in Co. D. on March 21, 1863, along with Philadelphia-native Col. Norwood Penrose Hallowell (second-in-command).
Hallowell survived serious injuries at Fort Wagner that required him to be honorably discharged on Nov. 2, 1863.
Barks was promoted to corporal and mustered out of service in Pittsburgh, Pa. on August 20, 1865, becoming a respected Pittsburgh police officer before dying on Dec. 26, 1906 and was buried in Allegheny Cemetery.
In South Carolina, Harrison successfully worked to improve former slaves’ conditions and garner equal pay for black warriors.
Harrison was discharged following a severe illness in March 1864, later writing black-empowerment articles and pastoring churches throughout New England before his death at age 82 on August 11, 1900 and burial in the Pittsfield Cemetery of Berkshire County, Mass.
That same year, Albanus Fisher of the 54th’s Co. I died at age 73 on Oct. 21 of complications from throat cancer in Norristown.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be contacted at dscott9703@gmail.com. More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: August 20, 2019 at 2:58 p.m.
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PUBLISHED: September 1, 2016 at 10:00 p.m. | UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:50 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Connecting with kinfolk where ancestors lived an incomparable experience
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
During an end-of-the-summer break and research trip over the weekend of Aug. 26 to my mother’s ancestral home in South Carolina’s coastal Low Country where I hoped to finally meet fellow descendants of my enslaved ancestors, a unique art exhibit in Charleston, S.C., featuring the main character, Porgy, in the early 1900s novel named for him and resulting theatrical production, “Porgy and Bess,” ignited some mighty fine memories.
You see, while growing up as a kid in Philly’s Mount Airy on Phil-Ellena Street and West Oak Lane’s Smedley Street during the 1960s and 1970s, there were many Friday evenings when my mother, whose roots extend to the coastal areas of South Carolina, would fry up a delicious batch of fish called porgy or porgies.
In fact, it couldn’t have been more than several months ago when I spotted huge porgies at the Whole Foods in Abington. I simply could not resist purchasing some with one thing in mind – throwing the seasoned fish covered with corn meal in a hot skillet doused with simmering olive oil and giving them no mercy at the dinner table.
My mom’s dad, William, who was raised on the South Carolina Sea Islands of Spring Island and St. Helena, and her mother, Emma, likely passed us their love for porgies, derived from their Gullah or Geechee ancestors who retained much of their African customs concerning religion (the African Methodist Episcopal denomination), music, artwork (sweet-grass basketry) and especially meals of rice, okra and various seafood treats such as shrimp and grits, as well as fried porgies.
Still, it was long after my childhood days when I began to associate the name of the fish with an iconic character in literary and theatrical history, Porgy, of the original 1925 novel written by the acclaimed European-American writer Edwin DuBose Heyward (1885-1940) that was made into perhaps the country’s greatest theatrical production, George Gershwin’s 1934 opera “Porgy and Bess.”
And I thought of those porgy feasts while visiting the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., that weekend and catching with my wife, Billie, an outstanding exhibit, “Beyond Catfish Row: The Art of Porgy and Bess.”
The wide range of paintings that depict whimsical landscapes of black culture in sparkling-green marshlands to the gritty waterfront areas of Charleston where granddad worked as a longshoreman include works by realist painter George Biddle of Philly fame, modernist Henry Botkin, and one of my favorite Gullah-culture artists, Jonathan Green, who “served as the visual designer contributing to costume and set design for the 2016 Spoleto Festival USA production of Porgy and Bess,” says the museum’s literature about the event.
In fact, virtually every trip that we take to the Low Country includes purchasing a print of Green’s, whose heritage is also Gullah.
Yet, one of the most vivid paintings in the exhibit was one of Porgy, by artist Henry Botkin (1896-1983) “depicting the crippled beggar kneeling on the floor,” in a dark vest covering a white shirt and adorned in dark-greenish pants with his mouth slightly open and eyes full of mischief, yet also reflecting a foreboding sadness.
Botkin likely realized that black folks lived very hard lives in pro-racist societies that viewed them as less than human, despite Charleston native Heyward’s apparent empathy for African Americans and likely discomfort concerning his family’s past slaveholding.
Although born in Boston but trained in New York and Paris, Botkin greatly influenced his cousin, George Gershwin, according to a New York Times obituary of the artist who died at age 86. “In 1934, the cousins went together to Folly Island, S.C.,” a place that my wife and I visited over the weekend, “where Mr. Gershwin composed ‘Porgy and Bess’ and Mr. Botkin painted visual counterparts for the opera.”
The character, Porgy, that Botkins painted, in fact, was based on an authentic Gullah-Geechee man, Samuel Smalls, apparently “crippled” while “at a young age,” but who became “a fixture in the Charleston community” traveling “through town in a small cart pulled by a goat,” says a plaque next to the painting.
About the time my granddad William was birthed on Spring Island, “Samuel Smalls was born around 1889 on James Island,” another locale that we visited, “then a rural section of Charleston County,” says an excellent Gibbes Museum biography of the real-life man, “Samuel Smalls: The Man Who Inspired Porgy,” written by South Carolinian Damon L. Fordham, a Spartanburg native living in Mt. Pleasant near Sullivan’s Island where the enslaved ancestors of most modern African Americans were “processed.”
“He was the son of Hector and Elvira Smalls,” a surname that’s in m get y family line, but “his mother later married a man named John Gibbs, who told the Charleston News and Courier that Samuel had been born with ‘little images of feet,’ implying that he may have had a congenital condition.”
After his stepfather built him the cart that was pulled by a goat, Smalls apparently became very well known about Charleston, often working odd jobs, selling various items and food on the street, as well as becoming quite active with gambling and courting women who were sometimes quite sassy.
Sure enough, Heyward, an insurance salesman aspiring to become a writer, says he was motivated to write the original book based on Smalls’ life and those around him.
Remarkably, as I’ve delved into my genealogy research, I’ve found that my family lines extend to such surnames as Heyward, Smalls, Middleton, Mitchell, Jenkins and even Hamilton.
Dubose Heyward’s ancestor, Declaration of Independence signer Judge Thomas Heyward Jr., even owned a large plantation next to Spring Island where grandpa rode horses along marsh areas and likely fished for shrimp, crabs and porgies, not far from where his mother, Grace Mitchell’s father, Collins Mitchell, a Union warrior in the 21st United States Colored Troops regiment during the Civil War, is buried.
Excitingly, over the months I’ve also traded numerous emails with a distinguished archaeologist and historian in the area, Charles Philips, who has been leading an investigation and studies for his company, Brockington and Associates Inc., on the very Spring Island ground where my ancestors lived, worked and died while laboring for the Edwards’ family and others. A weekend conference with him in Charleston revealed preliminary data regarding my ancestry on the island, plantation lifestyles, architectural details concerning the housing of my enslaved ancestors, as well as led to discussions about the possibility of African burial rites.
And even though we as a family were blessed to visit Collins Mitchell’s graveside several years ago, it wasn’t until recently that the Lord gave us yet another magnificent blessing. My research revealed that modern descendants of Collins Mitchell attend a church not far from the island gravesite on the mainland in a community today known as Bluffton, the Campbell Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church (established by ex-slaves in 1874) and derived from the historic Mother Bethel AME Church in Philly that was founded during the late 1700s by Bishop Richard Allen, a former slave of Germantown’s Benjamin Chew.
And with all praises to the Almighty, I was beyond thrilled when entering the sanctuary this past Sunday, introducing myself to the congregation during the acknowledgement of visitors and then following the service being surrounded by at least a dozen smiling faces – most of them my long-lost relatives and Collins Mitchell descendants.
I wouldn’t have traded a million porgy dinners for those moments when I was able to worship and connect with my kinfolk on the same land where generations of my ancestors prayed for glorious deliverance.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com. Information about his local history books and genealogy articles can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 9:36 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Holiday season bring reminders of
lessons from dad
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
It’s hard to believe that it has been eight years since my Wyncote-resident father, Dr. Henry Scott, passed away at Abington Memorial Hospital on Thanksgiving Day in 2008 of complications from a stroke at age 80 after being treated there for several arduous weeks.
So the holiday season through Christmas and Kwanza sometimes evokes very deep feelings, ranging from sadness to wondering if he is actually OK. And that’s despite my firm belief that dad must be in a place where he’s able to stretch his immense intellectual, spiritual, loving, competitive and even humorous capacities.
And, perhaps, one of the hardest things for me about his demise has been accepting that as a medical doctor whom had treated many thousands of patients over a few decades as a general practitioner at his thriving North Philly practice that he, the great Dr. Scott, ironically found himself at the receiving end of needles, feeding tubes, breathing mechanisms and, yes, our family’s anguished prayers.
Although, ultimately, the Almighty whisked my father away – at least physically – I can still hear him spiritually playing his beloved King alto saxophone that he acquired as a teenager and began to master while a student at Gratz High School in Nicetown and Chester County’s Lincoln University.
Pap, a slender, coffee-complexioned man with regal African features and a gregarious grin, would blow the hell out of such classics as Billie Holiday’s “The Very Thought of You” to jazzing up the blessings in one of his Christmas favorites, “Silent Night.”
And although he never made it to the big time as a musician, instead playing small gigs as a young man, there was a sure soulfulness about dad’s artistry – who by the way was also a patented inventor, all-around handyman and sublime tennis player.
Perhaps his expressiveness came from being raised in a home where his own father – a Halifax, Va., native whose ancestors were enslaved there near the North Carolina border – was a very tough dude, reputed to know how to make a quick buck, but was dead by age 39 after serving time in jail.
At a very young age, dad would have to shine shoes near what is today Broad Street and Erie Avenue, not far from his Nicetown residence, and give much of his cash to his mother, a former sharecropper from Abbeville, S.C., trying to raise three children as a sparsely paid cafeteria worker at a nearby city hospital.
Yet, it was his mother’s inspiration, after being mistreated by a staff physician one day, that convinced my dad to study medicine, starting as a chemistry major at Lincoln, then later matriculating to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where we lived as a family during the early 1960s until he graduated and relocated back to Philly near his beloved mother.
You see, dad, born at the dawn of the Great Depression of the early 1930s, realized early the importance of education for African Americans, so would often reminisce about when he stepped foot on Lincoln’s campus during the late 1940s. That’s where the likes of the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, attended, as well as the acclaimed writer, Langston Hughes, and the founding-president of Africa’s Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, walked the historic campus.
Really, up to that point, dad hadn’t known that there was a place where black folks actually attended college en masse, but thanks to a neighborhood man who had attended Lincoln and pointed him in the right direction, dad matriculated there, joined the Army and worked as an award-winning chemist at Valley Forge Military Hospital before deciding that his best route for financial security was to become a private-practice doctor.
And when I think about it, those entrepreneurial seeds were germinated by his mother, or my grandmother, who after being fired from the hospital for speaking her mind, obtained a GED, went to beautician school and opened up a hair salon, as well as invested in real estate while operating a couple of other retail businesses.
Instead of slavery’s legacy hampering her, realizing that Abbeville, S.C., was where the pro-slavery Confederacy was born, it seemed to actually inspire granny, igniting a chain reaction in my father who passed on with my loving mom the success flame to their four sons, all of us college graduates with at least master’s degrees.
Today, when I start to get a bit down about dad, I think about him joking before his death concerning how he certainly did not want to be cremated because he wouldn’t want to “burn twice” if he’d end up in a scorching place that was not so heavenly.
And there was the time that father wept as he told the story of one of his patients returning to him a year later, who owed him money that dad thought he’d never see, but she arrived that day and counted out each and every penny she had saved in a large jar once oozing with jelly.
Or I reminisce about the time that he was about to miss going to his doctor’s office for the first time several decades ago because of a horrendous snow storm, so the two of us, not being able to travel in his car from our Mount Airy residence, waited endlessly for a bus that never arrived.
I can still feel his disappointment at not being able to get to work that day. And that is a lesson in itself. He taught me a sense of duty, even in the face of great adversity.
And you know what? I think about such things, still, whenever I hear some saxophone player blasting out one of those old-fashioned tunes that come roaring back to me from some place in the past – or, perhaps, directly from heaven.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com. More information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
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PUBLISHED: April 12, 2012 at 10:00 p.m. | UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 1:22 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Ship had ‘Titanic’ impact on culture
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
Although the tragic sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912, involved many wealthy European-American aristocrats such as the Elkins and Widener families of Cheltenham, the event had a great cultural and folk-art impact on many segments of U.S. society, including black Americans.
In fact, contrary to popular belief that there were no people of African descent on the Titanic, an interracial family led by a black man, Joseph Laroche, with ancestral roots to Haiti’s great revolutionary leader, Jean-Jacques Desalines, was onboard and returning to his native land.
Laroche, from Haiti’s ruling class, died on the Titanic, leaving behind his French-born wife Juliette and children after they boarded in Cherbourg, France and endured some degree of discrimination.
Ironically, George Widener and his wife Eleanor Elkins Widener (whose fathers Peter A.B. Widener and William L. Elkins were legendary Gilded-Age business partners living in opulent Cheltenham mansions), boarded in Cherbourg too with their book-collecting son, Harry. Eleanor was the only family member to survive the trip that they primarily took to purchase gifts for their daughter’s wedding.
Returning to Cheltenham devastated after losing her husband and son, Eleanor sought and received solace at the St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Elkins Park where memorial services were held for her kin.
The church at Ashbourne and Old York roads is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the disaster on Saturday, April 14, at 7:30 p.m., with popular music of those harrowing times being performed by Kate Mallon-Day, mezzo-soprano; baritone Paul DeWitt Reid (reverend); pianist and organist David Antony Lofton, as well as Irene Pokrovsky, accompanist. Exquisite Tiffany windows at the church, endowed by the Widener family, memorialize the tragedy and will accentuate the program’s ambiance.
However, just after the 1912 debacle, in the African-American community, “Legends sprang up concerning the celebrated African-American boxing champion Jack Johnson: the story went that Johnson had not been allowed to board the segregated ocean liner and thus his life was spared,” according to the online site, Louisiana Voices at www.louisianavoices, that explores various oral traditions. Johnson, a bodacious ebony-skinned man was very controversial for speaking out against racism and even flaunting romantic relationships with white women during the early 1900s, the era of Jim-Crow discrimination.
And that’s when various black folk-art poems and even song lyrics began to emerge about the Titanic, perhaps most notably sung by Huddie Ledbetter, popularly known as Leadbelly.
Born Jan. 15, 1888, on the Jeter plantation near Shreveport, La., Leadbelly seemed even tougher than the black heavyweight champion, Johnson. He was sent to prison for various violent crimes, including for killing a cousin and knifing a prominent white citizen.
Yet, Leadbelly was a very skilled musician, mastering the 12-string guitar, among other instruments, and performing “The Titanic” in 1912 on Dallas street corners with the likes of the legendary blues singer and guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson, according to denverpost.com.
Such compositions, likely very offensive to the upper-class Wideners and Elkinses, poked fun at the so-called elite passengers of the Titanic: “Titanic was sinkin’ down … Had them lifeboats around … savin’ the women and children [and] lettin’ the men go down … Jack Johnson want to get on board, [but] Captain he says, ‘I ain’t haulin’ no coal!”
The lyrics concluded: “Black man oughta shout for joy, never lost a girl or either a boy. Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well.”
It’s likely that another popular black oration, “Shine and the Titanic,” developed from Leadbelly’s version, often recited in bars or clubs, with the black ship worker “Shine” admonishing the captain as he escaped from what he described as a “stinkin,’ sinkin’ ship.” Some versions of the oration are extremely graphic, a precursor of what today is known as gangsta rap, according to some scholars.
Leadbelly (who died in 1949) became a noted musician, even touring with the great folk-art scholar, John A. Lomax, in a car that carried in its trunk a 315-pound acetate disc recorder that allowed them to record folk music from around the country, including many of Leadbelly’s songs. In 1934, the duo ended up in Philadelphia, giving a show and then presentation at Bryn Mawr College where the school’s president became very upset after Leadbelly passed a hat around to collect money.
He reportedly left with a very decent chunk of cash.
Don ‘Ogbewii’ Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@aol.com.
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PUBLISHED: March 10, 2022 at 11:47 a.m.
Black history highlights saviors of historic health outbreaks in Montgomery County
Black doctors sacrificed their own wellbeing to save lives in historic epidemics
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
Local Blacks and others have courageously sacrificed themselves during historic health crises ranging from the yellow-fever rampage of 1793 and the 1918 influenza outbreak to today’s global COVID-19 pandemic while combating racism.
Often risking their lives over the centuries have been pioneering Black theologians and physicians, Roman Catholic nuns and today’s Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium in the Philly metro area, including Montgomery County.
When the mosquito-spawning, yellow-fever outbreak in 1793 doomed thousands of folks hopelessly sick with hemorrhaging, yellowing jaundice and other horrid symptoms in Philadelphia that was then the nation’s capital, much of the so-called colonial elite took refuge outside the city.
They retreated to such areas as Abington, including President George Washington in Germantown with enslaved servants, while free Black ministers Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, joined by the noted Dr. Benjamin Rush, spearheaded efforts in the city to help the sick and dying.
“After some conversation, we found a freedom to go forth … in the midst of burning fiery furnace, sensible that it was our duty to do all the good we could to our suffering fellow mortals,” wrote Allen and Jones in their historic 1794 pamphlet, “A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793.”
Although Allen and Jones, who respectively founded the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, joined other blacks with nursing and burying the dead, they were tragically accused of theft and other crimes, motivating them to refute such charges in their trailblazing publication.
Meanwhile, the Philadelphia physician William Smith and his second wife, Letitia, in summer 1793 sought refuge at their Graeme Park estate in Horsham, formerly owned by relative Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson who was a close friend of Dr. Rush, criticized for using controversial “bleeding,” etc., to help yellow fever victims. As a writer and prominent member of the Graeme family that had been cared for by enslaved blacks at the property, Fergusson stayed with the couple during the ravaging epidemic.
Allen, Jones and other African-Americans continued to aid infected folks, regardless of skin color, “saving the lives of some hundreds of our suffering fellow mortals.”
During the 1918 influenza global outbreak, the Philadelphia black physician Dr. Nathan Francis Mossell noted that 75 beds quickly filled at the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital that he founded to counter segregation in 1895 and where my late father, Dr. Henry Scott, interned during the early 1960s.
As the need for more beds increased, Mossell set up “emergency” hospital quarters at Philly’s St. Peter Claver School, an African-American parochial institution.
Healthcare providers visited the residences of people dying from influenza, including Catholic nuns or “Sisters” from the St. Peter Claver parish “where they succeeded in teaching a little colored girl of fourteen, who was deaf, enough of the truth of Faith to have her baptized. The next morning they found that she had died,” notes the publication, “Work of the Sisters During the Epidemic of Influenza, October, 1918,” published by the American Catholic Historical Society in 1919.
“In [Philly’s] Germantown the Sisters worked among the colored people, the Italians, the others of God’s poor,” notes the society. “In one poor home they found a mother and five children (colored) huddled together in two rooms….,” managing to save all from agonizing deaths.
Nuns from the Jenkintown-Immaculate Conception parish also helped, often risking their lives too. “The Sisters here helped in the Abington Hospital” and “they baptized a colored man, who died shortly after,” the society reported, as well as “several colored women” before their deaths.
About 23 of 2,000 nuns lost their lives in the Philadelphia area while treating those ill with influenza in 1918-1919.
As of October 2021, an estimated 115,000 to 180,000 healthcare workers perished from COVID-19 globally, according to an estimate of the World Health Organization.
Physicians and healthcare workers continue to risk themselves to save others, including those fighting to overcome systemic racism via the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium (BDCC) with a base in Jenkintown.
Founded by the award-winning Black surgeon, Dr. Ala Stanford, the group’s website says, “Collectively, as we are still grappling with the pandemic, our focus has expanded to include addressing other health disparities and challenges that plague communities of color.”
That “focus” certainly would impress two early-American theologians and healthcare workers through the ages dedicated to saving precious lives and souls.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com. Information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:35 a.m.
Story of Cremona Morrey Fry links Women’s History to Black History
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
Honoring the legacy of an 18th-century black woman, Cremona Morrey Fry, who was a former slave on the Cheltenham estate of Philadelphia’s first mayor, Humphrey Morrey (appointed in 1691), epitomizes the significance of Women’s History Month in March as an early spring seems to be enveloping us.
Remarkably, Morrey’s son Richard would have five interracial children with Cremona during the 1730s and 1740s, leading to the birth of one of the first black towns in America and iconic historical figures such as the Bustills and Paul Robeson, the great African American scholar, actor, athlete and activist, say several sources.
It’s an enthralling story that I’ve covered for years and recently spoke about to City of Philadelphia Law Department attorneys and legal workers alongside Karen Smyles, the writer-producer of an Emmy-nominated WHYY (PBS) television program, “The Montiers: An American Story,” originally shown in 2018, then re-broadcast several times over the past couple of years, including 2020.
The Morrey estate was located in what’s today Cheltenham Township where Cremona had been initially enslaved during the early 1700s, but later liberated, a status that included her daughter, also named Cremona (destined to marry John Montier), and other children.
You see, the elder Cremona, likely born about 1710, was ultimately given 200 acres of land by Richard in the vicinity of Arcadia University in Glenside, not far from where Philly’s Assistant City Solicitor Raina I. Yancey was raised.
After viewing the approximately 30-minute documentary on television, Yancey invited me and Smyles to speak during a Wed., Feb. 26 Black History Month re-airing of the program at her law department offices, 1515 Arch St., in Philadelphia.
“I actually grew up in Glenside on Montier land and feel honored to have grown up on land that belonged to an African-American woman several hundreds of years ago,” Yancey said.
The production, narrated by Smyles, features Montier descendants and commentators, including me, as well as local historians Thomas Wieckowski, David Rowland, Mary Washington and others from the Cheltenham Township Historical Commission, Old York Road Historical Society and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Smyles, who’s also a Cheltenham resident like yours truly and the winner of four prior Mid-Atlantic Emmys, says she first learned about the story in a 2009 press statement and columns that I had written based on my discovery of articles authored earlier by scholar-researcher Reginald Pitts for the Old York Road Historical Society Bulletin.
A modern descendant of the historic family, William Pickens, III of Sag Harbor, NY, says he grew up in New York learning about the rich history of his Philadelphia-area ancestors and became enthralled about their fascinating story as he matured.
A graduate of the University of Vermont and former corporate executive, Pickens’ research has been wide-ranging, making him an ideal and major contributor to the WHYY telecast.
Pickens describes the relationship between Richard and Cremona Sr. as an intense interracial love (despite social conventions and laws of the period discouraging and even outlawing such unions).
Yet, there’s evidence that a Richard Morrey in Abington Monthly Meeting minutes had been married to a woman named Ann, probably of British heritage.
Ann, depending on the source, either passed away or severed ties with Richard and moved to England, possibly with the couple’s son, before or by Oct. 1751 when “Ann Morrey, late wife of Richard Morrey, made a will with consent of her said husband ….”
Regardless, Pickens believes that proof of the loving marital relationship between Cremona and Richard, in addition to their five children, is that Cremona openly shared his surname of Morrey.
He also passed to her 198 acres of land on which Cremona’s daughter, Cremona Jr., would eventually build a home (that still stands today along Limekiln Pike in Glenside) during America’s Revolutionary War period with her husband, John Montier, likely a black man from one of the French-speaking Caribbean islands, perhaps Haiti.
Pickens says he is descended maternally from Cremona Jr. and her son, Solomon, who became a shoemaker, as well as one of Solomon’s children, Hiram.
Indeed, Hiram in recent years was found as the subject of one of two exceedingly rare 1841 portraits, including his wife Elizabeth, that were found under the bed of one of Pickens’ ancestors and subsequently restored and displayed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The portraits by artist Franklin R. Street are of great interest to art historians because they show middle-class, free African Americans, clad in fine attire and jewelry, thriving in the United States during a period when slavery was still prevalent in many parts of the country.
On that note, as I discussed during the Feb. 26 program, certain dynamics between Richard Morrey and Cremona, Sr., must also be considered.
