Do You Know about TheGrio and the Icon Awards?

As this is Black History Month, it seems like a good time to post an article about TheGrio, which I just learned about by accident earlier this month. Some of you, I assume, know about TheGrio, but my guess is that most of you know little if any about it. 

TheGrio is “an American television network and website with news, opinion, entertainment and video content geared toward African-Americans.” It can be watched free on the internet, and it is also available on local TV in many cities across the U.S.*

TheGrio’s name comes from griot, a Western African word that designates a musician-entertainer who plays a vital role in preserving their people's oral traditions and histories.

Although I rarely watch local TV, I happened to turn on CBS on the evening of Feb. 3 and theGrio’s Icon Awards program was being telecast. I listened with interest to speeches by three of the Icon recipients, the three I am briefly introducing below.

Al Sharpton received the Justice Ikon Award. According to Wikipedia, Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. (b. 1954) is “an American civil rights and social justice activist, Baptist minister, radio talk show host, and TV personality, who is also the founder of the National Action Network civil rights organization.” 

Sharpton has been a leading, and controversial, civil rights leader for nearly 55 years now. He has also sought various political offices, including that of POTUS (in 2004), but was never elected.

At the end of his theGrioAwards speech, Sharpton said, “The only thing that I really live for is I get up with this dream: every bigot, every racist, everyone in this country that hates will say damn, he’s up again.”

TheGrio online article concludes, “He loves to have them know that they can’t stop him. He loves knowing that Black resistance to oppression is unstoppable. That’s why the Rev. Sharpton deserves the Justice Icon Award.”

Those who commemorate recent Black history forty years from now will surely remember Al Sharpton along with many other exemplary civil rights leaders such as him as well as the next two theGrio Ikon Awards.

The Scientist Ikon was awarded to Kizzmekia Corbett, born in 1986 in North Carolina. In 2008, she received a B.S. in biological sciences and sociology from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).** 

In 2014, Corbett earned a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and since June 2021 she has been an assistant professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Corbett was awarded the Scientist Ikon because of her great contribution to the development of the covid-19 vaccination, which probably saved as many as five million lives—and some sources put that figure as high as 20 million—around the world.

Please click here to read the article about the reason Corbett was chosen for the Scientist Ikon and listen to her acceptance speech last November.

The recipient of the Inspiration Ikon Award was Dwayne Johnson. I never thought I would post a blog article in admiration of a man whose main claim to fame is professional wrestling, for I am the very opposite of a fan of that “sport.” 

Johnson’s father was a Black Nova Scotian and his mother (whose first name is Mataniufeagaimaleata (!) but she went by the name Ata) is Samoan. Both parents were professional wrestlers.

Citing Wikipedia again, Dwayne Douglas Johnson (b. 1972), “also known by his ring name The Rock, is an American actor, businessman, and professional wrestler. He is…widely regarded as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time.”

Recently, however, Johnson has been in the news because of teaming up with Oprah to raise and provide much-needed financial and housing relief for the many people suffering from the Maui, Hawaii, wildfires in 2023, the deadliest U.S. wildfires in at least 100 years.

Here is the link to Johnson’s impressive (and brief) acceptance speech for his Inspiration Ikon, which was also awarded in November 2023.

Black History Month every February is an important time to recognize prominent African Americans of the past as well as contemporary Black people of distinction who are shaping Black history that will be remembered decades from now.

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  * This is the opening sentence of the Wikipedia article on TheGrio (often written as theGrio)—and it needs to be updated as African-American is now not generally used as a hyphenated word nor used as much as Black. Here is a link to theGrio’s webpage with their explanation about themselves—and I encourage you to take a look at that website. (Note that Grio is pronounced grī/ō.) I was a bit surprised to learn that it is available on channel 62-2, a free local channel, here in the Kansas City area.

** I was interested to see that, for my granddaughter Naomi is currently a student at UMBC. 

Attacking/Advancing Black History

This month, as is February every year, is widely recognized as Black History Month. But this year, Black history is being both attacked and advanced more than in most preceding years. 

Black History Month was conceived by historian Carter G. Woodson. The son of enslaved parents, Woodson (1875~1950) was the second Black person to earn a Ph.D. (in 1912) from Harvard University, the first being W.E.B. Du Bois.

Woodson established what became Black History Month in 1926, choosing February because of President Lincoln’s birthday on Feb. 12 and Frederick Douglass’s birthday on Feb. 14. (The day and even the year of Douglass’s birth is not known for sure, but his death date of Feb. 20, 1895, is certain.)

Black History Month has been observed annually in the U.S. since 1976. While there have always been detractors, perhaps the study of Black history is questioned/attacked more this year than ever before.

The teaching of Black history is being attacked especially by numerous (almost entirely Republican) politicians. Foremost among those are Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is now the frontrunner as the GOP nominee for next year’s presidential election.

