Glory Days (excerpts)

January 1

January 1, a day of beginnings and endings. Imani, Kwanzaa’s seventh and final day: time to renew our faith in the future while savoring the last candle’s flickering glow. A ritual rooted in wisdoms and traditions centuries old, Kwanzaa was first celebrated thirty years ago. But long before Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga claimed this day for Imani (see December 26) and fifty-six years before it was declared Emancipation Proclamation Day in 1863, January 1 was a day of thanksgiving. For the two hundred years of our American sojourn, from 1619 to 1808, we had slaved for freedom. Our men had fought in the Revolutionary War, only to see their sacrifices betrayed by American colonists who reveled in their freedoms at the expense of ours. The first bend in the long road to freedom finally neared in 1807 as Congress banned the torturous importation of Africans that was the slave trade. Speaking for the millions of lives consumed by its evils, Absalom Jones, an ex-slave and cofounder of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, preached his first African-American Thanksgiving Day sermon the day the ban went into effect – January 1, 1808: Let the first of January, the day of the abolition of the slave trade in our country, be set apart in every year, as a day of publick thanksgiving for that mercy. Let the history of the sufferings of our brethren, and of their deliverance, descend by this means to our children to the remotest generations; and when they shall ask, in time to come, saying, What mean the lessons, the psalms, the prayers and the praises in the worship of this day? let us answer them by saying, the Lord, on this day of which this is the anniversary, abolished the trade which dragged your fathers from their native country, and sold them as bondmen in the United States of America. Friday, January 1, 1808 Pennsylvania Celebrations USA Kwanzaa: Faith

February 1

On February 1, 1960, four students took their seats at a lunch counter and their places in history. To some, their youth meant that they had time; that their whole lives were ahead of them. To them, their youth meant that if they did not get segregation out of the way, it would waste the rest of their lives. As NAACP Youth Chapter members, Ezell Blair, Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond were actively committed to ending segregation. Sitting around on a Sunday night, they came to the conclusion that the best time to act was now. Their strategy would be a sit-in. At Woolworth’s the next day, the North Carolina A & T freshmen made a few small purchases around the store before sitting down at the lunch counter. When the waitress refused to serve them, they put forth their challenge: “Why would the store invite us in to serve us at one counter and not another?” A policeman nearby stood stunned and confused, not knowing what to do. He had a gun. He had a stick. But they had been respectful, peaceful, and logical – and that was something to which he had not been trained to respond. They occupied the seats until the store closed, and left. Said McCain of the event years later, “If it’s possible to know what it means to have your soul cleansed, I felt pretty clean that time. I probably felt better on that day than IÕve ever felt in my life. A lot of feelings of guilt left meÉ. I felt as though the manhood of a number of other Black persons had been restored and hat gotten some respect from just that one day.” In truth, the Greensboro sit-in was not the first. But by braving the odds, risking their safety, and acting on their own, these young men inspired similar protests by college students across the South, and they contributed to the student activism of the 1960s and 1970s that culminated in the Black Studies, women’s and antiwar movements. Monday, February 1, 1960 North Carolina Civil Rights USA Dignity

March 1

For Olaudah Equiano, a young African boy kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1756 at the age of eleven, a book was a curious things. “I had often seen my master…employed in reading,” he said. “I had a great curiousity to talk to the books as I thought [he] did, and so to learn how all things had a beginning; for that purpose I have often taken up a book and have talked to it and then put my ears to it, when in hopes it would answer me; and I have been very much concerned when I found it remained silent.” Discovering the key to reading, Equiano turned the silence of books into a roar that can be heard to this day. On March 1, 1789, his two-volume book was published in England: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. His books spoke to the rape of Africa and slavery, broke ground for “autobiography” as a literary genre, and revealed life in mid-eighteenth-century Africa as seen through the eyes of a child. Born in Benin, a nation dating to ancient Africa, Equiano was the son of an enbrenche, or Ibo chief, in Essaka (eastern Nigeria). “We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians and poets,” he wrote. “Every great event such as a triumphant return from battle or other cause of public rejoicing is celebrated in public dances” – that is, there would be a public procession of different groups depicting great battles, “domestic employment, a pathetic story, or some rural sport [with] a spirit and variety which I have scarcely seen elsewhere.” Sadly, this charmed life ended abruptly when he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. But the experiences of his boyhood shaped his manhood. “I was trained up from my earliest years in the art of war; my daily exercise was shooting and throwing javelins; and my mother adorned me with emblems, after the manner of our greatest warriors.” With his book, he waged war on slavery until his death in 1797. Sunday, March 1, 1789 Benin Social History W. Africa Dignity