For instance, to what degree did Cremona Morrey Fry feel coerced in her relationship with Richard Morrey as a black woman who had been his slave and then employee? Did Cremona feel empowered enough to rebuff Richard’s romantic overtures? And if she had rejected him, what would have been her fate?
I believe that there had to be some degree of interpersonal and societal pressure, especially since Richard and Cremona could have been severely punished legally and socially at certain points because of their interracial relationship.
Did Richard’s huge stature in the community protect both from such punishment?
Further, why is it not long before Richard died during the mid-1750s (depending on the source), the relationship between Cremona and Richard may have become distant or even severed?
There’s even local documentation that a man named “Rich. Morrey” married another woman, Sarah Allen, in 1746.
Meanwhile, a few years after Richard’s death, Cremona Sr., married a free African American named John Fry, also known as “African John Fry,” before she died about 1770.
Perhaps, more details or answers to such questions will become much more obvious as time passes, as well as when we learn the whereabouts of most of the cemetery remains of 75 Montier family members and others who lived near the Montier homestead in a small black settlement, Guineatown, along and near the 200 block of Limekiln Pike.
The remains were supposedly removed during a 1963 road-widening project, but documentation has been scarce to nonexistent, despite the discovery of a few family members in area cemeteries not confirmed so far to be originally buried in Guineatown.
Notably, Smyles, an African American, says, “It is a story that continues to fascinate….
“It would be my dream to be able to produce a major documentary on the Montier family,” Smyles said as she continues to seek funding, harnessing the optimism that characterizes an early Spring.
“This is a story that is important in so many ways. It not only shows the presence and importance of an early African American family here in Philadelphia, but reminds young people and everyone, that we were doing much more than believed.”
Don ‘Ogbewii’ Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com. More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com. The WHYY program about the Montiers can be accessed at https://whyy.org/montiers-american-story/.
Originally Published: March 10, 2020 at 10:16 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:36 a.m
A Place in History: Harriet Tubman was a true heroine
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
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A unique romantic relationship in the Underground Railroad icon Harriet Tubman’s life was her second marriage to an African-American soldier, Nelson Davis, said to be about half her age and whose regiment hailed from a nearby Civil War training camp.
The union of Tubman and Davis, after the brutal and tragic death of her first husband, John Tubman on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, reveals how true “love knows no bounds” and that survival in a harsh world often requires the greatest toughness, even as the light of life dims.
You see, Davis likely escaped slavery in Elizabeth City, NC, “during or before 1861” as the Civil War erupted, writes the award-winning author Kate Larson in her excellent 2004 biography about Tubman, “Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero.”
And as a young man he traveled north to Oneida County, New York, living there for a couple of years before moving to Pennsylvania and “our neck of the woods” in 1863 following the July 1-3 Battle of Gettysburg spurred by the Confederate invasion of the Keystone state that motivated thousands of black men to join Union forces following President Abraham Lincoln’s Jan. 1, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.
Davis joined on Sept. 10, 1863 the 8th United States Colored Troops (USCT) regiment that originated and trained at Camp William Penn where the largest contingent of 10,500 men in 11 regiments of the war’s approximately 200,000 black soldiers joined Union forces just northwest of Philly in Chelten Hills, today Cheltenham Township.
Almost 15 years earlier, however, Tubman’s first husband and free African American, John Tubman, decided not to escape with her to Philadelphia in 1849 after five years of marriage.
When she returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to get him, as the recent film Harriet depicts, he had hooked up with another woman — then tragically was shot and killed after the war on Sept. 30, 1867 during a conflict with a white man, Robert Vincent, Larson revealed.
Meanwhile, by the time Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Rebel forces surrendered on April 9, 1865, Harriet Tubman was a legendary figure because of her incredible exploits of leading runaway slaves North and Union troops into combat, as well as serving as a nurse and intelligence operative.
A few days before Lee’s surrender, on April 6, 1865 when Tubman entered the grounds of Camp William Penn to speak to the last of 11 regiments, the 24th USCT, she was well-known in these parts since she had ushered runaway slaves to nearby Underground Railroad safehouses, including William’s Still home and the white Quaker Lucretia Mott’s “Roadside” estate that stood on Old York Rd. next to Camp Penn.
Although Tubman moved to Auburn, New York and opened a rooming house where she cared for her parents and others, her financial situation was often precarious because her Army pension had not been approved.
“One of these boarders was a young Civil War veteran, Nelson Davis,” wrote Larson.
“Davis, a member of Company G, Eighth USCT that fought so valiantly at the [February 20, 1864] Battle of Olustee, Florida, had been honorably discharged on November 10, 1865, at Brownsville, Texas […],” Larson continued, after the regiment suffered very heavy losses.
“Nelson Charles, as he was known then, was only twenty-one years old when he was discharged from the army. He followed a fellow soldier, Albert Thompson, from Company G to Auburn, where he found a room at Tubman’s home and a job nearby, probably at a local brickyard abutting Harriet’s property.”
Harriet’s relationship with Davis developed over the next couple of years and the couple married on March 18, 1869 in Auburn, making Tubman, at least 40 years old or so, a sure-fire “cougar” well before the term became popular.
Sadly, Davis began to suffer badly from tuberculosis, likely contracted during the war, after being relatively active in the community and working with his wife, Harriet, in their garden and tending to small livestock.
Later, they adopted a child, Gertie, but struggled as time passed to make ends meet while primarily living on Nelson’s meager labor earnings and pension that was a long time in coming likely due to racism, but also because of confusion about his original Charles surname that he along the way changed to Davis.
And incredibly, despite Tubman-Davis’ outstanding military service during the war, that included leading troops on the June 2, 1863 Combahee raid in South Carolina and liberating up to 750 enslaved blacks, she had a very difficult time receiving her own pension.
Yet before her death in 1913 at about age 90, the federal government after 34 years finally did grant Tubman-Davis a $20 monthly pension based on her late husband’s service and partially due to her Civil War nursing duties, depending on the source.
Still, before passing away, Tubman-Davis had to deal with sporadic poverty, despite earning money from two books about her life and was severely beaten by a couple of swindlers in a peculiar money-for-gold scheme, all the while suffering from epileptic fits from an injury she received while a slave that required brain surgery for which she “refused anesthesia,” according to Harriett-tubman.org and other sources.
The great woman’s tombstone under a massive cedar tree near her beloved husband’s resting spot at the Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, NY, in part reads “To The Memory of Harriet Tubman Davis – Heroine of the Underground Railroad,” a true testament of an unwavering love with roots to seeking freedom in our own backyards.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com. More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: February 24, 2020 at 12:09 p.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:40 a.m.
A Place in History: Advertisements show detail of slaves fleeing for freedom
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
Although it’s imperative during February’s Black History Month to pay tribute to African American icons such as former slaves Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass with remarkable local connections, too often the enslaved blacks toiling in the so-called shadows go unrecognized like those whom Benjamin Franklin profited from by publishing runaway slave ads and announcements in his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette.
Purchased by Franklin in 1729, The Pennsylvania Gazette featured such heinous advertisements through 1800 when it ceased publication in its earlier format, despite that so-called “Founding Father” printing in 1737 the renowned book of an anti-slavery crusader, Benjamin Lay, a revolutionary Quaker who Franklin visited at his cave abode near Jenkintown’s Abington Friends Meeting.
“RUN away, on the 21st Instant, from Robert Wakely, of this City [Philadelphia], a Negro Woman, named Anne about 18 or 20 Years of Age, is short and well set, and had on a blue Jacket and Petticoat … but no Shoes or Stockings,” said a Gazette advertisement in the Oct. 26, 1758 edition, revealing how desperate “Anne” wanted to escape bondage and debunking asinine claims that such blacks “never had it so good.”
Yet, if there is anything positive that’s resulted from such advertisements is that they provide valuable descriptions for modern researchers, including blacks pursuing their genealogies or family histories, as well as forever document and identify peddlers of human beings that even included married couples seeking “the Promised Land.”
“Also run away, at the same Time, a Negroe Man, named Frank, belonging to Alexander Collay, of Whitemarsh, about 30 or 35 years of Age, is a slender middle sized Fellow, and had on a new Wool Hat, Bearskin light coloured Coat, a Snuff coloured Jacket, without Sleeves, a striped Shirt, Leather Breeches, blue Stockings and good Shoes,” notes the Gazette’s Oct. 26, 1758 edition that I read via Accessible Archives.com.
“They are man and wife, and supposed to be gone together,” further noting that the so-called owners offered rewards for their capture between “fifty” and “Forty Shillings.”
Often, however, such “runaway” African Americans were caught and imprisoned until they were re-enslaved:
“This day was committed to this jail,” observed the Feb. 19, 1756 edition of The Pennsylvania Gazette, “one James Sterd, a Negro man, on suspicion of being a runaway; he says that he worked with one John Palmer, a Bricklayer, in Philadelphia, about a year ago, and some time before that he worked in Chester with Joseph Parker; this is to desire any one that has any claim to the said Negro, to come or send for him in four weeks after the date of this advertisement, otherwise he will be sold for his prison fees, by JOHN WEAVER, Goaler [or jailer].”
Just several years before his death in 1790, Franklin’s Gazette ran yet another such advertisement in the June 21, 1786 edition:
“RAN away from the subscriber, in Lower Merion township, Montgomery county, state of Pennsylvania, on the 15th of this instant, a NEGRO MAN, named Kent, well made likely young fellow, about 19 years of age, 5 feet 9 or 10 inches high, he is rather impudent, born in North Carolina …,” the ad says, indicating that “Kent” likely and rightfully rebuffed his enslavers.
“Whoever secures the said negro in any goal [or jail], so that the subscriber may have him again, shall have the above reward [“EIGHT DOLLARS”] and reasonable charges,” ending with a final warning of the “subscriber,” “JOHN JONES”:
“All masters of vessels, and others are forbid to carry him off at their peril.”
Franklin during his lifetime personally enslaved African Americans “George,” “Peter,” “Jemima,” “Othello,” “John,” and “King,” but also led an anti-slavery abolitionist organization (likely influenced by Benjamin Lay), illuminating the conflicting feelings and actions of such colonists — likely a reflection of the ambivalence that many modern folks maintain about slavery and ethnicity.
In fact, even a year after Franklin’s death, The Pennsylvania Gazette on May 16, 1791 ran the following advertisement just months before the U.S. Bill of Rights was ratified on Dec. 15, 1791:
“Was taken up, on suspicion of being a runaway, and committed to my custody, in Norristown gaol, on the 11th instant, a Negro man, who calls himself SAM, says he is the property of Ralph Bond, of Hartford county, Maryland, and that he left his master about Christmas last; he also says his former master’s name was Elijah Bozley, of Maryland,” the ad said.
“He is a thick square made fellow, about five feet seven or eight inches high, appears to be about 25 or 26 years of age, and is somewhat marked with the small pox.
“The owner is desired to come, prove his property, pay charges, and take him away, within five weeks from the date hereof,” before ending with what selling human flesh was all about: making cold-blooded profits, “otherwise he will be sold, for the charges and cost of imprisonment, by me WILLIAM STROUD, Gaoler.”
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: February 10, 2020 at 3:02 p.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:42 a.m.
A Place in History: Voices of women on empowerment
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
When the great women’s rights’ advocate, Lucretia Mott, who also fought for abolishing slavery while based at her eventual “Roadside” estate in what today is Cheltenham Township, attended a Philadelphia conference in 1849 at the Assembly Buildings, she delivered a remarkable speech, “Discourse on Women,” surely impacting women’s rights through to today’s Me-Too Movement.
“There is nothing of greater importance to the well-being of society at large — of man as well as woman — than the true and proper position of woman,” implored Mott, born in Nantucket, Mass. January 3, 1793, and a cousin of the Pennsylvania statesman, Benjamin Franklin, via her mother’s Folger kinfolk.
“A new generation of women is now upon the stage,” continued Mott, a Quaker minister standing about 5 feet tall, but with a presence and voice that demanded supreme reverence, “improving the increased opportunities furnished for the acquirement of knowledge.”
For sure, Mott had the admiration of some of the greatest women’s rights’ warriors in American history, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth, all known to have visited Mott when she lived during the Civil War (1861-1865) at her “Roadside” estate that was located adjacent to Camp Willian Penn, the first and largest federal facility to train almost 11,000 black soldiers during the conflict on acreage owned by her son-in-law, Edward M. Davis, a prominent member of the Union League of Philadelphia.
“The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman,” Stanton said in the “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” at Seneca Falls, NY, in 1848, “having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” pointing out then women’s inability to vote, requirement to obey laws in which “she had no voice,” and “made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.”
Stanton insisted that the fight to achieve parity with men was not simply a dream, but would, and must, become reality.
“In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule,” she told the audience. “But we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and National legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf.”
When threatened with imprisonment, due to her activism, if she did not pay a $10,000 fine, women’s rights’ advocate, Susan B. Anthony, told Judge Ward Hunt in 1873 to essentially kiss her derriere.
“May it please your honor I will never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty,” Anthony responded, adding that she would “educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, which tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while denying them the right of representation in the government….”
Then Anthony ended her message with these powerful words: “And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim, ‘Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.'”
With women running for the presidency of the United States and as they demand equal rights, equivalent employment compensation, the banishment of sexual harassment and even to command the highest office in the land, it’s vital to absorb the words of Sojourner Truth, an ex-slave of African ancestry and woman close to Lucretia Mott who also demanded women’s empowerment in her speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?”
“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere,” Truth said in 1851 at the Women’s Rights Convention in the Old Stone Church of Akron, Ohio, likely also referring to her black skin.
“Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! Ain’t I a woman?”
Then Truth, whom had earlier changed her name from Isabella Baumfree following a spiritual awakening and becoming emancipated, exploded with, perhaps, her most important point, something that likely made Lucretia Mott grin with optimism:
“Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted,” the former slave said, “and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it and bear the [slaveholders’] lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?
“I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery,” despite winning a landmark case against a slaveholder trying to separate Truth from her five-year-old son Peter, “and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
I’m sure, the great Lucretia Mott, and many of the contemporary warriors of the Me-Too Movement, would answer that question with the utmost affirmation.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history column can be found at www.kumbayan-universal.com.
Originally Published: January 27, 2020 at 10:15 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:39 a.m.
A Place in History: When Dr. King preached at Montco church: ‘All, Here and Now’
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Sunday, Oct. 27, 1963, preached from the pulpit of the Salem Baptist Church, formerly of Jenkintown, just five years before his assassination on April 4, 1968, the civil rights’ icon bellowed three evocative words – “all,” “here,” and “now” – that resounded throughout the black church’s historic sanctuary and well beyond its walls.
Almost 30 years ago during the early 1990s, Salem’s foundational pastor, the late Rev. Dr. Robert Johnson Smith Sr. told me during an interview that he had been a classmate of King while they were undergraduates at the historically black college, Morehouse, in Atlanta, Ga., where King was born and raised.
So, at the height of the civil rights’ movement in 1963 Dr. Smith was compelled to invite King to preach at Salem that has since moved to Abington’s Roslyn community under the dynamic leadership of Pastor Marshall Mitchell.
King, born Jan. 15, 1929, had educational roots to the Philadelphia area, specifically the Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, where he received a 1951 master’s degree in divinity before matriculating to Boston University and earning in 1955 a doctorate in systematic theology.
Pastor Mitchell, in fact, replicated King’s 1963 service at Salem in August, 2013, paying tribute to the 1963 “March on Washington” where King delivered the iconic “I Have a Dream” speech to more than 250,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial and to King’s exceptional 1963 sermon at Salem that had been discovered on tape in the church’s inventory room, according to Alexis Clark’s Aug. 2013 article in The Root.com.
The great orator’s message of demanding immediate justice and freedom on American soil is sweeping, visionary and soul stirring, with one audio version of his “All, Here and Now” sermon even available on the Web via YouTube.com that’s introduced with support from the legendary movie director Otto Preminger.
King’s “timeless” words, delivered in a booming voice tinged with a soulful, southern resonance, speak for themselves:
“We don’t need to utter but three words to tell this nation what we’re talking about. They aren’t big words,” preached King, at just age 34. “You don’t need to have a great vocabulary to utter them. You don’t need to have a philosophical bent to grasp them. They are three little words.
“But we want to let the world know that these words describe what we mean and what we’re determined to do about racial injustice,” King roared.
“One is the word ‘All.’ We don’t want some of our rights. We don’t want a few token handouts here and there. We want ALL of our rights,” the preacher said as listeners responded with shouts of “Amen,” and “That’s right!”
“The other word is ‘here,'” King continued. “There are some people who say that we need to go back to Africa. And there are some of us who tell Negros in the south to leave the south. ‘You can’t be free so get out.’ But down in Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia, South Carolina, we are saying something else now.
“We want ALL of our rights. And we want all of our rights here in Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina,” the preacher demanded, before making his final point.
“Then there is the third word. It’s the word ‘NOW!'” King exploded.
“We’re not willing to wait 100 years for our rights. We’re not willing to wait 50 years for what is ours [according to] the constitution of this United States and the authority of God himself!” King thundered.
“No, we are not willing to wait another 25 years for our rights. We can hear voices telling us to slow up. We can hear voices telling us to cool off. Our only answer … must be that we have cooled off too long, and if we keep cooling off, we’ll end up in a deep freeze!” he continued as listeners applauded with shouts of affirmation.
“No, what we are saying to this nation is that we want all of our rights. We want them here and we want all of them not next year, not next week, but we want them NOW, at this hour,” King exhorted.
As we prepare to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Salem Baptist Church and other venues, it’s vital to realize his message still resonates today while racial discrimination and anti-Semitism escalates amid right-wing fanaticism, not only in the United States, but globally, as America’s leadership on such human rights’ issues falters.
The introduction to YouTube’s “All, Here and Now” recording via The Ultimate Collection edition, dated June 17, 1966, notes that “Otto Preminger, foremost independent producer of motion pictures, has said, and we quote: ‘I have great admiration for Dr. King. His spirit and devotion to these ideals when translated into reality will lead to full democracy….’ Dr. King now responds to this observation with three little words…. Three little words of big and great significance…. ‘All, here and now.'”
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: January 15, 2020 at 7:53 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:40 a.m.
A Place in History: Hilton Head was home to milestones in
fight for slaves’ freedom
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
It’s a few minutes before 9 a.m. on Friday, Dec. 27 as I focus on small groups of beach walkers striding the white sand of Hilton Head, SC from the fourth-floor balcony of the Hilton Grand’s Ocean Oak Resort with dark-blue ocean waves of the Atlantic massaging the shore — the same seaboard that the Union army after the start of the Civil War (1861-1865) invaded with a vast armada blasting cannonballs toward shore to dispatch fleeing Confederate forces on Nov. 7, 1861 during the Battle of Port Royal.
And about 18 miles north of where I’m lodging with my wife Billie there’s a place called Mitchelville — “the first self-governing community of freed slaves during the Civil War” that likely consisted of my newly-liberated ancestors — that was established and protected with the help of a regiment of black soldiers, the 32nd United States Colored Troops (USCT), trained at Camp William Penn in what is today southeastern Pennsylvania’s Cheltenham Township.
Mitchelville was “a unique and at the time revolutionary experiment predating Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation by several months,” notes Peter Jackson, on assignment for BBC News in a Feb. 2012 online article, “Mitchelville: The hidden town at dawn of freedom,” initially consisting of “150 acres complete with roads, and divided up individual districts for the election of councilmen to oversee its affairs,” backed by a system of taxes from blacks who were among the first to benefit from mandatory education and work wages that led to electoral and political empowerment known as the Port Royal Experiment.
“It was the humanitarian vision of one man — triumphant Union Army General Ormsby Mitchel — at a time when slaves were considered ‘”contraband of war,'” Jackson explained.
And although plagued with fatigue duty, similar to other black regiments during the Civil War, the 32nd was assigned to protect those thousands of ex-slaves flocking to Union lines on Hilton Head by way of initially establishing Fort Baird, primarily rudimentary earthworks named for their commander, Colonel George W. Baird, and soon after building a more permanent structure with major elements still standing today, Fort Howell, honoring Brigadier General Joshua B. Howell and finished by the 32nd in 1864.
Today, the remnants of Fort Howell are part of The Mitchelville Freedom Park that incorporates the Gullah Museum of Hilton Head Island, featuring “an observation platform looking out toward Port Royal Sound, and kiosks telling the Mitchelville story through words and historical images,” says hiltonheadisland.org, a site that I drove to and visited with Billie later that day.
With temperatures hovering in the low-70s, we walked trails lined with replicas of quaint cabins, stores and even praise houses where the former enslaved blacks worshiped in their unique Gullah-Geechee dialect of African and English words chanting and dancing in a circling line called “the Shout.”
“By 1865 Mitchelville contained ‘about 1500 souls,'” read one of several storyboards that we encountered. “The houses were often simply built: the freed slaves themselves provided the labor; the military saw mill provided free lumber; and each family had about a quarter of an acre for planting gardens.”
But, back when the 32nd prepared to embark from Camp William Penn in April, 1864, the journey itself, perhaps, was an indication that the group certainly would face hardships, ultimately losing two officers and 35 enlisted men “killed and mortally wounded” with 113 enlistees dying “by disease,” for a total of about 150, according to statistics of the National Park Service.
“We left Camp William Penn April 23rd, and embarked on board the steamship Continental, for the seat of war,” wrote one soldier identified as B.W. in a letter to the editor of the Philadelphia-based newspaper, The Christian Recorder, published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
“We went down river to Fort Delaware [in Delaware City, Delaware], and took on board two hundred and eighty prisoners (white) of the Union Army, which made the ship very uncomfortable, making, in all, fifteen hundred souls on board, which crowded us so, that we had not enough room to lie down. During the passage, we lost one man overboard. He was sea-sick and was leaning over the side to cast up his accounts, and lost his balance.”
After arriving on Hilton Head, about 500 soldiers of the 32nd commenced building forts Baird and Howell, sometimes enduring racism and inferior pay compared to white troops, according to complaints they made to their superiors and The Christian Recorder.
In addition to serving on Hilton Head, the 32nd garrisoned on Morris Island, S.C. where the well-known black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts of motion-picture Glory fame, had valiantly attacked the Confederate stronghold, Fort Wagner, in mid-July 1863 before the 32nd served in Charleston, S.C. until Nov. 1864, as well as Boyd’s Neck and the fierce Battle of Honey Hill on Nov 30. They’d move on to protecting the Savannah Railroad from Dec. 6 to 9, and venture to such places as James Island by Feb. 1865 before being mustered out in August on Hilton Head.
As the evening sun sinks west and vacationers from all walks of life simmer down on Hilton Head’s beach below my hotel suite, I marvel at how the 32nd persevered, despite so many obstacles while fighting to preserve the Union and liberating fellow African Americans that included my ancestors craving the fruits of freedom.
Don ‘Ogbewii’ Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: December 30, 2019 at 2:05 p.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:42 a.m.
A Place in History: Reliving the inspiration and musical joy of Earth, Wind and Fire
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
After rapping with my wife, Billie, recently about her meeting the blockbuster group, Earth, Wind & Fire when she worked for such companies as Capitol Records, Columbia and Motown almost 50 years ago, I’ve contemplated EWFs’ transformative lyrics as many of us cherish religious spirituality:
“Keep my head to the sky for the clouds to tell me why. As I grew with strength, Master kept me as I repent …. Gave me the will to be free, purpose to live is reality. Found myself never alone, changes come to make me strong,” say the title-song lyrics of Earth, Wind & Fire’s 1973 album, “Head to the Sky,” focusing on the blessed benefits of perseverance amid strife and hardship.
I savor those reflective words of the super-group from Chicago co-founded in 1969 by former jazz drummer Maurice White that soared to prominence during the 1970s and 1980s with trendsetting music blending funk, rhythm-and-blues, jazz, rock, Latin and West African music harking back to the roots of civilizations stretching from South America’s Amazonian societies to the pyramid builders of Africa’s ancient Egypt.
Yet, such EWF messages ingeniously connect to the realities of yesterday and today, as well as project to the essence of humanity’s future and our inter-connected relevance in God’s cosmos.