A law passed in 1994 requires the teaching of Florida’s Black history in K-12 schools. But DeSantis has mounted an attack on what he calls the “woke mob,” claiming that certain instruction of Black history is the equivalent of political indoctrination.

“Florida’s struggle to teach Black history has become a battle over who controls the past” is a fairly long article by Mary Ellen Klas, a White woman who is a “bureau chief” for the Miami Herald newspaper.

I recommend the reading of Klas’s article, which was posted February 8 on the Miami Herald’s website (see here). Her closing words are from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

DeSantis is by no means the only prominent politician who is trying to control the past and the future by objecting to the teaching of Black history in the present.

In her GOP rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday evening (Feb. 7), Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that “our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race.”

That charge was in keeping with her January 10 “Executive Order to Prohibit Indoctrination and Critical Race Theory in Schools,” in which she claimed that CRT “emphasizes skin color as a person’s primary characteristic, thereby resurrecting segregationist values . . . .”

Southern governors shamefully distort facts to attack the teaching of Black history in their states—and in the nation as a whole.

Black history is being strongly asserted by “The 1619 Project,” a “long-form journalism endeavor” developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, writers from The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine.

The first publication of that endeavor was in August 2019, commemorating the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the English colony of Virginia.

Its aim was “to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of U.S. history."

Hannah-Jones (b. 1976) was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.” She was also chosen as first on a list of “The Most Influential African Americans 2020” (see here).

A six-part TV docuseries produced by Hulu debuted on January 26. Hannah-Jones is the host of that series that explores Black history as related to the themes that are the titles of the six TV episodes: democracy, race, music, capitalism, fear, and justice.

There has been criticism of Hannah-Jones’s work, some of it by historians and legitimate. Indeed, there are deficiencies in presenting history in sweeping generalizations and folksy anecdotes. But for the general public, there are advantages to presenting history in such a way.

Most of the criticism, though, has been by right-wing politicians and others who will not acknowledge the reality of systematic racism and also by those who want to preserve white supremacy in the country.

Black History Month is important as a time for challenging the unwarranted prevalence of white supremacy and for advancing acceptance of the reality of systematic racism that has been highly detrimental for so many Blacks in the United States, a reality that dates back to 1619.

“Carved in Ebony”: In Observance of Black History Month

In December, I received a book from my granddaughter Katrina—and I am happy to report that on February 9 she and her husband Ryan became parents of Nina Irene, a beautiful baby girl and Junes’ and my first great-grandchild. But this blog post is about Katrina’s Christmas present to me. 

Observing Black History Month

As is widely known, February is designated every year as Black History Month in the U.S., and I read the book Katrina gave me partly as a way to learn more about Black history. Let me share with you a little of what I learned from that book.

Carved in Ebony (2021) was written by Jasmine L. Holmes, a youngish (b. 1990) Black woman who lives in Jackson, Mississippi, with her husband Phillip and their three young sons.

Author Holmes’s slim book is about ten outstanding African-American women, all born in the nineteenth century, who have largely been unknown by the general public. Indeed, I didn’t remember hearing even one of their names prior to reading this book.

But they were all notable women—and good for me (and you) to learn about during Black History Month.

“God’s Image Carved in Ebony”

While, fortunately, it is not nearly as true now as when he spoke those words fifty years ago, in the Introduction, Holmes cites these words of Malcolm X: “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman” (p. 18).

But writing about ten outstanding Black women of strong Christian faith, Holmes asserts, “black women are made in the image of God. They are that image carved in ebony hues, wrought with a purpose, for his glory” (p. 19). Their exemplary lives should no longer be neglected.

“God’s Image Carved in Ebony,” the fifth chapter, is about Amanda Berry Smith (1837~1915), who even though she was born into slavery, became an evangelist, a missionary to Africa, and the founder of an orphanage for Black children.    

Amanda’s father bought his freedom from slavery and then that of his family when she was still young. But the Berry family was still poor, so Amanda left home to work as a live-in domestic.

She married at the age of seventeen, but that rocky marriage ended when her husband didn’t return from the Civil War. Then her marriage to James Smith ended with his death due to cancer in 1867. Soon afterward, Amanda began to fulfill her calling to be an evangelist.

In 1878, Amanda traveled overseas and preached in Great Britain and in India. Then she served as a missionary in Liberia for eight years, beginning in 1882.

Her final ministry was at the Amanda Smith Orphanage and Industrial Home for Abandoned and Destitute Colored Children, which she founded in Illinois in 1899 and where she served until 1912.

At the end of her long, productive life, Amanda was described as a woman in whom “God’s image was carved in ebony.”

