This blogpost is dedicated to all Speakers of TRUTH, especially my fellow BlackProGen LIVE panelists, who are on the battlefield for their ancestors and who continue to speak truth to power in a manner that makes their ancestors proud.
Our Obligation to Our Ancestors…
On this Good Friday 2019, I want to discuss the moral obligation that descendants have to their ancestors. This is a topic I have spoken about for years now and will continue to speak about. My cultural worldview is one that is African-Native and has been shaped by the fundamental belief that there is NO SEPARATION between those who reside on high and those of us still among the living here on earth. Our ancestors are with us wherever we go! They not only exists in the features they left us with, the beautiful rainbow shades we have, the color of our eyes, but they also are with us in the words we speak and the acts of restorative social justice that we do in THEIR NAMES. We call their names so that they will be remembered by all.
For years now, my multi-racial extended family has been in places and situations that can only be described as guided by our ancestors. We were not supposed to be at the last public hearing in Greenwich, CT before the “Byram African-American Cemetery,” Byram Cemetery and Lyon Cemetery were to be acquired by the Town of Greenwich back in September 2016. And yet we were there. On April 17, 2019, our extended family attended the Rutgers-Newark Agitate! The Legacy of Frederick Douglass and Abolition in Newark celebration . We were not supposed to be there originally, but there we were. I was initially slated to only speak three minutes due to time constraints, but I spoke for 10 minutes. Our ancestors rendered possible what seemed to be impossible. It was through God and their divine intervention that I was able to point out the FACTS of their lives — that they made up the bedrock of abolitionism in Newark.
On Restorative Social Justice for Our Ancestors
Last week my Goin cousin and fellow BlackProGen LIVE panelist, Dr. Shelley Murphy, informed me that the Boyd Carter Cemetery in Kearneysville, West Virginia, another historic African-American cemetery, is facing destruction. Our ancestors are in this cemetery facing a peace disturbed because a pipeline is slated to run through their sacred resting space. Shelley is working with other descendants of people interred there along with concerned allies, like Chris Petrella, a professor at American University and the Director of Advocacy and Strategic Partnerships with the Antiracist Research and Policy Center and others.
While we love working in tandem with our allies and welcome any help we can get, descendants of those buried in cemeteries, facing desecration and destruction, should fight on behalf of their own ancestors. It is OUR MORAL IMPERATIVE, OUR MORAL OBLIGATION as long as we reside on this earth to be our ancestors’ unified voice to articulate their pain, loud and clear, with our heads held high…
I want to say to the many people who have ancestral places that are currently under attack by outside forces that the battle is only over when WE SING and SHOUT! Don’t be dismayed that things aren’t going the way that you want them to go. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven! And in this our season, it’s time to get LOUDER and resurrect the lives and memories of those who are facing historic erasure. While the powers that be may eventually do what they always have done and erase our ancestral presence from the physical world, we, as descendants, have the power to do what we always had to do and that is to find ways of remembering those who have gone before us. While our ancestors risked being severely punished, mutilated and killed for writing and speaking out in their own defense, they always relied on the power of memory and oral history to stay in touch with their own ancestors. Today, we have the power to remember our ancestors, resurrect their communities, and then turn around and tell the world about our kin. We are not powerless! Our ancestors left behind their DNA in us to fight any battle that comes our way! We’ve come this far by faith…
Stories from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice
BlackProGen LIVE has been working with the descendants of lynching victims and have been helping them flesh out their family trees and tell their ancestral stories. As Nicka Smith points out, “In 2018, The Equal Justice Initiative opened the The National Memorial for Peace and Justice which memorialized more than 4,400 African American men, women, and children who were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.” Our two upcoming BlackProGen LIVE episodes “will feature the family history of some of the victims documented in the memorial in an effort to humanize and bring light to their lives outside of a tragic event they have been associated with,” states Smith.
BlackProGen LIVE is committed to educating and helping descendants of both Free and enslaved ancestors discover their ancestral stories. As a group, we believe that our research is nothing short of reparational acts of restorative social justice. Time and time again, we have proven that here are ways in which our ancestral stories and family history can be discovered in spite of slavery.
In conclusion, I posted this video almost 8 months ago and I am going to leave it right here AGAIN because our ancestors are with us wherever we go and they guide our research every step of the way!