And that’s why about a half century after the group was co-founded – as recently as this month – they were honored at such places as the Keswick Theater on Feb. 18, 2017 in nearby Glenside and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. this year on Dec. 8 for a Sunday, Dec. 15 program on CBS.
In fact, my wife Billie (who worked with the likes of Patti LaBelle, Teddy Pendergrass, Quincy Jones, The Jackson Five, LTD, Diana Ross and others as a producer and director of artist development) while based in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and early 1970s remembers Maurice White and some of the original members of Earth, Wind & Fire, showing up at parties dirt poor when they called themselves The Salty Peppers.
Later Billie’s girlfriend at Los Angeles High School, Jessica Cleaves, joined EWF as the lead vocalist of several songs on a couple of their initial albums, including 1973’s “Head to the Sky” and 1972’s “Last Days and Times” that first made the big-time in Philly via WDAS-FM, the indispensable and highly influential black radio station.
“Jessica and I went to senior prom together. And I also went to school with [guitarist] Al McKay, a later member of Earth, Wind & Fire,” Billie said, adding that Cleaves would soon sing with the immensely popular group the Friends of Distinction who were initially co-acts with the 5th Dimension, also destined to become a mega group.
“So I became friends with Maurice. It was a very platonic friendship,” my wife said, as she noticed my eyebrows raise more than just a little bit. “He was very outgoing and very musical and creative
and talented…. He was also very cognizant of good health and wellbeing, exercise and eating right,” adding that, “These guys were very pure in their musical focus.”
Yet, they certainly did struggle, Billie said, but eventually triumphed beyond imagination. “Over their five-decade history, the group has sold out concerts all around the globe, scored eight Number One hits, and sold more than 100 million albums worldwide, making EWF one of the best-selling musical groups of all time,” announced the Kennedy Center, earning multiple Grammys and awards along the way.
Yet, it wasn’t just the outstanding music that blends the world’s cultures in a cosmic joyous sound that makes you want to jump to the heavens — especially during their shows of the mid-1970s at the Spectrum in South Philly featuring pyrotechnics and magic orchestrated by the magician David Copperfield amidst dazzling choreography, space-aged Africanized suits that seemed to foretell of the hit film Black Panther, as Maurice White glided the stage jamming on his African Kalimba — an ancient thumb-plucking, melodic percussion instrument with metal strips.
Their timeless lyrics, accentuated seemingly with Gabriel’s heavenly horns and explosive African or Brazilian rhythms accompanied by Philip Bailey’s soaring falsetto voice and Maurice White’s rich tenor, singing sagacious or romantic ballads and funk-based dance jams, moved more than a few stagnant souls.
As an older black teenager greatly impacted by the civil rights’ movement and growing up during the 1970s in Philadelphia’s East Mount Airy, Earth, Wind & Fire’s messages were unmistakably empowering for me and my homies, including in their classic “Mighty Mighty”:
“Walk around, why wear a frown. Say little people, try to put you down. What you need, is a helpin’ hand. All the strength, at your command … We are people of the mighty, mighty people of the sun. In our heart lies all the answers. To the truth you can’t run from.”
Yet, the dynamism of such Earth, Wind & Fire messages also hit chords in people of every skin hue and culture who could identify with overcoming the forces of evil, negativity and destruction.
Still, some of the group’s most powerful lyrics are about self-improvement and spreading love, as in the hit song, “All About Love,” with Maurice White, who died of complications from Parkinson’s disease in 2016, imploring during a pioneering rap interlude in the ballad of soaring harmonies, reminiscent of downhome church spirituals. “You gotta love you, and learn [about] all the beautiful things around you. Trees and birds, and if there ain’t no
beauty, you got to make some beauty!”
And man, did Earth, Wind & Fire “make some beauty,” like no other group of musicians in my lifetime. Their revolutionary compositions are transcendent, liberating masterpieces.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: December 16, 2019 at 7:00 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:44 a.m.
A Place in History: True giving in shopping season
MONTGOMERY MEDIA
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
With the 2019 holiday shopping season vigorously kicking off, it’s worth realizing that the terms “Black Friday” and “doorbusters,” today associated with monstrously-discounted sales the Friday after Thanksgiving attracting hordes of frenzied shoppers, have ties to Philadelphia retailers and the pioneering department-store tycoon, John Wanamaker, who had a huge estate in what’s today nearby Cheltenham Township.
“These kinds of door-buster sales are not a recent phenomenon,” noted National Public Radio (NPR) host Renee Montagne during a Morning Edition interview of linguist Ben Zimmer on Nov. 28, 2014, “Black Friday,” following the soundbite of “Stampeding customers crashing through doors, elbowing and shoving to get in on some incredible bargains.”
As a matter of fact, “It turns out crowds were lining up for deeply discounted items as far back as the 19th century,” Montagne continued, with “one story [that] traces it back to the 1890s and a Philadelphia-based department store called Wanamaker’s.”
And, so, what was one of the main attractions driving the frenzied customers to Wanamaker’s that established the concept of department store sales?
“They were selling calico for a penny a yard, so that was a big savings,” responded Zimmer. “And it happened to be a time when calico dresses were very popular.”
I’d say more than “very popular,” judging from the next thing that happened.
“So there was a big crowd that rushed in to buy the calico,” Zimmer explained, perhaps referring to a 1925 article that appeared in the Davenport (Iowa) Democrat & Leader and an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. “And in the process, the window of the door to the store got smashed. And the story goes that a store official there at Wanamaker said that bargain certainly was a door-buster.”
Meanwhile, “Black Friday” has origins to when on “Friday, September 24, 1869, in what became referred to as ‘Black Friday,’ the US gold market crashed,” according to England’s newspaper, The Telegraph, although the term likely became popularized later in Philly.
“Police officers in Philadelphia were first to link Black Friday to the post-Thanksgiving period in the 1950s,” adds telegraph.co.uk. “Large crowds of tourists and shoppers came to the city the day after Thanksgiving for the Army-Navy football game, creating chaos, traffic jams and shoplifting opportunities.”
To make matters worse, “Police officers in the city weren’t able to take the day off work and instead had to work long shifts to control the carnage, thus using the term ‘Black Friday’ to refer to it,” an explanation that as an African American I find offensive since too often the word “black” has been unfairly and inaccurately associated with extreme negativity.
However, eventually, the negative connotation of “Black Friday” came to represent the huge profits that many retailers began to make on that shopping day, representing the black ink in their ledgers.
Sadly, increasingly countering the true spirits of Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Christmas and other religious or holiday observances, the focus on giving throughout the season has been greedily hijacked and over-commercialized to out-running others to the discounts and even slugfests.
I wonder if John Wanamaker, said to have conceived many modern retail advertising approaches, but was willing to give some of his riches to the less fortunate, ever envisioned his “doorbuster” concept becoming so artificially and ingloriously accepted by so many, near and far?
You see, the season shouldn’t be about predatory shopping, but giving from the heart, according to biblical wisdom and an African-Yoruba proverb, “What you give, you get ten times over.”
Kent Nerburn, author of Simple Truths, brings it all home, according to spiritualityandpractice.com: “Giving is a miracle that can transform the heaviest of hearts,” and “true giving is not an economic exchange; it is a generative act. It does not subtract from what we have; it multiplies the effect we have on the world.”
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: December 2, 2019 at 7:07 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:46 a.m.
A Place in History: Native American struggles in colonial days
MONTGOMERY MEDIA
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
When Pennsylvania’s founder and proprietor, William Penn, visited about 1700 the Gwynedd Meeting House that had just been established by fellow Quakers on what today is DeKalb Pike, north of Montgomery County’s Norristown, Native Americans of the Leni Lenape tribe’s Unami clan were also known to frequent the area.
After all, they had lived in these parts for many hundreds of years before such newly arrived European settlers came and then essentially annihilated the natives, despite those “original people” initially wanting to share the bountiful land jam-packed with such game as bears, deer, boars and wild turkeys.
“There was at this time a great preparation among the Indians near [the log-cabin meeting house] for some public festival,” notes the 1870 J.B. Lippincott & Co. book, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, in the Olden Time, that I found online.
The proprietor’s daughter, “Letitia Penn, then a lively young girl, greatly desired to be present, but her father would not give his consent, though she entreated much,” perhaps an early indication of Penn’s growing reservations about the natives, even with establishing the English colony to live in harmony with them.
Tragically, within a mere 50 years, according to the book, land-hungry settlers would force the natives off the land, sometimes committing despicable acts of genocide, horrors that we must acknowledge as many partake of Thanksgiving feasts on Thursday, Nov. 28 during Native American Heritage Month that places the focus back on the incredible dynasties and cultures that were devastated by the so-called advancements of settlers.
Attitudes about Thanksgiving must be adjusted from the falsehood that the natives and settlers harmoniously broke bread and lived happily ever after, when nothing is further from the truth.
Even today, our so-called president, Donald Trump, salutes one of the greatest Native American killers in history, former President Andrew Jackson, who signed in 1830 the Indian Removal Act that led to the genocide and vicious looting of Native Americans’ possessions, even in Pennsylvania.
However, such atrocities had earlier and deeper roots in the Commonwealth:
“In [1763 or] 1764 occurred the terrible massacre of the Indians in the prison of Lancaster [in or near Conestoga], where they were placed for security,” says Lippincott’s book. “A company of fifty [mostly Irish-Scottish] men from Paxton, with blackened faces, armed and mounted, entered the town in full gallop, went to the prison and effected their cruel purposes.”
Of the 16 natives whom had been placed in “protective custody,” 14 were gruesomely murdered. “In this manner lay the whole of them, men, women and children, spread about the prison yard: shot-scalped-hacked-and cut to pieces,” said one eyewitness, William Henry of Lancaster.
Even as Native Americans tried to fight back, they were pushed to the brink of extinction and further west to such states as Oklahoma on to horrid reservations as the 19th-century passed and the madness continued.
Believe it or not, Frank L. Baum, the author of the magical story that was made into the timeless film, “The Wizard of Oz,” fueled the national fury to demonize and kill off Native Americans as publisher of The Saturday Pioneer newspaper in Aberdeen, South Dakota from 1890 to 1891 when he called for their complete extermination in an editorial, according to several sources.
In nearby Carlisle, Pa., the United States Indian Industrial School was established as the “flagship” boarding school in the country between 1879 and 1918 where Native American children lived after being snatched from their families in a nationwide dragnet, often as innocent orphans following the massacres of their parents.
At the school, they were forced to mimic European ways and to relinquish their indigenous customs, including language, attire and religious practices, etc., under the threat of corporal punishment or even death.
Modern researchers contend that up to 500 children died under very suspicious circumstances at Carlisle, a place from which the celebrated track-and-field athlete Jim Thorpe (his assigned European name) tried to escape on several occasions before becoming an Olympic gold medalist in 1912, the first Native-American to do so for this country.
Today, there are just small numbers of Leni Lenape living in Pennsylvania.
And although a tiny percentage of Native American tribes in various parts of the country have become wealthy via casinos and even oil, many live in squalid conditions on unfertile land suffering from exceptionally high rates of alcoholism and diabetes.
Their communities and schools are often horribly inadequate due to poor funding, as the suicide rate among America’s “original people” skyrockets to unimaginable levels.
So, as millions of families sit down to succulent feasts this Thanksgiving, it’s so important to realize that the first custodians of the land continue to give and sacrifice so much, but are excluded from partaking of the bountiful harvests from the very seeds that they first planted and nourished millenniums ago.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: November 18, 2019 at 11:23 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:42 a.m.
A Place in History: Harriet Tubman, one of greatest
freedom fighters of all time
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
As interest surges in the supreme conductor of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, with the release of the motion-picture Harriet, it’s time to refocus efforts to give that great woman with local ties her just dues – placing Tubman’s portrait on the $20 bill and posthumously awarding her the Medal of Honor.
Starring Cynthia Erivo as Tubman and locally-trained actor Leslie Odom Jr., playing Philadelphia’s William Still, a preeminent station master of that “underground” system to help 19th-century slaves in America to freedom, the film hopefully will expose the deep dimensions of Tubman as an unparalleled Underground Railroad operative, intelligence agent, nurse and scout who led Union soldiers on daring raids during the Civil War (1861-1865).
With sure plans to see the film, I hope it inspires powerhouses in the motion-picture industry, such as Philly’s own Will Smith, Kevin Hart and others to produce awe-inspiring movies about such historical topics and folks, many with links to our area, including Tubman who married a soldier from Camp William
Penn where almost 11,000 black federal warriors trained in 11 regiments during the Civil War in what’s today Cheltenham Township.
She also gave a celebrated speech to the last regiment to depart Camp Penn that was the flagship of the 18 Civil War facilities designated nationwide to train about 180,000 black soldiers in 75 regiments under President Abraham Lincoln’s Bureau of United States Colored Troops (USCT), with a major headquarters in downtown Philly – a place where Tubman in 1849 first sought refuge and worked as a domestic worker and dishwasher after escaping brutal slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
“On last Saturday evening we had a very entertaining homespun lecture from a colored woman, known as Harriet Tubman,” speak at Camp William Penn, I wrote about in my 2012 Schiffer-Publishing book, Camp William Penn 1863-1865. “She seems to be very well known to the community at large, as the great Underground Rail Road woman, and has done a good part to many of her fellow creatures, in that direction,” notes an article I found in the April 15, 1865 edition of The Christian Recorder, published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
“During her lecture, which she gave in her own language, she elicited considerable applause from the soldiers of the 24th regiment, U.S.C.T., now at the camp,” that also hosted the likes of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Lucretia Mott, a white Quaker
preacher who lived adjacent to the 13-acre training center where Still operated a store as post sutler while fighting for black civil rights.
Known to have led many scores of blacks to “the Promised Land” or freedom by way of various station houses that included the residence of Still who wrote a landmark book about many of the escapes and Mott’s nearby Roadside estate, Tubman would venture to some of the deepest reaches of the South, earning her the moniker, “Moses,” of Old Testament renown.
With a $40,000 bounty offered for her capture by pro-slavery forces, Tubman, standing at just over five feet, risked much as she led groups of blacks through dense wilderness, served as a spy for Union forces, nursed many of the wounded federal soldiers in battlefield conditions, as well as led them into battle and raids — one of the largest that liberated hundreds of blacks along the Combahee River near where many of my slave ancestors lived in Beaufort, SC.
And she did all that, knowing any moment that she might suffer a convulsion caused by an injury that she suffered as a young woman in Maryland’s Dorchester County when her so-called plantation master or overseer hit her in the head with a very heavy metal object.
“She wore a variety of disguises and carried a gun to avert trouble and to prevent being betrayed by those who became weary or fearful,” wrote Rosetta E. Ross for the encyclopedic 2004 book series, African American Lives, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham.
In fact, she was heartbroken because her first husband, John Tubman, refused to join her, then ultimately was killed in a tragic 1867 altercation
with a racist in Maryland.
Following the war when Tubman settled in Auburn, NY and opened a boarding house she met and married the former Camp William Penn soldier, Nelson Davis, of the 8th United States Colored Troops, after he became a lodger — despite Tubman being at least 20 years older than Davis who suffered from tuberculosis.
My research indicates that Davis and Tubman, who died in 1913, had exceptionally hard times getting military pensions, like many black veterans following the war, with Davis receiving his first and the couple living on those funds before Tubman finally receiving payments after her husband’s death.
Some of the war’s top generals and political leaders wrote letters to the pension board attesting to her incredibly brave deeds during the war. They included Secretary of State William H. Seward, Brigadier General Rufus Saxton and others.
Harriet Tubman’s tremendous service, backed by such testimony, more than qualifies her to receive America’s top commendation for combat valor and her portrait to grace the $20 bill, despite the Trump administration cruelly blocking the progress.
May the film, Harriet, lead to her finally being recognized as one of the greatest freedom fighters in history.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: November 5, 2019 at 9:51 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:43 a.m.
A Place History: Day of the Dead traditions
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
As the Latino population thankfully grows throughout the United States and our region, despite ill-advised immigration policies that seem to unfairly target people of color, such celebrations as Mexicans’ Dia de los Muertos or “Day of the Dead” traditions from Thursday, Oct. 31 to Saturday, Nov. 2, with ancient Aztec roots, are of increasing significance.
In Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County, for instance, the overall Hispanic or Latino population was estimated to have increased by 2017 to 39,971 or 4.9 percent of the population, according to U.S. census data that I found online at factfinder.census.gov. Leading the way were Mexicans at almost 13,000 and Puerto Ricans approaching 12,000.
The increasing diversity is wonderful and intriguing, especially as such groups bring in their cultural practices that sometimes parallel, or contrast, such traditions as Oct. 31’s Halloween.
The rising numbers of Mexican eateries in Montgomery County, as well as other types of Latino restaurants, are just one indication of how America will one day become a society that’s dominated by Hispanic culture and such celebrations.
“In 2015, the Census bureau projected that in 2060, Hispanic people will comprise 28.6 [percent] of the total population, with 119 million Hispanic individuals residing in the United States,” according to CNN.com, figures that have likely terrified many anti-immigration folks as Latinos have overtaken African Americans to become the largest “minority” group in America.
In fact, although most folks near and far will be celebrating Oct. 31’s Halloween with masquerading and trick-or-treating by focusing on scary costumes that have propelled the commemoration to an annual $9 billion industry, the Mexicans’ “Day of the Dead” has more sacred and festive traditions that pay homage to their ancestors and the Almighty.
“Dia de los Muertos honors the dead with festivals and lively celebrations, a typically Latin American custom that combines indigenous Aztec ritual with Catholicism …,” says nationalgeographic.com about the tribute that originated in Mexico.
“Assured that the dead would be insulted by mourning or sadness, Dia de los Muertos celebrates the lives of the deceased with food [such as a sweet bread known as Pan de Muerto, tamales and candied pumpkin or Calabaza en Dulce], drink, parties, and activities the dead enjoyed in life.”
So, there are more celebrations at public, private and gravesite locales, near and far, that highlight the importance and joyousness of Dia de los Muertos.
The Norristown Public Library at 1001 Powell St. is offering a “Day of Dead Ofrenda” or altar exhibition from Oct. 31 to Nov. 2, starting 10 am and running to 4 pm, while Juntos at 600 Washington Ave. in Philly is providing an altar assembly workshop on Oct. 28 from 4:30 pm to 7 pm.
In addition to the elaborate altars consisting of marigold flowers, images of deceased kinfolk, seasonal fruit and bread, as well as a glass of water and burning incense that pay homage or are offered to the deceased, various dishes are also prepared to add much flavor to the celebrations as some participants recite witty and humorous poems called calavera or “skull.”
In fact, skulls symbolizing that all humans are essentially the same are often made of sugar, figuring prominently in the celebrations, as well as various depictions or creations of human skeletons.
Such displays and goodies will be offered at the Penn Museum of the University of Pennsylvania in Philly, 3260 South St., that’s commemorating the occasion on Saturday, Oct. 26, from 10 to 5 pm, “with musical and dance performances, puppetry and storytelling, face painting, sugar skulls, arts & crafts, and more,” according to an announcement.
Plus, there will be an “Azteca Prehispanic Dance” by Kalpulli Kamaxtle Xiuhcoatl and storytelling by Cecilia Huesca about “The Legend of the Xoloitzcuintle” with roots to the Aztecs’ Mesoamerica and Mexican cultures. “According to Aztec belief, the Dog of Xolotl was created by the god to guard the living and guide the souls of the dead through the dangers of Mictlan, the Underworld,” says nationalgeographic.com.
Huesca will also tell the story of “The Legend of the Cempasuchil Flower,” with special relevance for today’s geo-political upheavals because it focuses on an unconditional love, as well as one’s inseparable relationship with God and Mother Nature – a timeless saga that has as much relevance today, as it did among the ancient Aztecs.
Don ‘Ogbewii’ Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at
dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: October 23, 2019 at 6:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:46 a.m.
A Place in History: Founding director of African-American Museum coming to Philly
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
With Lonnie G. Bunch III, who’s the founding director of the breathtaking National Museum of African American History and Culture on Washington’s National Mall, scheduled to speak 6 pm about his new book at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Oct. 15, I’m more than impressed with the outstanding feats of the first African American to lead the Smithsonian Institution of 19 museums, galleries, gardens and the National Zoo.
Bunch will discuss his book, “A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump,” released by Smithsonian Books last month, with the president and CEO of the Museum of the American Revolution, Dr. R. Scott Stephenson, who told me previously that he’s committed to multi-cultural representation in museum exhibits.
“I can remember quite vividly how thirteen years ago I tried to talk myself out of accepting the position of Founding Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture,” Bunch writes in his insightful and fascinating book that I recently purchased as an e-book.
“Why take on a task that had proven impossible to accomplish for nearly a century? Why did I think that I could craft a museum that would explore the sweep of African American history and culture without staff or collections?”
Thank goodness, Bunch more than accomplished his lofty goals, and now has risen to lead the entire Smithsonian empire.
“Lonnie Bunch guided, from concept to completion, the complex effort to build the premier museum celebrating African American achievements,” said John G. Roberts Jr., Smithsonian chancellor and chief justice of the United States, in a statement published in The New York Times. “I look forward to working with him as we approach the Smithsonian’s 175th anniversary, to increase its relevance and role as a beloved American institution and public trust.”
Opening to the public on Sept. 24, 2016, today the museum, with an approximate collection size of 40,000 and 1.9 million visitors in 2018, has exhibits spanning from the start of slavery in the Americas, stretching to the American Civil War and the civil rights’ movement through to the age of Obama and beyond.
Many of the exhibits are sobering and very emotional, including one concerning the gruesome 1955 murder of the black Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi by white racists that some scholars say ignited the civil rights’ movement.
When I visited the museum in 2017 with my wife Billie, we were in awe as we viewed state-of-the-art exhibits, many enhanced with sophisticated audio-visual presentations, about some of the most important events and episodes in American history pertaining to African Americans. The place is so expansive and informative, that if you wanted to look at each exhibit in detail, it would literally take you at least several days.
I say, without hesitation, that it should be declared one of the “Wonders of the World.”
Although I admit bias, we were particularly impressed with an exhibit about my wife’s father, Lt. Cmdr. Wesley Anthony Brown, the first black graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. And exhibits concerning the first black soldiers under President Abraham Lincoln’s Bureau of United States Colored Troops during the Civil War, including some of the almost 11,000 who trained at Camp William Penn in what today is Cheltenham Township, were also very absorbing.
Designed by the native Tanzania architect David Adjaye, the exterior of the National Museum of African American History and Culture has an ancient Yoruba motif, that is nothing less than spectacular amid the grandest buildings on the National Mall, including the nearby Washington Monument. The structure is awe-inspiring,plain and simple.
The New Jersey-native Bunch, who had spent his professional life at museums from Chicago to California and Washington, D.C., seems a bit stunned by the incredible success of the museum that he started from scratch, according to this passage in his new book:
“There is no way that we could have predicted how visible and how important the museum has become. I knew that as part of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum would have a national and international profile, but no one could have anticipated that it would become such a site of pilgrimage and meaning,” he wrote.
As I continue to read his insightful book, I can barely wait to see what his magnificent vision brings to the entire Smithsonian sphere and the nation.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
For more about Bunch’s Philly visit, please see: https://www.amrevmuseum.org/events/read-revolution-speaker-series-lonnie-g-bunch-iii
Originally Published: October 7, 2019 at 11:03 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 23, 2021 at 9:17 a.m.
A Place in History: Tracing roots from Philadelphia to Africa
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
I exchanged notes with an African “DNA cousin” living in America via Ancestry.com’s message center several weeks ago confirming that many of her ancestors hailed from Nimba County in Africa’s Liberia after the genealogy titan processed our saliva by way of home-delivered kits.
And that’s so exciting to me because a prior DNA evaluation via AfricanAncestry.com of my mother’s paternal line with roots to America’s Gullah-Geechee people — descendants of West African slaves living in coastal South Carolina and Georgia who retain various Africanisms via music, art and cuisine — revealed some of them were the Kpelle people of Liberia.
