I was all set to write an amazing diary on Paul Cuffee, and then amid the research, I happened upon someone beating me to it.
I couldn't be happier. Why?
Because integral to Paul Cuffee's life is that he was black and Indian. And the diarist is as well.
I can talk at some length about my minority status -- I'm part queer, and I have native blood on both sides -- but I can also hide it. Nobody looks at me and sees other. So someone who has that personal history can more usefully discuss it.
I was looking for in exactly what year Cuffee started his racially integrated school -- 1797, 1798, whatever -- so I could put that on a timeline and then go hunting for something before it. It would probably have been a Quaker school because most racially tolerant anything back then was from the Quakers. That's my thing -- finding the facts and the reasons, assembling them, making some sense of the history you didn't learn in school because it's not canon.
I have a browser open to 11 sources on the Underground Railroad. I could throw any number of names at you, from Isaac Hopper to Romulus Hall, or John Henry Hill, maybe Ellen Craft.
But:
I was checking my diaries some days ago, and I saw I had a new comment.
Comments on the historical diaries I write usually fall into one of two categories:
"Great diary. Thanks for the history lesson."
"Did you know about [related person/book]? Here is a link."
This comment was its own history lesson. Functionally impossible to research. No book has it.
This experience was the first real heartbreak in my lifetime and in those days the loss of a pet belonging to a little 5 year old Negro boy was of less importance than a three day old soiled newspaper left on a bench inside Union Station.
...
So it is my theory that poor Buddy never made it out of the baggage car of the Boston train before my southern bound train left Washington. Buddy was a beautiful dog and my lifelong hope has been that he was eventually found and adopted by some caring family.
Those words, right there ... are in a strong sense worth more than the hours of research that went into my recent civil rights diaries. Anyone with the patience could look up all the things I found. It's not hard.
But one person has that memory of being a newly fatherless black boy on a segregated train and finding out, as he's getting off the train and being handed over to his grandfather in Jim Crow Georgia, that his dog is gone.
That memory means more to me than every tip I've ever gotten.
Welcome to the Black Kos Front Porch-newcomers, and oldtimers. This is our first Black Kos diary of the year and it's as good a time as any to extend an open invitation for everyone to join. Many people don't enter Black Kos, because they see the work "black" in the name and think something along the lines of "I'm not black so there's probably nothing of real interest to me there".
I am about as black as a bar of soap. I can trace my family tree back in at least two cases to the early 17th century -- Germany and England.
But the black civil rights movement, which I believe began around 1585 (page 72), is about more than understanding the black struggle for equality. It's about the white people who helped, and it's about the universal struggle to understand the self and the self's origin, and it's about the freedom to be imperfect, and it's about our human history, and it has a giant pile of dates and names and sources in there, and nobody's ever turned a fire hose on me, but if four hours of research on a seminal moment in black equality turn up something unknown to someone who majored in black history, what the hell else isn't being taught?
Seriously, what? Because we don't have a black history family tree -- linking Myles Horton to Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin and a pile of other people -- so I don't know.
Are they even teaching the relationship between those fighting for female suffrage and those fighting for full black voting rights? Fascinating stuff. But I swear, it's like the history classes skip this stuff entirely because ooh, gotta cover another president ... Taft or someone. President Arthur's role in New York transportation desegregation case law is not even a footnote in most places.
Raise your hand if you know about Henry and Frances Seward's abolitionist activity. Seward financially supported Frederick Douglass' newspaper, which reported on Arthur's court win.
Seward's wisdom. Why do we never talk about that?
'bout time we did.