The Example of Charlotte Forten Grimké

Charlotte Forten was born the same year (1837) as Amanda Berry and died about seven months earlier (in July 1914). But their lives were vastly different: whereas Amanda was born into slavery, the Forten family were prominent free Blacks in Philadelphia and active abolitionists. 

Although I hadn’t heard of Charlotte before reading the ninth chapter in Jasmine Holmes’s book, I had probably heard of the man she married in 1878, the nephew of the amazing Grimké sisters, the subject of my Feb. 24, 2016, blog post.  

The same year Amanda went overseas as an evangelist (1878), Charlotte married Francis Grimké, pastor of the prominent Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C.

In addition to her position as the pastor’s wife at that church until her death, in 1896 Charlotte helped found the National Association of Colored Women, and she remained an active advocate for civil rights until her death.

Yes, although not widely known, there are many outstanding nineteenth-century Black women—and now in 2022 the U.S. will likely have a new Supreme Court Justice similarly “carved in ebony.”

The Problem of (Teaching) History: “1619” or “1776”?

This post is closely related to my June 19 article regarding critical race theory (CRT). Most of the legislation seeking to curtail the teaching of CRT has included criticism of The 1619 Project as well. CRT and “1619” both raise the question of how history is understood and taught.  

The Problem of Microhistory

Each one of us has our own personal history, which should, one would think, be rather straightforward and non-problematic. But in writing my life story, now available in print, some historical “facts” came under question. June did not remember some of our family history the same way I did.

The two siblings in Ann Patchett’s intriguing book The Dutch House (2019) discuss their family’s microhistory. One asks, “Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?” The other reflects on how we humans

overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered (p. 45).

The Problem of Macrohistory

Recently I also read The Sense of an Ending (2011) by British author Julian Barnes. In that novel, one “high school” student remarks, “History is the lies of the victors.” The teacher retorts that “it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.”

At that point, the most brilliant student in the class says, rather cynically, “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” (pp. 16-17).

If that is true in personal or family history; it is especially true in writing macrohistory. But the problem is more than just the imperfections of memory and the inadequacies of documentation.

The most serious problem is the biases of the historians and the conscious or unconscious interpretation of past events for the benefit of a particular segment of society.

Thus, the squabble over The 1619 Project continues.

U.S. History: “1619” or “1776”?

In 2019, The New York Times Magazine published The 1619 Project, developed by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and others.

The year 1619 was when the first African slaves set foot in North America. The 1619 Project, then, “aims to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative" (from this link).

The 1619 Project was strongly criticized by politicians such as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (see here) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who proposed the Saving of American History Act of 2020 (see here), and especially by former Pres. Trump.

On the day before the 2020 presidential election, by executive order DJT established the 1776 Commission. Republican politicians continue to praise the flawed 1776 Commission report and to castigate The 1619 Project.

The “1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools” is being signed by numerous politicians, such as the two current Republican gubernatorial candidates in Kansas, who were rebuked by an editorial in the June 28 issue of the Kansas City Star.

There are some obvious problems with The 1619 Project, including some historical inaccuracies (as noted in this 3/6/20 Politico article). It also fails to link the beginning of U.S. history to the mistreatment of Native Americans (as this 9/26/20 opinion piece explains).

But most who oppose teaching CRT and “1619” want to shield students from much of the “ugly” history of the past. They need to consider, though, the truth of the following meme. (The painting depicts some dreadful history of Canada’s First Nations children, similar to what happened in the U.S.) 

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**Of the many articles I have read related to this post, I am linking here to only one, Eugene Robinson’s 6/28 opinion piece in The Washington Post, which is accessible here without a paywall. The sixth paragraph on is directly about The 1619 Project.

The Tragic Tulsa Massacre of 1921

There seems to be no end to the need for acknowledging the violence done to African Americans in this country. Two months ago, I wrote about the shameful Easter 1873 massacre in Louisiana. This weekend is the 100^th anniversary of the tragic massacre of Blacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Basic Facts of the Tulsa Massacre

It all started on a Monday morning, May 30. Sarah, a 17-year-old White elevator operator charged that Dick, a 19-year-old Black man grabbed her arm as he entered the elevator. It is not known what actually happened, but the next day Dick was arrested for attacking Sarah.

By mid-afternoon on May 31, threats of lynching Dick surfaced, and Blacks begin to gather to protect him—but they were far outnumbered by the Whites. About 10 p.m., a White man attempted to disarm a Black man. The gun fired in the ruckus, and the massacre began.

Beginning around 5 a.m. on June 1, Black homes and businesses were looted and set ablaze. At 7:30, Mount Zion Baptist Church was set afire.

Most of the killing and the destruction of property was over by noon, but by then Tulsa’s prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood, known as the “Black Wall Street,” was completely destroyed.

According to the large, impressive book The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History, “Perhaps as many as three hundred Tulsans” were killed.