The Kpelle, in fact, do have a presence in Nimba County which seems to indicate that my co-descendants live there today as my “DNA cousin” confirmed in her note.
Such news is stellar for African Americans because it narrows down the possibility that we’ve found co-descendants and ancestors that relatives were separated from during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It can even allow us to possibly identify the very village from which an ancestor was born, thereby reversing some of the traumatic impacts of the so-called Middle Passage.
Most historians and social-psychologists agree that out of all the horrific harm that came from American slavery, the family separations have had the most detrimental consequences.
As the largest ethnic group in Liberia (founded 1822 by ex-slaves from the United States), Kpelle people via DNA analysis also include the likes of the media tycoon Oprah Winfrey.
And it also includes my mom’s late father, Bill or William Mitchell, who after migrating with his family during the early 1900s from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, settled in nearby Abington Township’s Crestmont area for a spell before finding work at the Philadelphia waterfront as a longshoreman, a job he held in South Carolina’s Charleston and Savannah, Ga.
Meanwhile, follow-up messages from my “DNA cousin” and family-tree evaluations revealed the surnames of her various ancestral lineages, including Gbor and Massaquoi, extending back to a few generations.
In fact, further research indicates remarkably that there is a Gbor District — one of 17 in Nimba County — likely providing even more evidence of my Kpelle origins in Liberia.
So now I’ve been on a mission to learn all that I can about Kpelle culture, even finding music on the Web of women from a rice planting co-operative in a place called Gborola that can be purchased online via Smithsonian Folkways Recordings or listened to via Youtube.
It was so gratifying to listen to the rhythmic, call-and-response songs in the Kpelle’s tonal language that my ancestors likely sang in Africa and on the rice plantations of South Carolina where they were enslaved at such places as Charleston’s Middleton Place, St. Helena, Hilton Head, Callawassie Island and the Edwards’ family estate on Spring Island in Beaufort County.
Notably, my progenitors and other Africans were likely snatched from Africa due to their rice-growing and metal-making skills, largely building the foundation of the most powerful nation known to humankind, America.
“Dry swidden rice is the Kpelle staple and the focus of Kpelle life,” says UCLA’s sscnet.ucla.edu website. “The Kpelle conceptualize the word ‘work’ to mean ‘rice cultivation,'” something that makes me smile since grandpa Bill Mitchell was said to have rice with nearly every meal even if there were other starches on the plate such as potatoes!
“The Kpelle also grow a variety of other foodstuffs, including yams, potatoes, plantains, greens, peanuts, eggplants, okra,” and even consume fish, something that my mom often fed us four boys while growing up in Philly’s Nicetown, West Oak Lane and East Mount Airy.
To this very day, as a special treat, I’ll purchase a few pounds of Porgies from the store, and fry them up with one primary intention — to devour them with no mercy.
Further, although my maternal family practices Christianity and Islam (to a smaller degree), “some 10 to 20 percent of the Kpelle are nominal Christians (usually Lutheran) in those areas where missionaries are very active, and whereas a handful embrace Islam, the vast majority hold traditional animistic beliefs,” says the UCLA article. “Witchcraft and sorcery figure prominently in the belief system,” as well as religious-based secret societies, paralleling the beliefs of some of my Gullah-Geechee ancestors who eventually became members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church with roots to Philadelphia.
Although I still have much more to learn and confirm about my Kpelle ancestry, I found it quite irresistible to search for the surname of my Kpelle compatriot, Oprah Winfrey, in the family trees of my DNA matches via Ancestry.com’s computerized filtering system.
So, Oprah, I have very exciting news for you! I received hits indicating four of my DNA cousins have your surname in their family trees.
I wonder if I can finally retire and take a worldwide trip, including to Liberia, that I’ve been dreaming about?
Don ‘Ogbewii’ Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: September 23, 2019 at 7:43 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:43 a.m.
A Place in History: Giant crabs and the legacy of Amelia Earhart
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
The latest striking headlines about giant coconut crabs likely devouring or taking the remains of the great woman aviator Amelia Earhart who in 1916 attended the nearby Ogontz School for Girls before she possibly became marooned two decades later after crash landing a twin-engine Lockheed Electra plane on July 2, 1937 near the Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro while circling the globe, aren’t the first such reports about her possible fate.
The article, “Coconut Crabs Eat Everything from Kittens to, Maybe, Amelia Earhart,” was written by Rachel Nuwer for Smithsonian.com and published nearly six years ago on December 26, 2013, indicating that some folks “believe” the creatures’ “excellent sense of smell” led them “to a dead or dying Amelia Earhart.”
Other reports speculate that her navigator Fred Noonan, while dead or alive, may have also been overtaken by the creatures that “can grow up to three feet across and weigh nine pounds,” as well as climb quite high to dislodge coconuts and snatch unsuspecting birds perching in the genus Cocos’ trees.
Quite skilled at cracking and devouring exceptionally hard coconuts, the crabs even recently dispatched the remains of a pig, dragging some leftovers to their burrows in the ground, according to experimenting researchers, leading them to believe that Earhart and Noonan’s skeletal remains could be in their lairs.
But, even though such speculation might have some scientific value, I can’t help but be bothered by how it shields the daring essence of a trailblazing woman who defied the odds and set many aviation records, despite her modest beginning before landing at the elite Ogontz School for Girls that was originally located along Old York Rd. in Cheltenham before relocating to Rydal where Penn State’s Abington campus is situated today.
Born July 24, 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, Amelia Mary Earhart’s father was a “railroad lawyer,” according to Britannica.com, who suffered from alcoholism, causing his family severe financial stress that required them to move quite often.
However, following the death of Amelia’s grandparents when “her mother received her inheritance, Earhart was able to attend the Ogontz School” that had formerly been the estate of Jay Cooke, the great financier of Union forces during the Civil War.
Cooke rented his home to the school, according to my 2009 book, “Remembering Cheltenham Township,” after he “departed the residence to live with his daughter and son-in-law, Charles Barney, co-founder of the venerable financial services firm, Smith Barney Co.”
While at Ogontz, Earhart, who attended service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Old York Rd. in Cheltenham, was said to be quite colorful and outspoken, even criticizing classmates that she perceived to be elitist and was known to even go toe-to-toe with the school’s headmistress, Abby Sutherland, who eventually acquired the Ogontz estate.
Before long, though, the school’s growth required Sutherland to “search for another school site, which she found in nearby Abington. The school survived for decades at its new location in Rydal, but the property and all its facilities were passed on to Penn State by Sutherland in 1950.”
After leaving Ogontz, by 1918, Earhart moved to Canada with her sister where she became a nurse’s aide, caring for wounded World War 1 soldiers before joining the pre-med program at Columbia University, says Biography.com.
And although Earhart could not finish her studies because her parents “insisted” that she move to California to live with them, it was there where she “went on her first airplane ride in 1920, an experience that prompted her to take flying lessons,” purchase an airplane and eventually rise to become one of the greatest aviators and women’s rights’ advocates in American history.
Her feats ranged from becoming “the first person to fly solo from Los Angeles to Mexico City” to the first woman to soar across the Atlantic Ocean by herself before attempting the world flight with Noonan in 1937.
“After completing 22,000 miles, Amelia and her navigator … lost radio contact with U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca while en route to Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean,” says Ameliaearhart.net, then disappeared, later being declared legally dead in 1939, further feeding speculation about the aviator’s fate.
However, although we haven’t precisely determined the whereabouts of her physical remains, perhaps it’s much more important to honor Amelia Earhart’s tremendous legacy of inspiring us to courageously pursue our dreams and stand up for just causes.
By the way, if you’re ever unfortunate enough to get marooned or crash land on or near a remote Pacific island, it’s not the crabs or sharks that would be the greatest threat to your mortality, according to cuisine.com. “Falling coconuts kill 150 people every year – 10 times the number of people killed by sharks” with humans, according to researchers, very rarely attacked by giant crabs.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: September 6, 2019 at 1:17 p.m.
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UPDATED: September 23, 2021 at 9:23 a.m.
A Place in History: Pennsylvanians who joined the 54th Volunteer infantry warriors of the Civil War
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
Among the courageous blacks from Pennsylvania — some from Montgomery County — who joined the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer infantry during the Civil War (1861-1865) starting in Spring 1863 and immortalized in the 1989 film “Glory” was Norristown’s Albanus S. Fisher, a sergeant in Co. I who survived the regiment’s July 18, 1863 storming of the Confederates’ Fort Wagner on Morris Island, S.C.
There was also West Chester’s Solomon Hazzard, a farmer who was wounded as a private in Co. B of the 54th, eventually moving to Norristown following the war and living quite a colorful life, according to Judith Meier’s 1994 article in The Bulletin of the Historical Society of Montgomery County, “Citizen Soldiers of Color: Biographical Sketches of Montgomery County’s Black Soldiers in the Civil War.”
Both men, among many others memorialized at Pennsylvania monuments or cemeteries, are buried at the Treemount Cemetery in Norristown. Others rest at the likes of the Philadelphia National Cemetery in nearby northwest Philly.
I’m in awe about the courage and sacrifices of such warriors, many of them ex-slaves who benefited little as they preserved our Union, despite ongoing racism that’s quite notable as our nation today recognizes American slavery arguably beginning 400 years ago with blacks’ 1619 arrival in Jamestown, Va.
More than 650 black Pennsylvanians joined the Mass. 54th Volunteer Infantry by trekking to Massachusetts because – echoing President Abraham Lincoln’s initial rationale – our state’s officials refused to recruit them fearing white protests despite several prior attempts to enlist African Americans by such Philadelphia black leaders as Octavius Valentine Catto.
So, blacks such as the Rev. Samuel Harrison, 45, a Philadelphia ex-slave born 1818 and recruited in October 1863 as the 54th’s first chaplain, enlisted at Fort Meigs in Readville, Massachusetts (outside of Boston) after fellow blacks were captured and enslaved as Rebel forces threatening Harrisburg, Philly and even Washington, D.C., invaded central Pennsylvania during 1863’s summer, igniting the battle of Gettysburg from July 1 to 3.
Meanwhile, white officers were recruited and trained locally in late Spring of 1863 via President Lincoln’s new Bureau of United States Colored Troops (USCT), eventually swelling to about 180,000 black soldiers and 175 federal regiments.
The largest contingent of those warriors trained outside of Philadelphia at Camp William Penn in what’s today Cheltenham Township consisting of 11 federal regiments and about 10,500 soldiers after the state-sponsored 54th Massachusetts had already marched off to war with the likes of the famed black abolitionist Frederick Douglass serving as a primary recruiter and whose sons Charles and Lewis joined the 54th.
Douglass likely addressed the black troops at Camp Penn when the 54th charged Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863, keeping in mind that an upcoming Sept. 21 commemorative program is being held at (and near) the LaMott Community Center in Cheltenham to salute such USCT warriors featuring historians, authors and speakers as myself, Paula Gidjunis, Edward McLaughlin, Robert Houston, Thomas Wieckowski, Carmen Reitano, Cheryl Gooch, living historians and more. For updates, please see https://usct.org/.
Other Pennsylvania volunteers who joined the 54th at least several months before Chaplain Harrison included farmer George Price, a Montrose, Pa. native in Company C, but was killed at Fort Wagner. His hometown compatriot, Charles A. Smith, would survive.
Solomon E. Anderson, a married farmer from West Chester, Pa., was captured at Fort Wagner and imprisoned at the notorious Confederate prison, Andersonville, where he died in horrendous conditions.
Harrison’s sojourn to serve such warriors started from his birth as a slave in 1818 to parents enslaved by the Savannah, Georgia-based Bolton family, according to his memoirs and other sources.
After the Boltons liberated Harrison’s family and other slaves about 1820, Samuel lived in New York City with his mother (still employed by the Boltons) and Philadelphia where he resided as a shoe-making apprentice with an uncle until he reached manhood.
When his mother relocated back to Philly, Harrison’s hunger for the gospel and education soared.
Despite financial hardships that required him to drop out of what’s today Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, Harrison returned to Philadelphia where he married Ellen Rhodes, eventually having 13 children over 20 years.
By 1850, as Congress’ notorious Fugitive Slave Act took effect, Harrison and his family moved to Pittsfield, Mass., where he continued shoe making and became an ordained preacher of the Second Congregational Church of Pittsfield.
Harrison was recruited by Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew in July 1863 just after the 54th gallantly, but unsuccessfully, tried to take the Confederates’ Fort Wagner where many of its black soldiers and white commander Robert Gould Shaw were killed and buried in a mass grave. Frederick Douglass’s son, Lewis, was severely wounded, but survived.
The ferociousness of the fighting was evident via the gallantry of the 54th’s William Carney, the first African American to earn the Medal of Honor.
Bedford County, Pa.-native William Tecumseh Barks (1840-1906) was among the Mass. 54th Pennsylvanians who fought at Fort Wagner, enlisting in Co. D. on March 21, 1863, along with Philadelphia-native Col. Norwood Penrose Hallowell (second-in-command).
Hallowell survived serious injuries at Fort Wagner that required him to be honorably discharged on Nov. 2, 1863.
Barks was promoted to corporal and mustered out of service in Pittsburgh, Pa. on August 20, 1865, becoming a respected Pittsburgh police officer before dying on Dec. 26, 1906 and was buried in Allegheny Cemetery.
In South Carolina, Harrison successfully worked to improve former slaves’ conditions and garner equal pay for black warriors.
Harrison was discharged following a severe illness in March 1864, later writing black-empowerment articles and pastoring churches throughout New England before his death at age 82 on August 11, 1900 and burial in the Pittsfield Cemetery of Berkshire County, Mass.
That same year, Albanus Fisher of the 54th’s Co. I died at age 73 on Oct. 21 of complications from throat cancer in Norristown.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be contacted at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: August 20, 2019 at 2:58 p.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:46 a.m.
A Place in History: Daniel Boone and thoughts on issues of today
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
When George Boone, the uncle of the great frontiersman Daniel Boone, served as headmaster of nearby Abington Friends School from 1716 to 1720 neighboring where the Boone family had settled after arriving from England as persecuted Quakers, many European settlers found it essential to own firearms for hunting and supposedly self-defense.
Born 1734 in Berks County’s Exeter Township, Boone acquired his first gun in 1747 at about age 13 and would use firearms most of his life as an explorer, adventurer and someone who fought against, as well as associated with, Native American tribes such as the Shawnee.
By the time Boone died in 1820 at age 86 after the United States was established, such weapons were still perceived to be necessities for those choosing to live in the American frontier, etc., despite those firearms too often being aimed at the original custodians of the land, Native Americans.
Perhaps the Constitution’s Second Amendment and the so-called “right to bear arms” made sense when America was young with a small farming and frontier population compared to the 327 million diverse folks now living in rural, suburban and urban areas – some of them immigrants threatened with deportation as Democrats and Republicans squabble over such issues, including healthcare reform.
And making such matters even more explosive, is the Trump administration courting white supremacists that’s contributed to mass shootings while instituting cruel immigration policies as Democrats debate about whether to eliminate all private health insurance, surely something that would guarantee Donald Trump another undeserved term as president.
In this era of assault weapons that can kill dozens of people in seconds, it’s time to establish local, state and federal laws to limit the types and amounts of weapons that can be bought while screening potential purchasers.
I agree with much of what Democratic State Rep. Steve McCarter said in a recent message delivered online to his constituents in Springfield, Jenkintown and Cheltenham where I reside. “Legislation pending in the House and Senate includes bills to ban assault weapons, address access to guns for people at risk of violence to themselves or others and close the loophole for gun background checks, among others. These bills deserve a vote in Harrisburg. I and other members of the PA Safe Caucus are demanding it.”
McCarter also noted “the mass shooting rampages in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, left 31 dead, many more injured and a nation reeling. Like many of you, I have been grieving for those killed, for their families and for the communities in Texas and Ohio in which they reside,” adding that we cannot forget “the recent victims of gun violence much closer to home – in Philadelphia, in Allentown and in Pittsburgh, where a gunman terrorized morning Shabbat services at the Tree of Life Synagogue just shy of two years ago now.”
Hopefully, if anything comes from Trump’s pitiful and disgraceful presidency, he’ll sign meaningful gun-control legislation on the national level to stem the tide of inner-city killings and throughout America, keeping in mind that the El Paso killer targeted Mexicans and other Latinos with deadly accuracy.
Many politicians and others agree that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and earlier threats of violence against people perceived to have opposing views, including the press, have lit the fuses of racist monsters ready to kill as he separates immigrant Hispanic children from their parents to bolster his re-election chances by rallying his ill-informed, narrow-minded base. Trump’s exploitive immigration policies must stop.
On the other hand, instead of “Medicare for all,” progressives should modify their chants to “Medicare for all who want it!”
In addition to foolishly belittling during a recent debate the former Democratic President Barack Obama, the first African-American commander-in-chief who left office with very high ratings, a few of the most progressive Democrats seem to be giving the next election to Trump by advocating “Medicare for all” initiatives.
“Proposals pushed by three of the four leading Democratic presidential candidates – Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kamala Harris of California – differ in their particulars but would all end the job-based system that provides coverage to more than 150 million people in favor of a government-run plan,” wrote the Cheltenham-based historian, William F. Chambres, in an emailed essay, “Health Plans Still on the Stove,” that analyzes the various dynamics of such proposals.
From my perspective, the right approach is to allow people who want private insurance to keep theirs while providing Medicare for those who prefer that vehicle as representatives work to improve Obama’s life-saving Affordable Care Act.
And we should always opt to be merciful, fair and honor our great variety.
You see, despite Daniel Boone’s imperfections and biases, perhaps there’s a message from the old pioneer that we can learn from concerning the tremendous issues that we face today, as he once considered the wonders of America:
He declared, “In such a diversity it was impossible I should be disposed to melancholy.”
Don ‘Ogbewii’ Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: August 12, 2019 at 7:25 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:46 a.m.
Look at History: Botanist’s dedication would do well against
climate change crisis
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
When the Jenkintown-born botanist and horticulturalist Mary Gibson Henry at age 82 died of heart disease on April 16, 1967 in Wilmington N.C. while on a field trip, according to her death certificate that I found online via Ancestry.com, she had lived an extraordinary life of intrepid traveling to far-flung places, leaving behind a legacy of preserving “unusual species” of the Earth’s plant ecosystems.
So, during this modern age of global warming that threatens our planet as the Trump administration largely ignores the dire consequences of uncontrolled flooding, extreme weather, deforestation and runaway fires, Henry’s determination and dedication are prime examples of what’s needed to literally save our planet.
“Often one has to shove one’s self through or wriggle under briars, with awkward results to clothing,” Henry once said, according to the article, “Mary Gibson Henry, Plantswoman Extraordinaire,” by Mary Harrison at http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.edu. “Wading usually bare legged through countless rattlesnake infested swamps adds immensely to the interest of the day’s work … On several occasions I have been so deeply mired I had to be pulled out.”
Henry’s first trip to the Southeast U.S. “covered 2,000 miles,” traveling “along the Atlantic Coastal Plain, on the Piedmont Plateau, in Appalachia, and in the mountains of east Tennessee and Alabama,” Harrison noted, as well as to northern British Columbia while she acquainted herself with such early botanists as John and William Bartram. During one trip, in fact, she and a daughter were reportedly held up by bandits but managed to escape unharmed.
Born 1884 at her grandparents’ Jenkintown home to John Howard Gibson and Susan Worrell Pepper, Henry’s maternal “family were Quakers who had come from England with William Penn and taken part in the founding of Philadelphia,” Harrison noted. “Horticulture was a traditional pursuit on both sides of the family.”
And although Henry had only attended the Agnes Irwin School in Philly for just six years, departing in 1902, she gravitated to plants as her father took the family on excursions to Moosehead Lake in Maine, says Harrison, where the luscious “twin flower (Linnaea Borealis)” on “a dwarf evergreen shrub” caught her eye and “awakened in her ‘not only a love for and appreciation of the absolute perfection of the flower itself, but also for the dark, silent forest that shelters such treasures.'”
By 1909, she married John Norman Henry, “a physician who later became Philadelphia’s director of public health,” with the couple taking up residence in Philadelphia, but eventually purchasing residences in Maryland and a 90-acre estate in Pennsylvania’s Gladwyne, outside of Philadelphia.
Even after giving birth to five children, Henry traveled extensively and corresponded with well-known botanists and horticulturalists to become one of the most respected experts in the world, all with the encouragement of her husband who even provided her with a specially-outfitted Lincoln, Continental featuring plant-preserving mechanisms, a portable illuminating desk and chauffeur.
In fact, Henry was very concerned about the depletion of natural habitats worldwide due to human-induced environmental hazards and likely would have been quite upset about current inefficient government policies to preserve such habitats and associated species.
Recent reports indicate deforestation rapidly increasing globally in the Amazon forests of Brazil and Peru via greenhouse gases, etc., consequently hurting woodlands in Indonesia, Russia, Mexico and Papua New Guinea while Africa’s Sudan and Nigeria are being devastated. Only an abysmal six percent of Nigeria’s forests still exist.
Meanwhile, artic wildfires due to increasingly dry conditions are raging throughout the region, incinerating forests in Greenland, Siberia and parts of Alaska, as well as several U.S. western states. Such fires are releasing a record amount of CO2 or carbon dioxide into the air, further depleting the Earth’s upper atmosphere and adding to global warming that leads to more flooding and erratic weather patterns.
Closer to home, in 1949, Mary Gibson Henry’s prized “garden was threatened with destruction when the State of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Army Engineers decided to use Gladwyne,” according to Harrison, as a place to deposit sewage and silt from the nearby Schuylkill River.
Henry’s fierce appeal and organizing, that included letters from distinguished supporters, saved her estate and led to the establishment of what’s today the Henry Foundation for Botanical Research (www.henrybotanicgarden. org) on 50 acres of gardens and plants – many of them rare – where visitors can relish the work of a woman dedicated to saving some of the Earth’s most important and delicate resources.
Don ‘Ogbewii’ Scott can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: August 2, 2019 at 1:49 p.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:46 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: ‘Little Women’ author Louisa May Alcott was Germantown native
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
One of the spunkiest historical figures with local roots who throughout her hard life took “the bull by the horns” was Louisa May Alcott, the famed author of the groundbreaking novel “Little Women.”
Born in Germantown on Nov. 29, 1832 – the same day that her progressive educator dad, Amos Bronson Alcott, came to the world in 1799 – Louisa was primarily home-schooled by him, a pioneering transcendentalist, with help from powerhouse friends such as writers and philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne after the family returned to New England two years later.
When Louisa was born in a house on what today is Germantown Ave. “where the Masonic Hall now stands, between Coulter and Mill Streets,” reminisced Mary B. Houston Williams in an address to the Site and Relic Society of Germantown on April 18, 1902, her father Amos was ecstatic about his daughter’s birth in a letter to a “Colonel May”:
“She was born at half-past 12 this morning, on my birthday (33), and is a very fine healthful child, and has a fine foundation for health and energy of character,” Amos wrote, according to Williams, adding that his wife “Abbainclines to have her called Louisa May, a name to her full of every association connected with amiable benevolence and exalted worth.”
The Alcotts had traveled to Philly from New England so that Amos could set-up a liberal school without the rigid rules of the period. “The school he taught at in Germantown was the third school he had started, this time with aid from a wealthy benefactor [Reuben Haines] who paid the tuition of many of the students,” notes historynet.com, but soon died, prompting the Alcotts to return to Boston in 1834.
Although destined to become the family’s primary breadwinner due to her father’s financial ineptitude – despite his obvious genius in book learning and philosophy – Louisa very early became quite supportive of women’s rights because of the immense pressures that her mother Abby May Alcott experienced regarding her dad’s lackadaisical employment attitude, impoverishing the family of several girls: Anna Bronson Alcott (b. 1831), Elizabeth Sewell (b. 1835) and Abigail May (b. 1840).
Louisa, the second of the four daughters, also became an ardent anti-slavery abolitionist who greatly respected such local women as the Quaker minister Lucretia Mott of Cheltenham, at one point with her family helping escaped slaves via the Underground Railroad.
