Our Visual History
With February comes Cupid, chalky candy hearts, bone-chilling nights, red carpet Oscars dresses and, also, a time to reflect on the African American experience in America. Black History Month. As a kid, my parents enthusiastically regarded this time of year as an opportunity to offer a counter-narrative to the lessons my sister and I were being taught in school. Often one of them would say, “But what you don’t know is…” Then they followed that with facts and events, places and people I knew nothing of. The truly fascinating was often juxtaposed against the truly mundane. History, I learned, was rich, subjective and dictated by who got to tell it. As a kid, Black History Month felt like being given a passcode that unlocked a world of information and imagination previously unknown to me.
My Black History Month Instagram Challenge
This February, as I embark on so many firsts, I chose to try something new. With the help of a new calendar and dream planner from the genius folks at INK+VOLT, I decided to give myself a professional creative challenge. I wanted to use each day of Black History Month to honor someone from my family lineage by posting images from the photos handed down to me from both my grandmothers and one great-grandmother. I would bring Black History Month to Instagram my way. And I was curious if I could use 28 consecutive days of posting visual histories to reflect, discover and inspire something new within myself or for my family.
Like so often happens for me, the seed of this idea was actually planted over a lunch. Two people I admire greatly were both gently nudging me in the direction of a new book, one on family and specifically the generation of women who shaped my life. I left the lunch wondering if sharing daily pictures from the family archives just might help me get closer to this creative idea. Maybe, maybe not. I wasn’t sure. However, I knew that if nothing else, the daily challenge would certainly give me interesting dinner conversation topics with my daughter. She never met most of the people pictured in the sepia and black and white pictures. Some predate her by a century. She certainly doesn’t know their stories.
The first thing I noticed by Day 3 of the Instagram posts was the amount of people who sent me messages that they were so glad I was doing this. People who knew me and people who didn’t. One share came from someone who said the posts were as close as our children might ever get to learning about the influence of African American people. She was not African American. She just wanted to know history, shared history, American history.
Now, I felt like I was onto something. But what?
What does it mean to look back at our ancestors? What clues has history left us that might inform our now?
Those became the questions I started asking internally with each new post.
Getting to Know our Ancestors Through our Visual History
Anyone close to me knows I am a huge fan of Dr. Henry Louis Gates’ work on the TV show Finding Your Roots. (I actually met him once in Florence. But that is a story for another time.) I love contemplating the intersections of chance and choice. How the fates and actions of the people before us brought us to our now. How we carry those choices and fates with us, knowingly or unknowingly.
There is a section in my book From Scratch where I mention the achievements of my ancestors. As I was writing that passage, a question lingered at the back of my mind: How had these people been capable of such quiet, unassuming greatness in the face of disenfranchisement? When I posted on Instagram, answers began to emerge.
On Day 9 of my challenge, I posted a picture of an unknown relative. In the image, he is a young man photographed on a snowy day, scarf around his neck, cigarette in his hand. He is handsome, bold. He locks eyes with the camera without hesitation. I kinda love him for that. Behind him is a large brick structure. It looked to be a landmark or large public fountain in perhaps some northern city. I had no idea where he was or what he was doing there. I wrote the caption to accompany the post, “I want to know your whole story.” Then I shared it. And that’s when the universe took over.
Sharing our Stories
An hour later, a relative in Chicago who I haven’t seen since I was child responded telling me the man in the picture was standing on the grounds of his alma mater – St. Emma Military Academy, the only all-black military academy for boys in the US. A few messages back and forth and I learned that a few men in my family attended this prestigious school, especially those who migrated north out of East Texas. A little research and I learned that the school graduated 10,000 young men between 1895 and 1970. People who undoubtedly contributed greatly to their communities. What surprised me was that I never knew this school existed. As I was drinking my espresso on Day 10, suddenly the sense of personal purpose and commitment to civic service that runs through for so many generations in my family came into better focus.
By posting those pictures on Instagram, other new stories were brought forward in ways I had not anticipated. I discovered themes of purpose, determination, intuitive wisdom, connection to land, and a resilience in the face of disenfranchisement.
This 28-day challenge that started as “Let’s see if I can do this,” had by the end given me a rejuvenation and a sense of my own agency. I want to not only give a voice to those who preceded us, but to use their examples as inspiration to meet the challenges of our time in my own way. We are, right now, writing a history. What do we want it to say? Who do we want to tell it?
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