Moreover, “Upward of ten thousand Black Tulsans were without homes or businesses, their lifetime possessions either consumed by fire or carried away by whites” (p. 271).**  

Why Remember the Tulsa Massacre?

One of William Faulkner’s most memorable lines comes from his 1951 novel Requiem of a Nun: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

Faulkner’s words were paraphrased in "A More Perfect Union," a speech delivered by then Senator Barack Obama in March 2008. He argued that many of the difficulties in African American communities could be traced to the sufferings of previous generations under slavery and Jim Crow laws.

Or, he might have said, traced back to events such as the 1906 lynchings in Springfield, Mo., and the massacre in Tulsa 15 years later.

For decades and decades, evil racist acts of the past were overlooked, disregarded, consigned to the dustbin of history—or so it was hoped.

Just 35 years after the tragic Tulsa massacre of 1921, I took an American history course in Bolivar, Mo., just over 200 miles from Tulsa. I’m quite sure no mention was made of the Tulsa massacre.

According to the online Britannica, “Despite its severity and destructiveness, the Tulsa race massacre was barely mentioned in history books until the late 1990s, when a state commission was formed to document the incident.”

Nor was there any mention of the lynchings of African Americans fifteen years earlier in Springfield, Mo., even though that city was only about 30 miles away. My small Baptist college had no Black students, and there was little, if any, interest in Black history in the classroom or on campus.

But the past is never dead—and in 2019 the city of Springfield finally, after 113 years, erected a historical marker in the city. And now, 100 years after the massacre in Tulsa, the country is finally paying some attention to the tragic events there. The past, thankfully, is no longer forgotten or concealed.

There is hope for the days ahead if the nation learns from the living past in order to create a livable future with liberty and justice for all.

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** The book of photographic history was written by Karlos K. Hill and published in March of this year. Another important book on this subject is Randy Krehbiel’s Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre (2019). (Both of these books were available in my local public library.)

The Amazing Grimké Sisters

February each year is designated as Black History Month here in the U.S. For my contribution to this year’s emphasis on Black history, this article is mainly about two white women who were significantly involved in the struggle for the abolition of slavery in the United States.

In spite of long knowing about and being appreciative of other women abolitionists, such as Lucinda Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for some reason I had never known about Sarah and Angelina Grimké until fairly recently.

Last November I read The Invention of Wings (2014), Sue Monk Kidd’s wonderful historical novel about the Grimké sisters. I was both greatly informed and impressed.

Sarah Grimké was born in 1792 in Charleston, South Carolina, and her little sister Angelina was born in 1805. In the 1830s they became the first female antislavery pioneers and activists in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.

Charleston, S.C., was founded in 1670 as Charles Town in honor of England’s King Charles II. By 1690 it was the fifth-largest city in North America. Charleston, as it was called after 1783, became the nation’s slave trade capital, the place where 40% of slaves brought from Africa first landed. The city was built on slave labor and thrived under a slave economy for nearly 200 years.

Soon after Lincoln was elected President, in December 1860 South Carolina was the first state to secede. The Civil War, then, began on April 12, 1861, when troops in Charleston fired on Fort Sumter, which was on an island at the entrance of Charleston Harbor.

Growing up in Charleston, the Grimké sisters certainly knew about slavery firsthand. Their father, a lawyer, politician, and judge, was also a wealthy planter who owned hundreds of slaves.

Kidd’s book begins with a chapter about Handful, the slave girl who is given as a personal slave to Sarah on her eleventh birthday—and the book is as much the story of the fictional Handful and her mother as it is about the historical Grimké sisters.

In a significant subplot of the novel, the life of Handful’s mother becomes entangled with that of a black man with the improbable name of Denmark Vesey—a historical figure I was also glad to learn about.

Vesey won a lottery in 1799 when he was 32. He used some of that money to purchase his freedom—but he also wanted to help slaves in Charleston, and elsewhere, obtain their freedom. To that end he began to draw up plans for a slave revolt.

Vesey’s plot, though, was thwarted, the revolt crushed, and he was executed in July 1822. (Remarkably, in 2014 a monument to Vesey, which you see part of in the picture, was placed in a Charleston city park.) 

Having seen the evils of slavery even in their own home, Sarah and then Angelina a few years later moved north to escape it. The Grimké sisters became Quakers and increasingly became involved in the fight against slavery in Philadelphia and surrounding areas.

Other abolitionists could give stirring speeches about the need to abolish slavery, but the Grimké sisters from personal knowledge could testify to slavery’s evil impact on human lives. Through most of the 1830s they spoke in many public meetings, pleading for the abolition of slavery as well as for women’s rights—the first single women in the nation to do so widely.

The amazing Grimké sisters took very seriously the words a Quaker man spoke to Sarah when they first met: “To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.”