And even though father Amos seemed incapable of providing financial stability, he gave his girls and other students an extraordinary liberal education, avoiding punishment while emphasizing conversational techniques – making him an impressive educational reformist.
Establishing in 1834 a so-called “model community” called Fruitlands in “Harvard Massachusetts,” Amos “[made] use of no animal products or labor, except, as [wife] Abigail Alcott observed, for that of women,” according to the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail’s online article, “Louisa May Alcott (1832-88).”
By age 15, Alcott worked as a governess, seamstress and teacher while pursuing writing to help support her family then living in Concord, Mass. “In Boston, Louisa also encountered some of the greatest reformers of the nineteenth century,” including Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison, says the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail.
Meanwhile, “Louisa’s stories were finally beginning to sell,” including for such publications as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newsletter, earning her $100 in 1863 for “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” as the Civil War raged. She also began writing novels.
Alcott’s “brief service as a Civil War nurse inspired her to write ‘Hospital Sketches’ which appeared in the Boston Commonwealth as a series and as a book in 1863,” that became “enormously popular” based on the often graphic, but poignant stories, of the war’s wounded. Sadly, Alcott during the war contracted typhoid and pneumonia, so was treated with a mercury compound, causing periodic hallucinations, disorientation and other illnesses.
After touring in Europe and returning to Boston, “she accepted the editorship of Merry’s Museum, a children’s magazine. She became its major contributor. In 1867,” following the war, “the magazine’s editor, Thomas Niles, asked her to write a book especially for girls. The result was part one of ‘Little Women,'” partially based on the struggles she had encountered, as well as her sisters, mother and other women, becoming “a best seller” and propelling her to worldwide fame. The book was translated into a variety of languages.
By the time she died at age 55 on March 6, 1888 in Boston after never marrying, just two days following her father’s death, Louisa May Alcott had written hundreds of articles, numerous books and lifted her family out of poverty.
Upon returning to Germantown before her passing, she gave a presentation at Germantown Academy to a bunch of ingratiating, wide-eyed students, followed up by a few groups of them visiting the famous author staying at a nearby residence along or near School House Lane.
After all, “we realize that she is one of our very own people,” confessed Mary Williams to the Germantown Relic Society in 1902, “and not to Boston, nor to Concord, but to Germantown belongs the honor of being her birth-place.”
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: July 26, 2019 at 7:32 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:57 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Food a part of New Year’s traditions for many cultures
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
One of my family’s long-lived African-American traditions is eating for New Year’s a meal of collard or turnip greens that’s usually seasoned with pork or turkey, accompanied with peppery shrimp and rice, barbecued spare ribs, occasionally pungent-smelling chitterlings (or boiled pig intestines), as well as, for “good luck,” the fabled black-eyed peas, or “Hoppin’ John,” all with roots to the diets of enslaved African Americans.
Ironically, such foods were often the leftover “scraps” of slaveholders.
Many families have similar dietary customs throughout Southeastern Pennsylvania on New Year’s as we become increasingly diverse with many new immigrants between 2010 and 2014 hailing from India, China, Mexico, Vietnam, Korea, the Dominican Republic, Ukraine, the Philippines, Jamaica, Haiti and Liberia, according to a 2016 report of the Migration Policy Institute, authored by Randy Capps.
Significantly, the study notes that 24 percent of regional refugees consisted of Liberians, one of my African ethnic identities, according to the DNA analysis of AfricanAncestry.com, specifically the Kpelle people who were used as rice growers often in coastal South Carolina where my mother’s Gullah Geechee ancestors were enslaved on the Sea Islands and the Charleston area’s Middleton Place plantation.
“In the American South, with both rice and black-eyed peas available, the natives of West Africa could prepare a dish that reminded them of home: a humble combination of rice and beans that eventually became known as hoppin’ John,” wrote Tim Carman in the 2011 Washington Post article “A New Year’s tradition, born from slavery.”
Yet, how did the descriptive “Hoppin’ John” come about?
“One such theory supposes the dish earned its name from children hopping around the table before they could eat their beans and rice. (Please.) Another describes a hobbled man by the name of Hoppin’ John who sold the dish on the streets of Charleston, S.C.,” wrote Carman.
Strangely enough, a couple of food historians even assert that the name has French or Persian roots, the article says. I even found a couple of articles claiming that black-eyed peas were first domesticated in Asia.
Although I’ll stick with the belief that the so-called peas (that are really in the bean family) have origins to Africa where human migration began likely from the southeastern part of the continent, there’s no doubt that forms of “Hoppin’ John” have spread worldwide with other New Year’s food preferences.
“Throughout history, people have eaten certain foods on New Year’s Day, hoping to gain riches, love, or other kinds of good fortune during the rest of the year. For people of several nationalities, ham or pork is the luckiest thing to eat on New Year’s Day,” notes foodtimeline.org’s story “American New Year Food traditions,” including “Austrians, Swedes, and Germans.”
And with the Chinese “Year of the Pig” pegged for 2019, pork dishes take on greater significance, especially considering our area’s increase in immigrants from China.
“In Chinese culture, pigs are the symbol of wealth,” says Chinesenewyear.net. “Their chubby faces and pig ears are signs of fortune as well.”
Meanwhile, on New Year’s plates of folks from India are lentils, grapes, an assortment of fish, noodles, cakes and, similar to African Americans, cornbread and black-eyed peas, notes the Times of India.
Many Mexicans believe it’s best to consume “twelve grapes as the clock strikes midnight on [Dec.] 31st, and as you eat each grape make a wish for the new year,” says tripsavvy.com, perhaps accompanied by dried salted codfish, lentils, “sparkling cider, and a hot fruit punch known as ponche.”
The Vietnamese New Year, also known as Tet, includes eating sticky rice cake, pickled onions, meat pie or pork head ham, as well as beef braised with cinnamon, says vina.com, especially for folks from the north.
A favorite New Year’s dish for Ukrainians consists of kholodets or meat jelly made of “a cold jelly bouillon with meat, carrots, and bones,” as well as Shuba salad, a mixture of salty herring, onion, carrots, beets, boiled eggs and mayonnaise, says kyivpost.com.
Philippine immigrants for New Year’s rely on “pancit (noodles)” that “are cooked to signify long life, as are eggs signifying new life,” according to tagalogland.com.
“Traditional delicacies made from malagkit (glutinous or sticky rice) like biko are prepared – that’s so good fortune will stick around throughout the year,” but do avoid fish and chicken “because these animals scrounge for food,” something that humans want to avoid in the new year.
Koreans customarily eat soup with sliced rice cakes, or Tteokguk, that’s also reserved for celebrating birthdays, along with dumpling soup, kimchi dumplings, heart-shaped imitation crab omelettes and stuffed shitake mushrooms.
On the other hand, Jamaicans favor “jerk” pork or chicken with rice and pigeon peas or kidney beans, enhanced by fried plantains as Haitians enjoy “soup joumou,” a combination of meat, potatoes and squash.
It’s a delectable treat that historically was forbidden for the so-called lower-class or slaves before their successful 1804 rebellion that sent shock waves around the world – even encouraging my enslaved ancestors to pursue freedom as they were forced to subsist on food that’s paradoxically today considered delicacies.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached atdscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: January 4, 2019 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:04 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Overcoming immense opposition, William J. Simmons lived inspiring life
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
It’s not easy to grasp the anguish of William J. Simmons, being the young son of an enslaved African-American mother who was desperately determined to clench God-given liberty for herself and children.
“While he was still a young child his mother fled with him and her two other children to the North” from Charleston, S.C., writes scholar-writer Arnold H. Taylor for the Dictionary of American Negro Biography.
“In order to evade slave catchers they lived successively in Philadelphia, Roxbury, Mass., and Chester, Pa., before finally settling in Bordentown, N.J.,” Taylor continued.
And it was that very act of tremendous bravery that would inspire Edward and Esther Simmons’s son, William, who was born June 26, 1849, just before the infamous Congress-sanctioned Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, to become a dentist, noted teacher, college president, trailblazing theologian and renowned biographer, along the way serving as one of nearly 200,000 black soldiers who fought in the Civil War.
He’d enlist as a mere 15-year-old in the 41st United States Colored Troops Infantry that was organized locally in what is today Cheltenham Township in the autumn of 1864 at Camp William Penn, going to war near Petersburg, Va., and eventually witnessing the surrender in April 1865 of the traitorous Confederate officer Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, Va., ending legal slavery in America.
That scene as an ex-slave, along with many other Camp William Penn warriors, must have been exhilarating and motivating, especially as Simmons likely reminisced about the struggles and sacrifices of his dear mother.
As Civil War Day zooms in on Oct. 20 from 10 a.m. to 4 pm. at the historic Richard Wall House Museum at 1 Wall Park Drive in Cheltenham Township, not far from where that first and largest federal institution to train almost 11,000 black soldiers during that “war to preserve the Union” was situated on 13 acres, I am so inspired by the incredible life of Simmons.
“At the age of twelve Simmons began an apprenticeship with a white dentist and learned the profession well enough to treat several of his employer’s patients,” wrote Taylor, one of many fascinating facets that I explored in my 2012 Schiffer Publishing book, “Camp William Penn: 1863-1865.”
And following the war, Simmons returned to dentistry about the time “he joined a white Baptist church in Bordentown and subsequently decided to become a minister.”
Simmons undoubtedly realized that a higher education was certainly necessary for him to pursue a theology career, so “assisted by members of the church to continue his education, he first attended Madison (later Colgate) University and then Rochester University, in New York State.”
Yet, severe eye problems, perhaps due to his war experiences, caused him to leave Rochester, but exhibiting remarkable resilience, Simmons graduated from the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1871 with a bachelor’s degree and a decade later, in 1881, with a master’s diploma.
Simmons taught in Washington’s public schools before marrying in 1874 Josephine A. Silence, with the couple eventually having seven children and relocating to Florida where he “unsuccessfully” dabbled “at land investments and growing oranges.”
After returning to teaching, it’s quite impressive that Simmons also became an ordained minister and pastored a small church, as well as served as a “deputy county clerk and county commissioner,” remarkable achievements for a young African-American man as the Reconstruction era of building the American South began to subside and racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan proliferated to hamper the post-slavery achievements of such blacks.
Regardless of immense oppression, though, by 1879, Simmons was about to soar even higher, landing in Lexington, Ky., “to become the pastor of the First Baptist Church,” before in 1880 assuming “the presidency of the virtually defunct Normal and Theological Institution, a Baptist school in Louisville, and eventually transformed it into the State University of Kentucky, Louisville.”
And as if that wasn’t enough, the prolific Simmons soon “became the editor of American Baptist,” simultaneously advocating that blacks receive industrial educations, when warranted, but that others must pursue classic academic studies to become educators of young African Americans.
Further, as a political visionary, he advised African Americans not to become “a slave to [a particular] political party,” but to keep their options open, speaking out against racist Jim Crow practices and authoring “the biographical dictionary Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, and Rising (1887),” largely to counter America’s growing anti-black sentiment.
Sadly, William J. Simmons died on Oct. 30, 1890, “of heart failure and ‘dropsical diseases,'” at the exceptionally young age of 41.
Ironically, that was the same number of his USCT Civil-War regiment and before he could finish writing a biographical volume about the great accomplishments of black women – more than likely inspired by his mother who courageously lifted her children from bondage to liberation, despite the dreadful odds.
You see, more than anything, Simmons wanted to be a prime example to inspire young blacks to overcome obstacles, regardless of the perceived opposition – something he certainly exceeded throughout his exemplary life.
Don ‘Ogbewii’ Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: October 12, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:04 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Improved science yields revelations about ancestry
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
I was recently shocked to learn that my DNA ancestry has been reshuffled to confirm what a noted anthropologist told me almost 40 years ago – my African ancestry is largely Angolan, something I’ve thought about quite a bit as the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS) prepares to meet for its national convention from Oct. 11 to 13 at the Valley Forge Casino Resort in King of Prussia.
It’s very hard to believe that 37 years have passed since I first visited in November 1981 the elegant home of the esteemed University of Miami professor Oscar Ronald Dathorne, director of the Caribbean African and Afro-American Studies (CAAS) program based at the college’s main Coral Gables campus.
As a Miami News reporter working on a package of stories about the black scholar’s intriguing Guyanese upbringing and scholarly career that spanned from the Caribbean and England to the United States and Africa, as well as the challenges and successes of running such a dynamic academic program, I also met Dr. Dathorne’s German-native wife, Hilde Ostermaier-Dathorne, a respected anthropologist and scholar at their sprawling Perrine home just south of Miami.
Amidst outstanding African art, books and relics, we conversed as Hilde – who had done extensive field studies in Africa – told me that based on bone structure, my ancestry was Angolan, some of such folks known for retaining their Africanisms and identified as Gullah or Geechee people living along coastal South Carolina or Georgia.
Frankly, I was quite intrigued by the prospect of knowing my precise African ancestry, subsequently learning that Angolans actively opposed slavery, including on plantations of upland and coastal South Carolina where they often led the likes of the 1739 Stono rebellion instigated by an Angolan named Jemmy. And some of the greatest warriors in Africa hailed from Angola, including the renowned Queen Nzinga, born in 1582.
Initially, DNA studies of my ancestry via such services as Ancestry.com identified my primary African ancestors from tribes primarily in Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Ghana and Senegal, de-emphasizing my ancestry from southern-central Africa, including Angola.
And that’s why I was so astounded when Ancestry.com recently realigned the ancestries of many subscribers, including mine, making “Angola, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo” and other south-central African countries as my ancestors’ primary points of origin.
So, what are the reasons for the major adjustments? “Your DNA doesn’t change, but the science we use to analyze it does,” explains Ancestry.com. “Your results may change over time as the science improves.”
Specifically, 37 percent of my heritage has been updated to incorporate “Southern Bantu[-speaking] Peoples” from those regions, 22 percent each for Benin/Togo and Mali, 8 percent Ivory Coast/Ghana, as well as 7 percent “England, Wales & Northwestern Europe,” 3 percent “Ireland and Scotland,” and even 1 percent from Hilde Dathorne’s Germany, another surprising revelation.
According to Ancestry.com, my African ancestors for more than 200 years “were enslaved and brought to South Carolina to work on rice and indigo plantations. In the mid-1800s, African Americans outnumbered whites in South Carolina almost 2 to 1,” often allowing them to retain African cultural and other traits associated with the Gullah, a word that is likely derived from Angolan linguistic patterns as determined by such legendary black scholars as Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner, a pioneering linguist with a 1926 doctorate in English literature from the University of Chicago.
After slavery and to escape racist Jim Crow policies, “many [blacks] followed the railways north to cities like Philadelphia and New York, looking to make better lives for their families,” including my kinfolk who settled in South and North Philly and in the Big Apple’s Harlem and the Bronx.
Relatedly, I’m very excited about the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS) preparing to meet locally to probe such presentations as “Combining Traditional Research with DNA to Grow Your Family Tree,” “Family Reunions: Telling the Story,” “Sold Down the River: The Forced Migration from the North to the Antebellum South” and “Ancestors Lives Matters” delivered by the acclaimed genealogist Tony Burroughs.
And I am especially interested in the seminar of the activist-lawyer-journalist Michael Coard titled “Avenging Our Enslaved Ancestors & Honoring Our Ancient Ancestors,” as well as Edward McLaughlin’s “The Cemetery Monument Hidden in Plain View: Black Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Buried at Philadelphia National Cemetery” where many African-American Civil-War soldiers rest who were trained at Camp William Penn, the first and largest federal institution to host such warriors during that epic struggle.
Members of 3rd United States Colored Troops (USCT) re-enactors (the camp’s first regiment) and Citizens for the Restoration of Historical LaMott (CROHL) are also participating, according to organizers, with conference attendees having an option to visit an associated museum in Cheltenham Township.
And as I continue to work on a book about my maternal and paternal ancestors, the session by Adrienne Whaley, “Finding Revolutionary Ancestors: Understanding Your Resources,” should be quite helpful.
That’s also considering my ongoing research and the WHYY television program that I appeared in earlier this year pertaining to the African-American town originating on 200 acres of an ex-slave working for the 18th century Morrey family, Cremona Morrey Fry, who bore five interracial children fathered by the well-to-do benefactor and Quaker landowner in Cheltenham, Richard Morrey.
In fact, if you attend the national conference, I look forward to seeing you there as I present on Saturday autographed books about local history incorporating the genealogy of such families, as well as focusing on the legendary Camp William Penn warriors – brothers-in-arms to my Gullah kinfolk of Angolan ancestry who served during the Civil War in one of South Carolina’s African-American regiments, the 21st USCT Infantry.
It’s something that undoubtedly harkens back to my Angolan warrior heritage.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com. For more information about the AAHGS conference, visit aahgs.org.
Originally Published: September 30, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:59 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Sanctuary founded by Frederick Douglass’s descendants still thriving
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
It wasn’t hard visualizing the outstanding 19th century African-American leader and anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass standing on the shore of a black community called Highland Beach in Maryland and gazing across the Chesapeake Bay towards the “Eastern Shore” where he had earlier escaped brutal slavery.
And that was as I lounged near where Douglass reminisced with my wife Billie on a sandy beach just a few yards from a swinging Labor Day party under a humongous white tent.
We had just finished an early evening Highland Beach meal of grilled salmon, raw oysters, a range of salads, green beans and other treats washed down with soft and strong spirits under the tent as a jamming rhythm-and-blues band from Richmond, Va., ignited the place with tunes by Sly and the Family Stone, Frankie Beverly and Maze and Bruno Mars, driving the dancing, mostly African-American crowd almost to a frenzy.
“Highland Beach was founded in the summer of 1893 by Charles Douglass,” one of Frederick Douglass’ sons, “and his wife Laura after they had been turned away from a restaurant at nearby Bay Ridge resort because of their race,” notes the online article “History of Highland Beach” at highlandbeachmd.org, 30 years after Frederick Douglass inspired the first black federal Civil War troops to be trained at Camp William Penn in what is today Cheltenham Township in the summer of 1863.
Douglass’s son and daughter-in-law bought several dozen acres “on the Chesapeake Bay with 500 feet of beachfront and turned it into a summer enclave for their family and friends,” that included a retirement home for Frederick Douglass that today serves as a historical landmark and museum for the community of mostly very affluent African Americans, many of them doctors, lawyers, prominent business people and educators.
Over many decades since its founding, “the residents and guests” on Highland Beach included “Paul Robeson, D.C. municipal court judge Robert Terrell and his wife Dr. Mary Church Terrell, Booker T. Washington, Robert Weaver, Alex Haley, W.E.B. DuBois, and poets Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar.”
In fact, Highland Beach was one of the only sanctuaries that my father-in-law, Commander Wesley A. Brown ,had when he attended the nearby Naval Academy from 1945 to 1949 when he became the first African American to graduate from that institution that’s based in nearby Annapolis, Md.
Although banned from virtually all public and private facilities in Maryland during the era of Jim Crow segregation, my father-in-law would sometimes walk for nearly five miles to Highland Beach where he was provided lodging and entertainment, as well as hailed as a hero during his successful quest to “breaking the color barrier” at the Academy, despite the virulent racism that he endured.
And ironically, the morning following the Highland celebration, my bride and I had Sunday brunch at a seafood restaurant on the Severn River across from the Naval Academy and gloated over the largest building on campus that’s named for her dad, the Wesley A. Brown Fieldhouse, built in 2008 for $54 million with funding that fellow academy graduate Sen. John McCain helped to push through.
Although my dad-in-law, who sadly passed away in 2012, did not generally agree with McCain’s political stances, I believe he would have been very proud of the Arizona senator standing up to the ongoing dysfunction of the Trump Administration, the general cowardice of the Republican-dominated Congress, as well as refusing to kill former President Barack Obama’s vital health care initiatives.
I thought about the courage of McCain as he fought devastating brain cancer with so much class, as just a stone’s throw away from the fieldhouse we saw preparations being made for the senator’s funeral where he’d be laid to rest not far from where my father-in-law’s ashes are encased at the columbarium among other Navy warriors.
And I think Commander Brown would have been proud of the wave of new black politicians running for office in record numbers and winning important primaries or elections, ranging from Tallahassee, Fla., Mayor Andrew Gillum determined to become Florida’s first black governor and Ayanna Pressley’s victory in the Massachusetts U.S. House race to Wesley Bell as a Ferguson City, Mo., council member unseating Robert P. McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor who led the probe into the unjust police killing of Michael Brown, an African American.
Relatedly, during that same Labor Day weekend, former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick advanced his case against the league for allegedly colluding to exclude or blacklist him for his heroic demonstrations against such festering police killings by kneeling on the sidelines during the national anthem – his God-given, human and political rights in my book.
On top of that, the sporting goods giant Nike very recently announced an endorsement campaign that supports such courageous and outspoken athletes with Kaepernick as the centerpiece. Hallelujah!
None of these accomplishments mean nothing, though, if blacks, Latinos and others being persecuted by the Trump Administration and the spineless Congress do not get out and vote during the upcoming mid-term elections in November. As Obama said in an unprecedented and justified attack against Trump’s dangerous policies, failure to elect decent and fair-minded politicians with guts will have “dire” ramifications.
Although Frederick Douglass died in 1895 of a heart attack before he could enjoy his Highland Beach retirement home, his tremendous legacy was celebrated over Labor Day weekend there with great soulful passion and optimism that shone in his eyes as he looked across the bay at a place where he first burst from the shackles of slavery.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at kumbyah-universal.com.
Originally Published: September 14, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:02 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Long-ago messages resonate in current political climate
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
When the pioneering Philly-based retailer John Wanamaker hosted a visit of U.S. President Benjamin Harrison in 1907 at his grand Lindenhurst mansion in Cheltenham, the commander-in-chief was already known for trying to protect the civil rights of African Americans, quite a rare practice for that era of rampant racism that our current “leader,” Donald J. Trump, seems to relish.
Counter to Trump’s indifference to people of color, “Harrison reminded the nation that” African Americans “‘did not intrude themselves upon us [or America]; they were brought here in chains and held in the communities where they are now chiefly found, by a cruel slave code,'” notes author Christopher Brian Booker on blacksandpresidency.com.
As early as 1885, about 20 years after serving as a Union officer in the Civil War, Harrison pointed out that “the colored race in the South has been subjected to indignities, cruelties, outrages, and a repression of rights such as find no parallel in the history of civilization.”
Despite sometimes wavering and succumbing to racist pressure, Harrison also recognized that black Northerners faced major racial challenges, too, following the period of Reconstruction as Jim Crow discrimination took hold with the growth of white racists such as the Ku Klux Klan during the early 1900s, while Wanamaker’s newly created department store empire soared in downtown Philly.
In fact, Wanamaker’s store eventually hired light-complexioned black women as sales clerks and then other darker people of color, old-timers used to tell me.
Meanwhile, African Americans began to migrate from the South to the North and West Coast in massive numbers during those horrid times of uncontrolled lynching, segregation and other discrimination.
Harrison, the Indiana politician – whose grandfather William Henry Harrison was the ninth U.S. president and great-granddad Benjamin Harrison a signer of the Declaration of Independence – said that such white repression “was our shame, not theirs,” despite blacks making “remarkable advances in education and the acquisition of property.”
Yet, Harrison acknowledged that African Americans’ educational, housing and job opportunities were generally abysmal due to racial hatred – the same kind that Trump is firing up today, despite a group of African-American ministers recently and bogusly claiming that he is or will be one of the greatest pro-black presidents in history.
“Before you praise this president for being pro-black … do your homework,” admonished the Rev. Dr. Kevin R. Murriel, senior pastor of Cascade United Methodist Church in Atlanta, Ga., during a recent online presentation.
The good reverend pointed out that Trump’s policies have been horrible for African Americans as he’s “ramped up mass incarceration” by way of a new so-called “war on drugs.”
Incredibly, Trump has appointed an overwhelming number of white conservative federal judges, with virtually none as people of color, asserts Murriel.
Meanwhile, “unlawful” voter “purges” have largely hurt black and brown communities, as Trump has also moved to end protections to limit predatory lending and chewed up environmental regulations that greatly impact people of color, the pastor says.
And Trump’s administration has de-emphasized the push for affordable housing while cutting billions from nutritional programs to help young people of color and others.
That’s keeping in mind that much earlier President Harrison tried to get dedicated federal funding for African-American schools, as well as to support black voting rights, but met stiff congressional opposition.
Quite ludicrous, the Rev. Murriel says, is that Trump even claims he greatly improved the economy that led to record-low black unemployment, an achievement that was really accomplished over eight years by the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, whom Trump deviously declared was not born an American citizen as a campaign tactic to attract white nationalists’ votes.
In his very shaky political and business endeavors that are being probed for criminal wrongdoing as his former personal attorney and campaign manager both have been convicted of felonies, Trump has denigrated African countries and Haiti.
And he’s been slow and incompetent with helping the U.S. territory Puerto Rico following a devastating hurricane, humiliated and bad-mouthed African-American women and men, as well as defended and even hired white supremacists while pushing for policies that discriminate against immigrants of color, the preacher asserts.
As I now read the top-selling book, “Unhinged,” by Trump’s estranged African-American reality show and political protege Omarosa Manigault Newman, I cringe about the apparent lunacy and treachery that has been unleashed in the White House, notwithstanding Manigault Newman’s enormous credibility issues before and after being fired by the Trump Administration that reportedly now has no senior black officials in the West Wing.
Appointed in 1889 as postmaster general by President Harrison before modernizing the U.S. Postal Service, John Wanamaker and other area residents, including the Rosenwald family of Sears fame with a Jenkintown estate (Alverthorpe), helped to fund black learning institutions such as the Penn Industrial School on St. Helena Island in South Carolina where my own maternal Gullah Geechee ancestors were enslaved not far from where Omarosa’s Manigault kinfolk likely toiled on plantations.
Ironically, she is perhaps realizing the long-ago messages from her persecuted ancestors resonating in the powerful preaching of an Atlanta minister, the Rev. Dr. Kevin R. Murriel, who is not afraid to admit the stark reality. The “evidence” indicates that President Trump “cares nothing about people of color.”
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
Information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: August 31, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:01 a.m.
AT PLACE IN HISTORY: Quirky shipping incident caused shore to go bananas
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
As one of my daily excursions during a recent weeklong visit of my brother-in-law, Ike, of Long Beach, Calif., I drove to the Atlantic City area, specifically to a relatively new concrete fishing pier under the Route 52 bridge connecting Somers Point with Ocean City, N.J., where we got just a few bites from fish messing around with our lines.
Without landing a single fish, we pulled up huge clunks of bright-green seaweed for at least a few hours, despite a local bait seller telling us that in recent weeks folks had been catching hefty flounder from the pier.
With temperatures hovering around 90, I lamented that I had not opted for a party-boat or even charter vessel since there were some reports of anglers pulling up fish among the many wrecks of sunken ships that often met untimely and tragic fates off the Jersey coast over several centuries.
Yet, there have been other shipping incidents along that shore, some of them quite quirky, to say the least.
One of the weirdest stories concerns the apparent rescuing of untold bunches of bananas in 1903, causing local folks to, in fact, “go bananas” big time!
“In a dense fog, on the night of March 30, 1903, the Norwegian steamship ‘Brighton’ stranded on a bar 200 yards off the upper end of Pacific avenue, Atlantic City,” noted Alfred Miller Heston in his online 450-page book, “ABSEGAMI: ANNALS of Eyren Haven and Atlantic City, 1609 to 1904,” first published in 1904.
Heston, an Atlantic City resident, wrote that several passengers and the crew of 22 were rescued from the 1,250-ton vessel that had been “steaming up the coast in a storm.”
To make matters worse, the fog was so dense that “signal rockets failed to penetrate the fog and darkness,” Heston wrote.
“At daylight the lifesavers boarded the ship, going out over a stormy surf in a life-boat. The crew lifted the hatches in order to lighten the boat and bananas by the bunch – thousands of bunches – were sent over the side and washed ashore, where a great crowd of people gathered them. Indeed, Atlantic City went ‘banana crazy,'” Heston declared.
And that was only the beginning of the bizarre episode concerning the bananas, initially cultivated in New Guinea 6,500 years ago and in Africa, stretching back to 4,500 years, according to sciencemag.org.
“Thousands of bunches were brought ashore from the stranded steamship, and the town from one end to the other was a banana market. Atlantic City was crowded with Lenten visitors, some of whom gleefully exhibited to their friends a bunch of the green fruit,” even attracting shark-like opportunists from nearby Philly and the Big Apple.
“Hucksters and agents from the fruit dealers, not only here [Atlantic City], but from Philadelphia and New York, scrambled over each other to buy for twenty or twenty-five cents a bunch of the green fruit that was worth anywhere from $1.20 to $1.50 in customary markets,” wrote Heston, obviously taken aback by the spectacle.
“Great bunches of the fruit were seen on every kind of conveyance – wagon, hack, baby coach, donkey cart, rolling chair and street car,” with the town going into a complete and utter frenzy. “On hotel [restaurant] bills of fare were bananas raw, bananas fried, banana fritters and plain bananas. Every day for a week was banana day.”
Ultimately, “wrecking steamers” were able to “pull the ‘Brighton’ off the bar,” setting it afloat virtually unscathed, for the last leg of its journey to New York, minus an awful lot of the bananas, but salvaging much of the $40,000 cargo that included authentic Jamaican rum.
The truth is, after our dismal day of fishing, pulling up some of that rum would have been a very nice constellation prize.
Instead, we endured the unrelenting teasing of my wife, Billie, about how we were not fishermen but simply seaweed-men, as Ike and I mournfully cleared our hooks all morning of the stuff.
Regardless, I did manage to get her to simmer down a bit when we cruised over to the Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa for its buffet that included many seafood delights.
I think there were even a few dessert dishes, composed of you know what: bananas!
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: August 17, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:02 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Exploring the unknown is alluring … despite the dangers
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
Revelations that people around the globe may have heard the distress radio transmissions of the super-adventuresome woman aviator Amelia Earhart, who attended during the early 1900s the nearby Cheltenham-based Ogontz School for Young Ladies, are intriguing but so heart-wrenching.
The “water’s knee keep – let me out!” bellowed a woman suspected to be Earhart in one transmission that was heard by a 15-year-old St. Petersburg, Fla., girl not long after the famous flier took off in her Lockheed Electra aircraft in summer 1937 during a mission to be the first woman to circle the globe with her navigator, Fred Noonan, when the plane disappeared.
The harrowing transmission continued, according to the girl, as Earhart, pleaded, “[H]elp us quick!”
During another episode, a woman identified likely as Earhart broadcast on a radio frequency that was heard by a Toronto, Canada, housewife: “We have taken in water … we can’t hold on much longer!”
A study commissioned by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) asserts that people around the world probably heard the desperate appeals of Earhart and Noonan by way of various radio frequencies not long after the plane crashed in the sea near a deserted island where they survived awhile, despite countering conclusions by the U.S. Navy indicating the pair crashed into the Pacific and quickly died.
Really, the final distress radio calls pertaining to some of the most important events in history provide a timeline of related technological advancement and humankind’s insatiable appetite for adventure – despite the risks, sometimes tragic results and occasionally even life-saving miracles.
And that’s from the desperate radio transmissions emanating from the Titanic as it sank April 15, 1912, in the northern Atlantic and the USS Indianapolis battleship during World War II being torpedoed in 1945, leaving much of the crew to be devoured by sharks to the desperate cries of a Russian cosmonaut cursing the shoddy construction of his spacecraft as it fell uncontrollably toward the Earth’s surface in the 1960s.
In fact, 700 people survived – as 1,500 others, including members of the Widener and Elkins families of Cheltenham, died – after the technological marvel, the RMS Titanic, struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, owing their lives “to the newest technology of the time: wireless telegraphy,” wrote Megan Garber in her theatlantic.com article, “The Technology That Allowed the Titanic Survivors to Survive.”
“It was Guglielmo Marconi – he, later, of radio fame – who ultimately [during the late 1800s and early 1900s] devised the system that could successfully facilitate communication between moving ships, via coded electromagnetic radio waves passed between dedicated transmitters and receivers,” Garber wrote.
Despite human errors, the Titanic’s transmitter ultimately beckoned to such rescuing vessels as the Carpathia: “Require immediate assistance…. Come at once. We struck an iceberg. Sinking.”
Even with Cheltenham-resident Eleanor Widener managing to survive the debacle by being picked up by the Carpathia, her husband, George Widener, as well as son, Harry, did not live to return home to their Elkins Park mansion, the sprawling Lynnewood Hall.
And when radio technology was much more advanced a few decades later in 1945, unspeakable tragedy could not be avoided.
Just after the USS Indianapolis in the Pacific “had successfully carried parts for the Little Boy atomic bomb across the Pacific” to Tinian Island, on July 30, 1945, it was sunk by Japanese torpedoes, killing many crew members but also leaving great numbers with bloody injuries in shark-infested waters.
Just before the sinking, the “Ship’s captain, Captain Charles McVay, then continued on to Guam,” wrote writer Tara Ross in an online article, “This Day in History: USS Indianapolis is sunk by Japanese torpedoes.”
However, the radio “transmission containing Indianapolis’s expected route was sent ahead to the Leyte Gulf. Unfortunately, a radio staff member there decoded part of the message incorrectly. As a result, the senior officer to whom McVay was to report had no idea that Indianapolis was coming. Thus, he would not miss her when she failed to arrive on time a few days later.”
Ross continued: “Of the nearly 1,200 men on board, about 900 men survived the initial explosion and went overboard into the water,” many gruesomely devoured by sharks, with 316 ultimately surviving.
Was this essentially bad karma, considering that the “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” atomic bombs incinerated, burned or radioactively killed up to 226,000 Japanese civilians on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effectively ending World War II?
Exceptionally tragic were the 1967 radio transmissions of the Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov when his Soyuz spaceship began crashing to earth as parachutes failed, at least based on accounts that have been sometimes questioned.
As the story goes: “The space vehicle [was] shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes – though no one knows this – won’t work and the cosmonaut … is about to, literally, crash full speed into the Earth, his body turning molten on impact,” wrote Robert Krulwich in a March 18, 2011, opinion piece for National Public Radio (NPR).
“As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, ‘cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship,'” Krulwich wrote, acknowledging that “if it’s true – is beyond shocking.”
Yet, because of human beings’ unquenchable thirsts for adventure and learning about the unknown with immense competitive drives, reminiscent of the very driven Amelia Earhart, we often push ourselves and each other beyond human endurance.
We’ve even blasted radio-enabled satellites and pointed massive telescopes to the heavens where we’ve picked up mysterious signals from the far reaches of the universe – perhaps some with extraterrestrial life and other regions with black holes that suck matter into infinity, as well as rotating neutron stars or magnetars that are “the extremely magnetic, fantastically dense corpses of exploded stars,” explains NationalGeographic.com.
And although all this stuff seems to be quite fascinating, I cannot help but think of a rather blunt warning of the dynamic motivational speaker Les Brown, whom I interviewed many years ago in Miami: “Be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it!”
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: August 3, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:05 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: African-American man helped lead
first visit to North Pole
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
As many of us deal with the climbing summer temperatures, this polar-exploration saga, or “blast from the past,” might be enough to cool you down a wee bit but also spark your mind’s eye.
One of the most jolting items that I spotted in an old book, “Germantown History,” which I discovered some time ago at a second-hand shop in Glenside and published in 1915, notes that in our very own Pennsylvania, “the first expedition was fitted out for Arctic exploration,” according to a Nov. 25, 1904, address given by Hampton L. Carson, attorney general of Pennsylvania, to The Site and Relic Society of Germantown.
Probing further, I quickly learned that Carson’s topic, “The Dramatic Features of Pennsylvania,” likely referred to the epic 1891 journey of Cmdr. Robert Edwin Peary, a Navy officer whom had been stationed at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.
I was surprised to discover too that the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in downtown Philly harbors “the flag carried by Robert E. Peary on his first major Arctic expedition, which was financed by the Academy and its members in 1891-92,” writes Matt Erickson in an online 2014 article for DrexelNOW, “Hidden Treasures: The 43-Star Artic Expedition Flag at the Academy of Natural Sciences.”
The Pennsylvania native “Peary ultimately did hoist the flag on the northern coast of Greenland, despite breaking his leg in an accident on his way north, an injury that prompted the Academy to mount a second expedition for the purpose of rescuing him,” wrote Erickson.
“Along the way, the expedition did collect a wide variety of new specimens for the Academy: polar bears, musk ox, seals, birds and plants.”
Later, in 1909, Matthew Alexander Henson, an African American and son of Maryland sharecroppers who married a Philadelphia woman, Eva Flint, would journey with Peary to co-discover the North Pole, although there is still controversy about whether the duo ultimately accomplished that remarkable task.
However, most historical sources give credit to the two men with some noting that it was Henson, a black man, who first accomplished the tremendous feat.
Depending on the source, the duo initially met in Philadelphia or Washington, D.C., where Henson had “found work as a clerk in a hat shop,” according to biography.com. Apparently, Peary was a customer in the store when they began to converse.
Already, according to a variety of sources, Henson was a seasoned sailor, incredibly leaving home and an abusive stepmother at just age 11, then “walked all the way to Baltimore” from D.C. “and found work as a cabin boy on the ship Katie Hines” on which “skipper, Captain Childs, took Henson under his wing and saw to his education.” Henson “also saw much of the world,” says biography.com, “traveling to Asia, Africa and Europe.”
Peary was so impressed with “Henson’s seafaring credentials” that he “hired him as his valet for an upcoming expedition to Nicaragua” where they became close friends.
They returned to Philadelphia, and in April 1891, Henson married Flint, “a member of Philadelphia’s black middle class,” notes the 2004 encyclopedic book, “African American Lives,” despite the marriage eventually ending due to Henson’s frequent absences caused by his journeys, according to another source. Other reports indicate that Henson may have broken off the marriage after realizing that his wife was pregnant by another suitor when he returned from a long excursion.
Persistently, “Peary and Henson would make multiple attempts to reach the North Pole,” notes biography.com. “Their 1902 attempt proved tragic, with six Eskimo team members perishing due to a lack of food and supplies.”
Yet, “they made more progress during their 1905 trip: Backed by President Theodore Roosevelt and armed with a then state-of-the-art vessel that had the ability to cut through ice, the team was able to sail within 175 miles of the North Pole.” However, “ice blocking the sea path thwarted the mission’s completion, forcing them to turn back.”
Meanwhile, purportedly, “Henson fathered a son, Anauakaq, with an Inuit woman [Akatingwah], but back at home in 1906 married Lucy Ross.” He was Henson’s only known offspring, sources indicate.
In one of his two autobiographies, “A Negro Explorer at the North Pole,” that was published in 1912, it’s clear that Henson had an extraordinary relationship with the Inuit people, further writes scholar-writer Sholomo B. Levy for “African American Lives,” edited by Harvard professors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Higginbotham:
“I have been to all intents an Esquimo, with Esquimos for companions, speaking their language, dressing in the same kind of clothes, living in the same kind of dens, eating the same food, enjoying their pleasures, and frequently sharing their grief.”
As Peary and Henson finally approached the North Pole in April 1909, following “eighteen years of sacrifice and repeated disappointment, Peary, at age fifty-three and Henson, at forty-three, found themselves 175 miles from the top of the world with four Inuit,” Levy revealed.
And as they closed in on their target with Henson already ahead of Peary, it seems the competitive streaks in each of the men kicked in: “Henson suspected that Peary would ask him to trail behind on the last leg of the journey. Thus, on 6 April 1909, when Peary instructed him to stop just short of the North Pole, Henson claims that he inadvertently overshot his target and camped at the pole forty-five minutes before Peary arrived,” wrote Levy.
“Peary disputed this claim, and his relationship with Henson became much more distant after their return. Henson wrote that ‘for the crime of being present when the Pole was reached Commander Peary has ignored me ever since.'”
As Peary retired with a hefty pension, though, and received worldwide adulation, Henson worked virtually unnoticed “as a handyman in a Brooklyn garage for sixteen dollars a week and moonlighting at the post office” as his “second wife, Lucy Jane Ross, had to work to supplement their income.”
Eventually, he did receive cursory recognition, most of it initiated by black leaders such as Booker T. Washington.
And upon Peary’s death in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 20, 1920, he was heroically buried at the Arlington National Cemetery. More than three decades later, on March 9, 1955, Henson died of a cerebral hemorrhage in New York City where he was buried in an unmarked grave before finally being reinterred in 1988 with his wife, Lucy, at Arlington “near the site of Robert Peary’s grave.”
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: July 22, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:03 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Transportation inequality: Another vehicle
for racial discrimination
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
On a frigid day in December 1863, William Still, the “father of the Underground Railroad,” departed the grounds of Camp William Penn in what today is Cheltenham Township and where almost 11,000 black soldiers trained to fight in the Civil War, the largest contingent of about 180,000 such warriors to prepare at federal facilities in the United States.
The son of former slaves, Still would help set into motion protests against segregation or the separation of races on public transportation that would empower other trailblazers ranging from the great anti-lynching giant Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Rosa Parks and many others.
And their valiant actions, sadly, would be just a segment of the “transportation inequality” that people of color have endured in America since its founding and to this very day with President Donald Trump’s cruel immigration policies.
But, back on that cold morning in 1863, Still traveled to the fort by the North Pennsylvania Railroad and the supply center that he operated on its 13 acres being leased to the federal government by Edward M. Davis, the son-in-law of the famous Quaker anti-slavery abolitionist, Lucretia Mott, who lived next to Camp William Penn in her “Roadside” estate.
Still, one of the most influential blacks in Philadelphia, was anxious to return to his city store by railway for an early afternoon appointment but was told by the train conductor as he rode homeward that due to “the rules” he’d have to leave his seat and “step out on the platform” because blacks weren’t allowed to ride inside of such train cars.
Still exploded: “Well, it is a cruel rule! [A]nd I believe this is the only city of note in the civilized world, where a decent colored man cannot be allowed to ride in a city passenger car,” telling the story in a follow-up letter to Philly’s newspaper, the Press, that he also published in a 1867 pamphlet.
Outraged and humiliated, Still opted to ride outside the car to make his appointment, but when the weather became unbearable, departed the train and walked the rest of the way in the blasting snow.
After essentially filing a class-action lawsuit, Still’s persistence with the likes of Lucretia Mott, a white woman who’d ride in solidarity with black passengers (including Camp William Penn soldiers) on the outside platforms, spurred the desegregation of public transportation in the city.
Others, even before Rosa Parks’ victory with the help of the black NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall (destined to become the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice) during the 1960s’ civil rights’ movement, helped to federally strike down such “foul” rules, as Still once described them.
The anti-lynching crusader, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “was physically removed from a Memphis train after her refusal to leave the first-class ladies car for the Colored coach,” notes a press statement sent to me about an intriguing play, “The Ladies Car,” concerning Wells-Barnett’s life, as well as her bravery and resulting lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern Railroad Company in 1884. “After a successful premier in Atlanta, The Ladies Car, a historically inspired drama based on the life of Ida B. Wells, heads to Holly Springs, Mississippi (hometown of Wells) in honor of her July 16th birthday.”
According to the playwright, Tiana L. Ferrell, who’s the great-great granddaughter of Wells-Barnett, “The Ladies Car provides an opportunity to promote the legacy of a courageous heroine and her quest for freedom” when it is presented July 14 at Rust College (www.rustcollege.edu) as part of the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Social Justice Weekend from July 12-15 featuring an array of related programs.
Further examples of “transportation inequality” can be found even before the battles of Wells-Barnett and William Still, based on a very interesting article that I found, “Transportation Protests: 1841 to 1992,” at www.teachingforchange.org, written by Julian Hipkins III and David Busch.
For instance, on July 16, 1854, the 24-year-old New York City school teacher Elizabeth Jennings Graham, was grabbed by a bus “conductor” who told her to get off of the vehicle reserved for whites, “he took hold of her by force to expel her.” She successfully challenged the brutality and bogus practice.
Then, “months after San Francisco’s horse-powered street car companies during the Civil War dispatched … street cars (with orders only to accept white passengers),” just several months before William Still’s protests, on “April 17, 1863, Charlotte Brown, a young African American woman from a prominent family, boarded a street car and was forced off,” but then legally defeated such segregation.
Two decades earlier, the great anti-slavery abolitionist and orator, Frederick Douglass, in addition to being maltreated and ejected from local train lines near Norristown, Pa., was in 1841 with “his friend James N. Buffum” after they “entered a train car reserved for white passengers in Lynn, MA,” were “ordered … to leave the car,” which “they refused,” waging effective campaigns via the press and legal system.
And in the Philly area, the likes of educator Fanny Jackson Coppin, South Carolina politician Robert Smalls (who commandeered a Confederate ship during the Civil War), as well as writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, became victims of transportation segregation, cases protested by the likes of the black leader Octavius V. Catto who was assassinated by racists in 1871.
Other subsequent challenges included the infamous Homer Plessy v. Ferguson landmark Supreme Court case establishing the stupid legal doctrine “separate but equal” because the justices ruled that the train-riding Plessy, who was black, violated Louisiana law when he had to be thrown off a train on June 7, 1892.
Although earlier challenges “led Congress to grant equal rights to black citizens in public accommodations with the Civil Rights Act of 1875,” ultimately “the Supreme Court overturned this victory in 1883, declaring it unconstitutional,” Hipkins and Busch wrote, surely a reminder of a couple of recent higher-court rulings applauded by Trump and many Republicans that imperil the rights of labor unions, as well as Islamic and Latino immigrants.
Transportation is still being used to enforce racism by stopping primarily people of color from crossing our borders – whether by foot, wheeled vehicles or jumbo jets.
Really, transportation has been a primary vehicle to dispense discrimination from America’s inception, notes Mark Brenman in a 2007 article for www.americanbar.org, “Transportation Inequality in the United States: A Historical Overview,” starting with forcing Native Americans westward from their land under horrific conditions and the deadly trans-Atlantic abductions of blacks from West Africa for free-labor on American plantations that ironically necessitated William Still’s Underground Railroad to help them reach for freedom, equality and justice.
If there’s anything that William Still has taught us from the day he angrily marched through a winter storm in 1863 after being forced from the train, no matter the mightiness of the opposition, true justice and the will of the people shall always prevail if we are bold enough to act.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: July 6, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:04 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Local building a key piece of Underground Railroad
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
Please consider the 19th century anti-slavery vigor that electrified up to 200 listeners via moving speeches of the country’s greatest liberators in the hallowed Abolition Hall in Plymouth Meeting – from the foremost black leader and ex-slave Frederick Douglass to the brilliant Quaker preacher Lucretia Mott of nearby Cheltenham and the legendary William Lloyd Garrison of Boston, Mass.
Their sanctified voices echoed around the country during the mid-1800s and as the Civil War (from 1861 to 1865) raged to abolish slavery and save the American Republic, which makes opposition to a plan to maximize the historical relevance of Abolition Hall and related buildings, as well as land, baffling and short-sighted, to say the least.
Buttressed by the heart of local abolitionists – many of them free blacks and white Quakers – such nationally acclaimed anti-slavery warriors supported one of the most impressive routes of the Underground Railroad led by the likes of Abolition Hall’s builder, George Corson, who abhorred the slavery that was so familiar to such nearby Norristown African Americans as Daniel Ross, a very courageous and close associate of Corson’s.
“A Quaker limemaker, quarrier, and agent of the Underground Railroad, George Corson … was a well connected conductor” of the system that ushered slaves to freedom throughout the north and into Canada, often utilizing the many acres of land and nearby structures adjacent to Abolition Hall, including his own residence.
“He was a founder of the Plymouth Meeting Anti-Slavery Society” who was “aided by his wife, orator Martha Maulsby Corson …,” notes Mary Ellen Snodgrass’ book, “The Underground Railroad: An Encyclopedia of People, Places, and Operations.”
Bravely, in a landmark case, “[o]n August 29, 1855, George Corson” helped to escort with other abolitionists “Jane Johnson to a Philadelphia federal courtroom to testify on behalf of Passmore Williamson, a Quaker attorney found guilty of [heroically] abducting Johnson from her master, North Carolina planter John Hill Wheeler.”
With the assistance of the “father of the Underground Railroad,” William Still of Philadelphia, Johnson was ushered to freedom with the help of locals who probably included the likes of Daniel Ross of Norristown.
“The history of the Underground Railroad in Montgomery County … cannot be told without mentioning Dan Ross, an African American Underground Railroad agent who was connected with the Quaker Corson family of Plymouth Meeting,” wrote the acclaimed historian Charles Blockson, an African-American native of Norristown, where Ross “lived in a spacious two-and-a-half-story frame house at Green and Jacoby Streets,” in his 2001 book, “African Americans in Pennsylvania: Above Ground and Underground.”
Blockson added, “Agent Dr. Hiram Corson stated: ‘When fugitives had reached Norristown, they were rested and cared for; the Abolition members notified of the fact. The next step was to send for ‘Old Dan’ to have his counsel. They were generally taken to his home and kept until arrangements were made to forward the fugitives to Canada.'”
Remarkably, according to census records, by 1870, Ross is living in a Norristown home worth an amazing $5,000 with a personal estate value of $300, outstanding accomplishments for an African American during the late 1800s who risked his liberty and life harboring runaways.
“There should be a portrait of Daniel Ross, and a history of his labors during twenty or more years,” declared Robert R. Corson, a relative of George Corson’s, about the illustrious black man, in William Still’s epic book, “The Underground Railroad,” the indispensable Bible of that laudatory escape system.
“Hundreds were entertained in his humble home … He must not be left out” or, as I see it, pushed aside in history.
And nor should his freedom-fighting comrades, as well as the buildings and Plymouth Meeting land that are so sacred in American history while being so instrumental in abolishing the horrors of slavery and mending the Union.
Commendably, during a series of public hearings, local advocacy groups, including Philly’s the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), have pushed to “preserve the Corson Estate and its attendant historic structures – including Abolition Hall, the neighboring Hovenden House [where George Corson’s son-in-law, artist Thomas Hovenden, painted freedom fighter John Brown going to the gallows], and a barn that once gave refuge to escaped slaves – as a proposed 67-townhouse development edges closer to being built on the land,” noted Norristown’s newspaper, The Times Herald, a sister publication of the Times Herald & Public Spirit.
The groups, modern freedom fighters in my book, want to make sure that the historically significant structures and land are not relegated to obscurity or worse but receive long-lasting exposure and recognition as expressed during a June 14 public hearing at a Whitemarsh Township supervisors meeting that will be followed up on Aug. 16.
It’s time for the developer, township and all concerned to join hands and move forward with better preserving and celebrating this vital history in the spirit of what Frederick Douglass once declared in an 1855 speech, “I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong.”
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
Information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: June 22, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:09 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Spirit, fervor of civil rights activist lives on today
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
When the great anti-lynching giant Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, who’d help to start in 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), visited Philadelphia on May 27, 1892, a racist mob destroyed the headquarters of her Tennessee-based newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, that vigorously exposed such rampant violence against African Americans.
It’s such fervor for fighting against injustice and reaching for excellence that’s carried on today as a local branch of the historic NAACP honors citizens who’ve embodied Wells-Barnett’s sense of justice, equality and making remarkable achievements.
“On March 9 of that year [1892] she denounced in the newspaper the lynching of three of her friends, accused of raping three white women when actually they were competing with white storekeepers,” wrote Rayford W. Logan in his “Dictionary of Negro Biography,” published almost a century after that horrific incident in 1982, that he edited with fellow scholar Michael R. Winston.
As a strident activist, the proud black woman born during the Civil War in 1862 and whose forbearers were Mississippi slaves “urged Memphis Negroes to migrate to the West, urged them to boycott [segregated] streetcars, investigated other lynchings and reported her findings,” Logan wrote.
“Our country’s national crime is lynching,” exhorted Wells-Barnett in a January 1900 Chicago speech, according to blackpast.org. “It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an ‘unwritten law’ that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal,” too often a law enforcement mentality that still sadly persists during this age of Trump.
Following the 1908 lynching of two blacks in Springfield, Ill., where former President Abraham Lincoln earlier practiced law, Wells-Barnett and the likes of the preeminent African-American scholar W.E.B. DuBois co-founded the NAACP to combat such hatred with the support of Atlanta University President Horace Bumstead, a white man who helped to lead black Civil War troops trained at Camp William Penn (1863-1865) in what is today Cheltenham Township.
DuBois researched and wrote his epic book, “The Philadelphia Negro,” about black life, accomplishments and struggles in the city during the late 1800s.
In fact, in realizing the essence of such dedicated freedom fighters, the Cheltenham Area NAACP (cheltenhamnaacp.com) is hosting at the JC Melrose Country Club in Cheltenham its 18th annual Freedom Fund Dinner on Sunday, June 10, 2018, during an exciting program when esteemed notables in our community will receive well-deserved awards, including the Rev. Dr. Alyn E. Waller, senior pastor of Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church, and the Rev. Marshall Paul Hughes Mitchell, of Salem Baptist Church of Jenkintown, as well as several others.
Student scholarships and book award recipients from area high schools, including winners of an essay contest, will also be recognized with the exceptionally talented Bill Anderson of FOX 29 News serving as the master of ceremony and the dynamic attorney, motivational speaker, entrepreneur, writer and social-commentator Nikki Johnson-Huston rounding out the outstanding program with the keynote address.
It’s such dynamism that propelled Wells-Barnett to earn an outstanding place in history locally, nationally and globally.
“On one visit to Philadelphia she met Catherine Impey, an Englishwoman who published the journal Anti-Caste,” notes American National Biography at anb.org. “Early in 1893 Impey joined with Scottish author Isabelle Mayo to invite Wells to tour Scotland and England in the cause of antilynching.”
And at “the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago during 1893, she joined with the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Chicago lawyer Ferdinand L. Barnett to circulate a coauthored protest pamphlet,” continues anb.org.
“Even after Wells married Barnett in 1895, she continued her activism. Assuming the editorship of her husband’s newspaper, the Chicago Conservator, Wells-Barnett remained a militant voice, giving speeches, investigating lynchings, criticizing Booker T. Washington [for advocating that blacks carefully and gradually seek equality], starting organizations, and joining movements – while giving birth to four children.”
Imagine, making such outstanding accomplishments, even though as a youngster “both of her parents and her infant brother died in a yellow fever epidemic that swept the Mississippi Valley” in 1878, notes scholar Paula J. Giddings in “African American Lives,” edited by Harvard professors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham.
Incredibly, at just age 16, Wells-Barnett began teaching school, along the way attending several colleges, including the historically black Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C.
Yet, the post-Civil War lynching of African Americans, including the 1911 burning at the stake of Zachariah Walker near Coatesville, Pa., so outraged Wells-Barnett that she risked her own life multiple times by way of her writing and traveling to such hellish scenes to investigate murders that surely totaled to many thousands of black men, women and children. Many victims will never be known because they were attacked in isolated areas and their bodies disposed of without families or police authorities being aware.
However, too often, law enforcement was complicit in such murders, Wells-Barnett charged.
Although Ida B. Wells-Barnett even criticized the NAACP for not being proactive enough before dying in 1931 of uremia or kidney failure, I believe in this age of Trumpism and blatant racism, that she’d raise her hands to the heavens in affirming that protesting, activism and recognizing accomplishments while marching forward deserves much praise.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.org.
Originally Published: June 8, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:07 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Remembering the soldiers of the
371st Regiment Infantry
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
My great uncle, Henry Sibert, was just 21 years old when he was drafted into World War I in 1917 while living in Cedar Springs, Abbeville County, S.C., then traveled to the state capital of Columbia and ultimately joined the 1st Provisional Infantry that spawned the famous all-black unit, the 371st Regiment Infantry that earned numerous battle citations for valiant combat in France.
Although Uncle Henry – the older brother of my dad’s mother – died on Aug. 23, 1933, more than two decades before I was born and only served a couple of months likely due to illness or injury, he was buried in the nearby Philadelphia National Cemetery on Limekiln Pike, according to military records and my late father (Henry Scott, M.D.), who’d often recall the oodles of red-white-and-blue flags fluttering in the wind the day Uncle Henry was laid to rest.
Today, with May 28’s Memorial Day upon us, I marvel at their valor for enduring some of the most segregated and racist conditions in America while growing up in South Carolina where the Civil War’s Confederacy was founded.
Then they fought in some of the most horrific World War I battles before survivors returned home, often to face more racism and sometimes brutal lynching.
“They arrived on the Western Front in April 1918 before other American troops because of white South Carolinians’ fear of having a large force of armed black men in their midst,” notes writer Jeff Wilkinson in an article, “African-American World War 1 unit from SC fought with honor,” published 2015 in Columbia, SC’s newspaper, The State.
“Once in Europe, the regiment was placed under the command of the French Army because the French needed fresh troops, and out of fear of conflict between the regiment and the white Southern troops that would soon be arriving,” Wilkinson wrote.
Their combat record was stellar as they fought in the final offensive of “the Great War,” capturing large amounts of the German territory, as well as many enemy combatants and munitions. “Even more startling was the feat of shooting down three German airplanes with rifle and machine gun fire, perhaps a record for small arms’ ground fire.”
The 371st’s casualties were extremely heavy, though, with “more than 1,000 men out of 2,384” lost in just eight days, surely proof of their courage and tenacity.
“The French Government awarded the 371st the French Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre,” adds Wilkinson. “Ten officers and 12 enlisted men received the U.S. Distinguished Service Cross.”
Medal of Honor recipient Freddie Stowers, a black corporal from Sandy Springs, S.C., whose grandfather was a slave, was drafted in 1917, like my Uncle Henry, into the 371st Infantry Regiment, initially part of the 93rd Infantry Division, a larger black segregated contingent that faced virulent racism from white troops and officers.
According to government and military records, my Uncle Henry married in Iowa not long after being drafted, likely as a candidate to be trained as an officer like Stowers in the 371st. And although I’ve never seen a picture of him, his draft card describes Uncle Henry as “tall” and of “medium” weight or size with “brown” eyes and “black” hair.
Uncle Henry’s ancestors were slaves, too, probably on the Porcher family’s Cedar Springs Plantation straddling Berkeley and Abbeville counties in SC, near the banks of Lake Moultrie. In 1939, six years after his death in Philadelphia, the Porcher plantation and other nearby land was flooded as part of the Santee Cooper Hydroelectric Navigation Project, displacing many communities and families.
Several census reports indicate that Uncle Henry was racially a “mulatto,” as well as his father, George Sibert, my paternal great-grandfather. George, according to family oral history, was born after a plantation manager or overseer walked into a family dwelling, pointed at one of the women and simply said, “You’re coming with me tonight.”
DNA and other archival evidence indicate that my great-grandfather, George, was likely fathered by an elder George Sibert, a white resident of Greenwood, S.C., near Cedar Springs.
Meanwhile, although Stowers was recommended for the Medal of Honor shortly after his death during combat in 1918, due to apparent racism, that recognition was delayed for more than seven decades.
While heroically leading his platoon in the Ardennes region of France to a German machine gun nest, knocking that out, then moving on to more German line trenches before succumbing to withering gunfire, Stowers inspired his men to make more successful advances.
“Corporal Stowers’ conspicuous gallantry, extraordinary heroism, and supreme devotion to his men were well above and beyond the call of duty,” his official Medal of Honor citation says.
Stowers was buried with 133 of his fellow warriors at the Meuse-Argonee American Cemetery in France.
Finally, on April 24, 1991, 73 years after his battlefield death, Stowers’s sisters posthumously received their brother’s Medal of Honor commendation from President George H.W. Bush at the White House.
Uncle Henry, just before being buried on Aug. 28, 1933, at the Philadelphia National Cemetery with several of his 371st comrades among flapping red-white-and-blue flags, lived in the 1100 block of Deacon Street in North Philly with his mother, Lugenia Hill Sibert, and “Big Papa” George following his divorce and the Siberts migrating from South Carolina’s racist, Jim-Crow inferno.
His death certificate says he died of “broncho-pneumonia” and “hypertensive cardiac disease” at just age 37, only 16 years after joining the 371st Regiment Infantry.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: May 25, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:06 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Issues of race come to the forefront
with Cosby case
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
As the first powerful icon to be convicted of sexual assault during this explosive Me Too era, Bill Cosby’s downfall really hurts me as a black man whose paternal ancestors shared his forbearers’ migration patterns from Virginia to Philadelphia and upward mobility from slavery.
I’m thinking of my late father, Dr. Henry Scott, M.D., whose private practice career paralleled the make-believe television character Dr. Clifford Huxtable of the 1980s revolutionary “Cosby Show” – a fellow who had my pap’s intellect, humor and wisdom while shattering long-held racist stereotypes of African Americans.
In fact, once the Cosbys and Scotts arrived in the city during the early 1900s, we lived in virtually the same neighborhoods of North Philly and Germantown, etc., despite not personally knowing each other.
Even today, Bill Cosby’s nearby Elkins Park estate is a few blocks from my abode in Cheltenham Township, one of the most historically diverse communities in America that was founded by at least several slaveholders during the 1680s.
Strikingly, both of our Virginia ancestries include a young female slave who was victimized sexually by a white landowner or someone in the plantation power structure, predicaments I believe are at the very core of America’s painful racial history, conjuring up an array of vital concerns.
People have labeled Cosby everything from a rapist and serial sexual pervert to being akin to an angel as an actual victim himself due to his race and celebrity. His wife, Camille, very recently compared him to the murdered 14-year-old martyr of the civil rights movement, Emmett Till.
Although several of Cosby’s many female accusers are black, some Cosby supporters insist that he is being unduly punished for something that always has been deemed unforgivable in America – black men having relations with white women – for which many were often gruesomely murdered.
However, very few people would argue that Cosby fits under the umbrella of almost all of the above and that the comedian-educator, whether we like it or not, directly reflects our American society.
The truth is the United States was essentially founded to preserve slavery by powerful white slaveholders who hypocritically demanded freedom for themselves as many slept with their black female slaves – to the degree that most of the 37 million African-American descendants of slaves in the U.S. are about 15 percent European.
The rapes were pervasive, persistent and atrocious. Yet where are the screams for Me Too justice regarding those immoral crimes that still impact virtually every sphere in American society?
You see, there’s absolutely no doubt that the impact of such historical sexual assaults, as well as the brutality and forced labor without compensation, on top of family separations, still have a devasting impact on black Americans and our overall U.S. culture. False imprisonment, modern police brutality and the neo-Nazi movement are prime examples.
Whether you are descended from early Americans or new immigrants, as a member of this society that still discriminates against people of color and the poor, you are complicit in the sad story of William Henry Cosby Jr. that has unresolved and conflicting themes concerning race and sexuality going back to the so-called Founding Fathers.
That conflicting dichotomy is still expressed today in many virulent ways, spanning from language and the use of the N-word to rogue cops looking to lock up black dudes.
Don’t get me wrong. Dole out punishment if that’s what is truly due. There is absolutely no excuse for the crimes that Cosby has been convicted of in Norristown, that’s if the jury was fair and accurate. Topping it off, he has admitted to being unfaithful to his wife, but not a situation for which he was tried and punished.
Further, his lawyers certainly do have the right to appeal given that this latest second trial was primarily about the accusations of former Temple University worker Andrea Constand, leading some legal experts to argue that the prosecution and judge were overzealous in allowing and presenting witnesses beyond the scope of specific charges.
Although many say Cosby has been found guilty and deserves swift punishment, I assert that raping him in prison as one of his supposed victims has venomously recommended is mindful of the perverted hate that blacks endured during slavery and the Jim Crow eras.
Meanwhile, was Thomas Jefferson guiltless when he wrote the Declaration of Independence in a farmhouse at Seventh and High streets (today Market Street) in Philadelphia with his slave James Hemings there serving the future president as Jefferson along the way impregnated James’ little sister, Sally Hemings, with five children?
And how could George Washington from Virginia (where his stepson as a youth impregnated two servants), as America’s first president, bring slaves to his Executive House that stood adjacent to where the Liberty Bell now sits on Market Street, just a stone’s throw from America’s Independence Hall, then secretly send slave catchers after his wife’s escaping “body servant,” Oney Judge?
Where are the cries for the belated Me Too compensation or reparations for such atrocious crimes that some will bogusly argue were “legal” when those vile acts were committed?
Tragically, the exploitation of black women continued well into the 20th century and beyond.
The spectacular hypocrisies of our society are exceptionally painful today as some folks shallowly declare that race and history have little to do with a jury’s decision making, including the multiethnic group that convicted Bill Cosby.
In fact, it will be very interesting to see if such white men as President Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer and others are convicted of alleged sexual misconduct.
Relatedly, many have asked, how can a person who made it to the top of America’s food chain throw it all away over such supposed decrepit actions? After all, he has great wealth, as well as an exceptionally devoted wife, Camille Cosby, and vibrant children, even following the devastating 1997 murder of son Ennis. His daughter, Ensa, recently died of renal disease.
And as a child, according to various sources, Cosby endured an alcoholic father, as well as the very early death of a brother while he worked as a kid to help support his family, like my own dad.
Considering the exploiting historical hypocrisy of America that Cosby may have felt with the passing down of slavery’s anguish and enduring discrimination, did “America’s Dad” over-rationalize that such sexual activity was justified with a reported 50 to 60 women, even though he insists it was consensual?
Although my dear dad and most black men that I know certainly would never commit such acts because of ongoing racism or otherwise, I cannot precisely measure the pain of Bill Cosby, as well as the impact that prior experiences or tragedies may have had on him, mentally or otherwise.
For now, he has been judged to be guilty, despite reportedly paying the accuser $3.4 million in an earlier civil settlement and his first trial ending in a hung jury, proof to some observers that Constand was really after the big bucks as prosecutors have unjustly over reached in hope of throwing yet another so-called “uppity” black fellow in the slammer.
Sadly, and ironically, Cosby, who criticized underprivileged African Americans from his bully pulpit for being supposedly trifling, now is confined to his nearby home wearing an electronic GPS device that’s so akin to the chains worn by our Virginia ancestors before possibly spending the rest of his days in prison – sure forms of modern-day enslavement.
Don “Ogbewii’ Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: May 11, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:10 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Augustus, fellow soldiers finally
recognized for service
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
At just 19 years old, George F. Augustus, as a black resident of Philadelphia’s 20th Ward, enlisted as the Civil War raged on March 29, 1864, to become a private in Company E of the 43rd United States Colored Troops (USCT) infantry at Camp William Penn in what’s today Cheltenham Township, determined to combat Southerners hellbent on preserving slavery and shattering the nation.
A porter and laborer by trade, according to his service records, Augustus trained at that first northern facility to recruit such federal soldiers during the Civil War totaling almost 11,000 in 11 regiments from 1863 to 1865, at that point the largest number of black warriors trained at a specific base in America.
Tragically, Augustus would die of an agonizing wound he received in Virginia before returning home, ultimately being buried at the Philadelphia National Cemetery (6909 Limekiln Pike) – a place that is finally paying tribute to the multitude of black Civil War soldiers buried there, many of them ex-slaves and free blacks who trained at Camp William Penn.
Commendably, scheduled to honor those soldiers by way of a new storyboard that acknowledges their sacrifices during a Saturday, April 21, ceremony were the likes of U.S. Congressman Dwight Evans, state Sen. Art Haywood, state Rep. Steve McCarter, as well as Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney and Cheltenham Township Commissioners Ann Rappoport and Irv Brockington.
And stellar folks programmed to speak were Dr. Robert Hicks, director of the Mutter Museum/Historical Medical Library and College of Physicians; the Rev. Paul DeWitt Reid of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Elkins Park, as well as Charles L. Blockson, curator emeritus of his tremendous African-American collection (including rare books) at Temple University.
You see, although almost 200,000 black soldiers served in the Civil War, more than a few of them Philadelphia natives, the storyboard is reportedly the first and only official memorial dedicated to the United States Colored Troops in the city – nothing less than a crying shame.
The storyboard would not have been possible without the persistence of Ed McLaughlin, a Springfield Township resident, who was the “driving force behind the Philadelphia National Cemetery sign,” according to an announcement from McCarter’s office.
And I applaud that McLaughlin was vigorously backed by the 3rd Regiment Re-enactors representing the first such unit to go to war from Camp William Penn, as well as a Cheltenham-based group, Citizens for the Restoration of Historical LaMott (CROHL).
CROHL, which administers the Camp William Penn Museum (just blocks from Philadelphia National Cemetery), under the leadership of the late Perry Triplett and now Joyce Werkman, has been a longtime advocate for obtaining greater local, statewide and national recognition for such warriors and the historic facility that once stood on 13 acres above the northwest corner of Broad Street and Cheltenham Avenue.
Now, it’s time to surely cultivate other memorials and even learning facilities, such as comprehensive museums, to recognize the incredible local contributions of the United States Colored Troops.
Really, when it’s all said and done, we must remember that the sacrifices of such young soldiers as Private George F. Augustus are why we live in liberty, as many knew that they would not likely survive America’s most deadly war.
If captured by Rebels, they would have faced torturous deaths, squalid imprisonment or certain slavery.
As part of the 43rd USCT infantry that was organized from March 12 to June 3, 1864, before moving on to Annapolis, Md., by April 18, Private Augustus along the way likely helped to guard trains of the Army of the Potomac and served in siege initiatives outside of Petersburg and Richmond, Va. The gutsy unit in due course participated in the horrific Battle of the Crater in the area on July 30, 1864.
Sadly, military records indicate that Augustus ultimately suffered from a gruesome wound – a compound fracture of his left femur or upper thigh bone that he received Aug. 4, 1864, during the Battle of Cemetery Hill in Virginia near Petersburg.
It’s possible, since he was so seriously hurt or hit while on fatigue duty, that Augustus was wounded by a sniper or via an accident while performing manual labor.
And that was following the Battle of the Crater debacle during which Union forces devastated a Confederate stronghold by planting hundreds of pounds of explosives via an underground tunnel, only to be forced back into the resulting crater by the Rebels and slaughtered.
Many of the soldiers who were encircled at the perimeter of the crater and then forced to the bottom were likely compatriots of Augustus, some reportedly shot by their white officers who feared brutal deaths if captured fighting side-by-side with black warriors.
Ultimately, many others would die of disease.
By the end of the war, according to the National Park Service, the regiment “lost during service 3 Officers and 48 Enlisted men killed and mortally wounded … and 188 Enlisted men by disease,” or a total of 239. That’s a hefty percentage considering that each regiment consisted of between 800 and 1,000 men, including officers.
Even after his devastating injury, it seems that Augustus survived for a period because he was placed on a ship to be moved to the sprawling Satterlee Hospital that stood in what is today West Philly, indicates his service records that I found online via Ancestry.com.
The report, however, ends with these heartbreaking words: “Admitted dead from Transport Baltic August 17 1864 … Compound fracture of left femur.”
Among many other valiant warriors, Private George F. Augustus today rests in Plot 133 at the Philadelphia National Cemetery, finally honored and remembered for his immeasurable sacrifices.
Don “Ogbewii’ Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: April 27, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:07 a.m.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Remembering ‘a phenomenal woman’
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
Ever since I can remember, I’ve thought of my Aunt Liz as someone who could look even Godzilla – the so-called “King of Monsters” – straight in his bloodshot eyeballs, point her bodacious finger at him and put the fear of the Almighty in the gargantuan fire-spitting reptilian with a barrage of heartfelt words that rose from her sanguine soul.
So when the Rev. Mark Tyler, pastor of the historic Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, told the anecdote at her funeral the other day of some unsuspecting numbskull walking past the sanctuary building near Sixth and Lombard some time ago and attempting to strike a match on its exterior, my vigilant Aunt Liz reportedly let that person have it in words backed up by the threat of her swinging pocketbook.
Born during the 1930s Great Depression in South Philly, Aunt Elizabeth was “the seventh child out of 10 children,” notes her obituary titled “A Phenomenal Woman,” just slightly younger than my own dear mother, her sister Grace, whom Aunt Liz was very close to even before dying recently of an illness that took her away barely without a warning.
But, what made Aunt Liz – a radiantly beautiful woman who could have easily replaced Claire Huxtable on the old “Cosby Show” – so “phenomenal” to me was her fierce audacity, intellect, outstanding debating skills, as well as command of African-American history.
It’s a past that is so connected to the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), founded by the former slave Richard Allen during the late 1700s with today hundreds of thousands of worldwide congregants, that was a primary vehicle that liberated the black masses from bondage and propelled them into the 21st century.
Old-school philosophical and exceedingly witty, Aunt Liz was an impeccable dresser who had an opinion about virtually everything under the stars, along the way serving in various positions at the church, most notably the church’s historical society.
“She gave tours of the historical museum,” where the remains of Bishop Allen rest in a crypt below the sanctuary. “She approached her duties with professionalism, aplomb and grace,” notes her going-home tribute. “Accuracy and detail were evident in her meticulous notes,” despite Aunt Liz not having a bunch of college degrees.
Yet, her knowledge and appreciation of current events, the arts and history were virtually unsurpassed. Most impressive, as her eulogizer, AME Bishop Jeffrey M. Leath, said to the well-wishers filling the church, was her unrelenting wisdom.
I cannot tell you how many times, often during family get-togethers at my parents’ Wyncote residence, that Aunt Liz gave me sound advice about a range of affairs ranging from domestic issues to employment.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t always agree with Aunt Liz, as we’d debate various issues, including the usefulness of what they used to call Ebonics or black English.
She once argued that it was imperative for modern African Americans to speak impeccable English virtually all the time with me countering that blacks must be able to speak and communicate in standard English, as well as use the black vernacular to survive in their communities.
I found her position quite interesting since her father and mother came from South Carolina’s Gullah-Geechee people whose ancestors were enslaved on the coastal islands of such southern states where they retained much of their African customs, including diet, religion and, yes, language.
I’m certain that her great wisdom and deft ability to confront adversity came from our Gullah-Geechee folks, very proud, tough and resourceful people, akin to the likes of former first lady Michelle Obama and heavyweight boxing champ Joe Frazier.
You see, I believe, if Aunt Liz had grown up on those coastal areas, specifically Spring Island, St. Helena and Savannah, Ga., where her paternal and maternal ancestors lived, then she would have become an unparalleled advocate for that culture, too.
Regardless, my auntie was not the type of person who you’d want to try to take advantage of, unless you were ready for some potent feedback or payback.
Let’s just say, if you ever stepped on her foot on a bus (which she often rode even into her 80s), God be with you if you didn’t say, “Excuse me, ma’am!”
Perhaps, my three brothers and I felt so close to Aunt Liz because during her first marriage to my Uncle William, she had four girls, whom were practically like sisters to us. We spent the night over each other’s houses as tots.
And Lord have mercy, but Aunt Liz’s fried chicken would have put KFC straight out of business. It was nothing less than succulent.
Yet, even with Aunt Liz’s cultured formalities and hatred for such words as “funky” and other perceived uncouthness, I remember her admonishing an old buddy of mine who visited her for Sunday dinner several decades ago for trying to eat her famous fried chicken with a knife and fork.
She essentially told my friend, Jerry, to pick up the darn bird with his fingers and stop fooling around.
Aunt Liz could be so hilarious, loving, but also, fiercely faithful. If she believed in something, or someone, it was very hard to sway her.
She had an altruistic and noble heart whom many called “Queen Elizabeth” during her transition ceremony.
Bishop Leath essentially described Aunt Liz as a beautiful person, noting that the essence of her attractiveness was not just her exterior, but emanated as true conviction from the depths of her soul.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: April 13, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 1:38 a.m.
A Place in History: Message of unity in ‘Stone of Hope’
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
I earnestly walked down well-worn paths amid a grove of trees adorning the quiet sunlit waters of the Tidal Basin along the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.
I was with my wife, Billie, on the Saturday afternoon of Oct. 8, headed for the new $120 million Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial featuring an extraordinary “Stone of Hope” statue of the iconic civil rights’ leader conceived in 1984 by “brothers” of his college fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha.
And that’s when I began pondering the sacrifices of such local civil rights’ movement participants as state Rep. Lawrence Curry and the retired professor-author Leonard Barrett of Temple University (my past Cedarbrook neighborhood friend). Both marched, along different paths, with King during the 1960s when America’s racial “mountain of despair” seemed to rise into infinity.
A couple of weeks ago, though, eight days before the Oct. 16 official dedication that was rescheduled due to Hurricane Irene and of all things, an earthquake, we strode under cruising cobalt skies blowing earthward light breezes of about 75 degrees that seemed to almost lift us. We were people of many backgrounds gliding in unison to the grand American freedom-fighter’s towering 30-foot statue created by Chinese master sculptor Lei Yixin.
You see, we couldn’t stop ourselves from getting a sneak preview of that long-awaited monument, days before the main commemoration featuring such dynamic speakers as the Revs. Al Sharpton, King’s lieutenant Jesse Jackson, Joseph Lowery (co-founder with King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and Bernice King, whose remarkable oratory and visual cadence are so much like her father’s.
All of those speakers, and others such as King’s son Martin Luther King III, eloquently urged that America move to eradicate poverty, a touchstone of King’s movement before he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn.
They also admonished Americans to overcome the ultra-conservatism of modern zealots determined to protect the interests of the wealthy while hurting the poor. And they drew attention to the horrific incarceration and unemployment rates of African Americans and Latinos. Most demanded with very good cause that the intransigent Congress pass a comprehensive employment bill that will surely create jobs, improve the economy and mandate that the rich pay their fair share in taxes, despite the political opposition of those determined to protect the status quo.
The first black president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, who has fought valiantly to get his $477 million jobs initiative through Congress despite Republican and Tea Party opposition, was exceptionally eloquent during the Oct. 16 ceremonies.
He urged Americans to “draw strength from those earlier struggles,” adding that transformation “has never been simple or without controversy.” Realizing that his ascension to the presidency was due to King’s past sacrifices, Obama left copies of his inaugural speech and 2008 convention presentation in a time capsule at the hallowed ground of the monument (the first such tribute to an African American in the basin or mall areas).
I pondered King being the first there back on the afternoon of Saturday, Oct. 8, in Washington, as we approached the granite statue of the slain leader, a week before Obama would visit. I’m sure King would have been proud of the statue, but also would’ve told admirers if such enormous funds to build it might be raised to create his stone likeness, surely similar initiatives could help the poor in addition to necessary government funding.
As we approached his monument, at first we could only see small bits of the glistening ivory-colored spectacle through the trees while we anxiously zeroed in on our destination. All around were iconic symbols, seemingly exuding great adulation, of some of America’s greatest presidents, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who ironically and sadly profited off of the free labor and ownership of King’s African ancestors.
Yet, nearby too was the memorial of the magnanimous President Abraham Lincoln, who finally agreed to pursue black liberation, where King delivered in 1963 one of the greatest speeches in American history, “I Have a Dream.” King’s timeless words seemed to foresee racial equality and unity, as well as what I call age of Obama.
And although America has not quite reached its destination, partially due to those trying to bring down the president’s policies largely because of his skin color and defending the downtrodden, we’re clearly on our way. You see, walking shoulder-to-shoulder with us that sublime October day were dozens of people of every skin hue from around the world, marching to pay homage to a mighty man with an even grander message of national and global unity.
As we together emerged from that patch of woods along the basin of the Potomac, a river where more than a few black enslaved Africans drowned trying to swim across in search of liberty, the brilliant face of King glowed under the afternoon sunshine. That “Stone of Hope” brought tears to my eyes as he prophetically gazed across the iridescent waters.
Originally Published: October 21, 2011 at 10:00 p.m.
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A PLACE IN HISTORY: TV program explores twists, turns of local family
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 11:08 a.m.
The greatest wonders of pursuing family history and our ancestors’ lives are the twists and turns while really learning about who we are as modern descendants.
We are exactly a combination of our parents and the folks who came before them, whether we realize it or not.
It’s up to us to take the positivity from those forbearers, pass it along and move forward. After all, that’s what the awesomeness of advancing humanity is all about, according to my West African ancestors.
And that’s what I loved about watching the premiere of WHYY-TV’s program “The Montiers: An American Story” that aired Friday, March 16, at 8:30 p.m. concerning the remarkable story of an early American interracial relationship between the son of Philadelphia’s first mayor, Humphrey Morrey (a Quaker appointed circa 1691), and Cremona Satterwaithe, a black servant and prior slave of the Morrey family likely with roots to a local Native American tribe, the Leni-Lenape, at least according to several online genealogical sources.
Like other notable family sagas, though, there are emerging revelations that greatly impact earlier perspectives – or confirm them – even concerning the Montiers, as I learned after the airing of the documentary and my prior column. I’ll explore those issues momentarily with concrete suggestions to scientifically determine the whereabouts of missing family graves and documenting precious family ties.
Regardless, the Emmy-award producer, Karen Smyles, was very impressive in pulling together an absorbing Cheltenham-based story that interweaved genealogy with reflections of the modern descendant, William Pickens III, centering around the 18th century, common-law marital relationship between Cremona and Richard, the mayor’s son, that produced five mixed-race children.
As viewers learned, Richard subsequently left Cremona 200 acres of land after she took on the surname Morrey, a remarkable event since interracial relationships then were punishable by public whipping, imprisonment and the enslavement of the couple and/or their children.
The pair, in fact, would have considered such sanctions, despite Cremona being liberated as a slave by the Morreys, perhaps an indication of their love for each other given the grave risks.
However, although Cremona remained as a household servant, there’s an inescapable question: Did Cremona Morrey feel pressured in any way, including sexually, given the racist and sexist dynamics of the period, as a slave and then a reliant employee of the Morrey family?
Given her status as a black woman with possible Native American ancestry and Richard Morrey’s immense stature as the son of Philadelphia’s first mayor, I believe that Cremona Sr. (1710-1770) certainly felt pressure to varying degrees, although Pickens asserts that Cremona Sr. was not proven to be in the Satterwaithe family or of indigenous American ancestry, but was essentially African.
Meanwhile, as the WHYY documentary explores, one of the couple’s five children, Cremona Jr., named for the elder Cremona and born about 1745, married a black man with Caribbean roots, John Montier.
The couple built a home about the time of the Revolutionary War that still stands today in Cheltenham’s Glenside where a small black community developed that included such Montier-Morrey historical figures as Cyrus Bustill, a co-founder of the pioneering civil rights’ group, the Free African Society. They, too, included David Bustill Bowser, a 19th century Philly-based artist and activist, as well as Paul Robeson, an iconic 20th century “Renaissance man” and black leader.
A deeded cemetery, consisting of about 75 graves, also developed nearby the Montiers’ Cheltenham homestead, containing the remains of William Pickens III’s earliest ancestors, presumably including Cremona Sr., as well as her second husband, John Fry, a black man whom she married after Richard’s 1754 death.
Nonetheless, there certainly was true love between Cremona and Richard, according to Pickens, despite Richard being married to a woman named Ann before she likely departed for England with a son about 1735, keeping in mind that the first of Richard and Cremona’s five children, Robert Morrey, was born that very year in 1735, records indicate.
There are also remarkable revelations that Richard Morrey married yet another woman, Sarah Allen or Sarah Beasley, in 1746, just a year after Cremona had Richard’s last child and the very year Richard made provisions for Cremona to receive 198 acres, as indicated in a deed.
A church historian, Ginny McCracken, of Trinity Church Oxford in the 6900 block of Oxford Avenue in Philadelphia, confirmed Morrey’s 1746 marriage via an email and during my recent visit to the historic church founded in 1698, where the co-founder of Cheltenham Township, Tobias Leech, a slaveholder of early American Africans, is buried, too.
Interestingly, Cremona Montier Jr. was born in 1745, a year before a Richard Morrey married in 1746 his new wife, Sarah, who was likely a widow, according to images of online original documents.
Notably, the second son of Cremona Sr. and Richard, a religious man named Caesar Morrey Penrose and born about 1737, served as the sexton of Trinity for an astounding half-century during the 1700s, according to McCracken, who’s investigating whether he was earlier made a slave or indentured servant in New Jersey for being born as an interracial child of a then illegal marital relationship.
Caesar, who died in 1831, is interred in Trinity’s cemetery, too, quite remarkable since such majority-white congregations during early American periods did not permit blacks to be buried in their churchyards, including Quakers who were among the first to abolish slavery, topics that I discussed with
McCracken and fellow church historian Kyle Sammin as we toured the historic graveyard.
Today, Pickens and his Montier co-descendants are trying to determine the fate of most of the 75 individuals – including Cremona Morrey Fry, her daughter, Cremona Montier, and their ultimate spouses – who were probably buried in the family cemetery along Limekiln Pike in Glenside, just north of the Montier homestead.
They were supposedly removed during a road widening project decades ago, but authorities have not presented documented proof of their fates, despite multiple inquiries over many years, something that has been upsetting to modern descendants.
Yet, it’s been reported that the remains of Pickens’s ancestors, Elizabeth and Hiram Montier, the subjects of rare and celebrated 1841 portraits now hanging at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, were discovered at the historically black Eden Cemetery among such graves as the great African-American singer Marian Anderson and others.
A March 14 program at the museum, featuring the first showing of the Montier film, made those historic images a centerpiece as the large audience discussed the remarkable story with a panel that included William Pickens III and Deesha Dyer, former social secretary for President Barack Obama.
Smyles, the producer of the documentary, sent me information via email indicating that African Americans who attended the March 14 program and now living in New Jersey where Caesar Morrey Penrose once worked and resided believe they are descended from the Montiers.
An April 11 WHYY film presentation and symposium being held at Arcadia University that was built on land that likely originally belonged to Cremona Sr., from 6 to 8 p.m. in The Great Room of the Commons Building, 450 S. Easton Road, will probably reveal even more remarkable developments.
Such programs are vital for probing and ultimately uncovering rich family histories like the Montiers, and perhaps, eventually locating the whereabouts of modern descendants via DNA biotechnology to document family ties and ethnicities, etc.
Modern ground-penetrating radar or sonar capable of revealing if many of the Montier burials remain in the original cemetery site that stood along the 200 block of Limeklin Pike in Glenside should also be utilized with the help of local civic and political leaders, as well as property owners.
That’s realizing the ancestors represent our common humanity and the sum of who we’ve become as a society, families and citizens.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com.
More information about his local history books can be found at kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: March 30, 2018 at 1:30 a.m.
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UPDATED: September 24, 2021 at 10:36 AM EST
A Place in History: Harriet Tubman was a true heroine
By Don 'Ogbewii' Scott
A unique romantic relationship in the Underground Railroad icon Harriet Tubman’s life was her second marriage to an African-American soldier, Nelson Davis, said to be about half her age and whose regiment hailed from a nearby Civil War training camp.
The union of Tubman and Davis, after the brutal and tragic death of her first husband, John Tubman on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, reveals how true “love knows no bounds” and that survival in a harsh world often requires the greatest toughness, even as the light of life dims.
You see, Davis likely escaped slavery in Elizabeth City, NC, “during or before 1861” as the Civil War erupted, writes the award-winning author Kate Larson in her excellent 2004 biography about Tubman, “Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero.”
And as a young man he traveled north to Oneida County, New York, living there for a couple of years before moving to Pennsylvania and “our neck of the woods” in 1863 following the July 1-3 Battle of Gettysburg spurred by the Confederate invasion of the Keystone state that motivated thousands of black men to join Union forces following President Abraham Lincoln’s Jan. 1, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.
Davis joined on Sept. 10, 1863 the 8th United States Colored Troops (USCT) regiment that originated and trained at Camp William Penn where the largest contingent of 10,500 men in 11 regiments of the war’s approximately 200,000 black soldiers joined Union forces just northwest of Philly in Chelten Hills, today Cheltenham Township.
Almost 15 years earlier, however, Tubman’s first husband and free African American, John Tubman, decided not to escape with her to Philadelphia in 1849 after five years of marriage.
When she returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to get him, as the recent film Harriet depicts, he had hooked up with another woman — then tragically was shot and killed after the war on Sept. 30, 1867 during a conflict with a white man, Robert Vincent, Larson revealed.
Meanwhile, by the time Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Rebel forces surrendered on April 9, 1865, Harriet Tubman was a legendary figure because of her incredible exploits of leading runaway slaves North and Union troops into combat, as well as serving as a nurse and intelligence operative.
A few days before Lee’s surrender, on April 6, 1865 when Tubman entered the grounds of Camp William Penn to speak to the last of 11 regiments, the 24th USCT, she was well-known in these parts since she had ushered runaway slaves to nearby Underground Railroad safehouses, including William’s Still home and the white Quaker Lucretia Mott’s “Roadside” estate that stood on Old York Rd. next to Camp Penn.
Although Tubman moved to Auburn, New York and opened a rooming house where she cared for her parents and others, her financial situation was often precarious because her Army pension had not been approved.
“One of these boarders was a young Civil War veteran, Nelson Davis,” wrote Larson.
“Davis, a member of Company G, Eighth USCT that fought so valiantly at the [February 20, 1864] Battle of Olustee, Florida, had been honorably discharged on November 10, 1865, at Brownsville, Texas […],” Larson continued, after the regiment suffered very heavy losses.
“Nelson Charles, as he was known then, was only twenty-one years old when he was discharged from the army. He followed a fellow soldier, Albert Thompson, from Company G to Auburn, where he found a room at Tubman’s home and a job nearby, probably at a local brickyard abutting Harriet’s property.”
Harriet’s relationship with Davis developed over the next couple of years and the couple married on March 18, 1869 in Auburn, making Tubman, at least 40 years old or so, a sure-fire “cougar” well before the term became popular.
Sadly, Davis began to suffer badly from tuberculosis, likely contracted during the war, after being relatively active in the community and working with his wife, Harriet, in their garden and tending to small livestock.
Later, they adopted a child, Gertie, but struggled as time passed to make ends meet while primarily living on Nelson’s meager labor earnings and pension that was a long time in coming likely due to racism, but also because of confusion about his original Charles surname that he along the way changed to Davis.
And incredibly, despite Tubman-Davis’ outstanding military service during the war, that included leading troops on the June 2, 1863 Combahee raid in South Carolina and liberating up to 750 enslaved blacks, she had a very difficult time receiving her own pension.
Yet before her death in 1913 at about age 90, the federal government after 34 years finally did grant Tubman-Davis a $20 monthly pension based on her late husband’s service and partially due to her Civil War nursing duties, depending on the source.
Still, before passing away, Tubman-Davis had to deal with sporadic poverty, despite earning money from two books about her life and was severely beaten by a couple of swindlers in a peculiar money-for-gold scheme, all the while suffering from epileptic fits from an injury she received while a slave that required brain surgery for which she “refused anesthesia,” according to Harriett-tubman.org and other sources.
The great woman’s tombstone under a massive cedar tree near her beloved husband’s resting spot at the Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, NY, in part reads “To The Memory of Harriet Tubman Davis – Heroine of the Underground Railroad,” a true testament of an unwavering love with roots to seeking freedom in our own backyards.
Don “Ogbewii” Scott, a Melrose Park resident, can be reached at dscott9703@gmail.com. More information about his local history books can be found at www.kumbayah-universal.com.
Originally Published: February 24, 2020 at 12:09 PM EST
Digital First Media History Columns - 2017-2018
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Sep 29, 2017
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Mar 3, 2017
Giving me great sustenance these days in the face of a national administration hell-bent on “deconstructing” progressive accomplishments are h…
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Something momentous was about to happen, I thought, as I very recently studied the anguished faces of emergency room workers at a major hospit…
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Digital First Media History Columns - 2016
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Digital First Media History Columns -- 2016 and Before:
Author at ancestral plantation on Spring Island, SC
- Columnist praises black Civil War soldiers resting in Gettysburg
- Obama's political boxing skills lead to victory
- Titanic tragedy impacted black culture
- Local seafarer's adventurous global travels
- Martin_Luther_King_Jr.'s_'Stone_of_Hope'
- Finding long-lost graves thrills descendants
- Voter ID laws unfair, racist
.
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Cyrus Chestnut puts on joyous, profound performance
The heart-thumping rhythms and saucy-sweet melodies of the phenomenal jazz pianist Cyrus Chestnut with his very tight squad of musicians dressed in radiant African garb lifted the audience well above the atmosphere s thinning ozone layer at Montgomer...
Although she died 136 years ago in 1880 at age 87 with mostly family around her bed at their Roadside farmhouse in nearby Cheltenham, Lucretia Mott the greatest women s rights advocate in American history and an extraordinary anti-slavery abolit...
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Visit to Virginia prompts thoughts of ancestors
I couldn t help but beam and clap my hands with my wife, Billie, and her sister, Carol, while rejoicing and singing among the rest of the congregation in an itty-bitty church way back in Virginia s Tidewater area of Gloucester County much as it had b...
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Benjamin Gilbert's epic story of capture has local ties
The epic story of Benjamin Gilbert and his family s 1780 capture by Native Americans before being forced to march with them from Pennsylvania to Canada while enduring unspeakable torment has roots to his father, Joseph Gilbert, settling on 250 acres ...
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Former Philly Mayor the Rev. Goode inspires congregants at Bethlehem Baptist
I took in the sacred, yet keen, words of the Rev. Dr. W. Wilson Goode, the first African-American mayor of nearby Philadelphia, during early morning church service at the Bethlehem Baptist Church in Spring House just several hours after Orlando, Fla....
A PLACE IN HISTORY: 'Roots' reproduction coincides with search for ancestors
It has been almost a century since my maternal grandfather, William, also known as Bill Mitchell to kinfolk on South Carolina s Sea Islands, brought his family at the dawn of the 1920s to nearby Abington s Roslyn to start new lives during one of the ...
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Trump's behavior a far cry from Lincoln s example
When President-elect Abraham Lincoln s inaugural train cruised into Philadelphia s Kensington Station at about 3:45 p.m. on a very chilly Thursday more than 150 years ago on Feb. 21, 1861, he had matured from being earlier indifferent and noncommitta...
6.2K - May. 19, 2016; scored 1000.0
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Masterful acting performance brings jazz master to life
I reveled in the mesmerizing performance of actor Don Cheadle starring in the evocative new film Miles Ahead that very cleverly probes the super-cool, yet wide-ranging genius and frenetic life of the jazz impresario and trumpet player Miles Davis....
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Philly's apology on target, although mighty late
When the Brooklyn Dodgers Jackie Robinson the first African American to play major league baseball attempted to lodge at Philadelphia s Benjamin Franklin Hotel with teammates in 1947 when they were scheduled to face off against the largely racis...
When U.S. President Benjamin Harrison became friends with the department store tycoon John Wanamaker, and even visited his local Chelten Hills mansion in what is today Cheltenham Township before appointing in 1889 his buddy as postmaster general, mu...
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A PLACE IN HISTORY: Mary Carver Knight had 'gift' for conveying Quaker concepts
Mary Carver Knight, who in October 1682 was said to be likely the first child of English parentage born in Pennsylvania, was destined to be a dynamic and outspoken minister of the Abington Meeting, firmly believing that females, too, were endowed w...
A PLACE IN HISTORY: Mutter Museum offers unique look back at medical history
Even when Dr. Robert Hicks was filmed a few years back in the heart of Cheltenham s LaMott community where the first and largest federal institution to train black soldiers during the Civil War Camp William Penn once stood from 1863 to 1865 on mo...
Please access earlier Montgomery Media columns via the links below:
- A Masterpiece: '12 Years a Slave'
- Exploring family's Gullah roots: From Philly, S. Carolina to Barbados
- Civil War's spying balloonist made Norristown home
- Columnist praises black Civil War soldiers resting in Gettysburg
- School shootings hit close to home
- Obama's political boxing skills lead to victory
- Titanic tragedy impacted black culture
- Local seafarer's adventurous global travels
- Local 'dude' becomes jazz legend
- Martin_Luther_King_Jr.'s_'Stone_of_Hope'
- Trayvon Martin verdict shows persistent racism
- Columnist explores African, Gullah roots
- Local native women held much power
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