Going Black in History : Event Celebrates African Traditions, Denied Heritage

It takes an entire village to raise a child.

African proverb

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Things are different now, but there was a time when people lived this proverb. Whether in small towns in the South or in close-knit communities throughout Los Angeles, parents raised their own children and other people’s too.

With a stern look and a sharp word, Mrs. Brown down the street could correct a neighbor’s child caught doing wrong--and that child would respectfully obey.

“This is a part of black history--understanding the family,” said Teri Hoggard, president of the National Council of Negro Women.

So members chose this proverb and its message of collective responsibility as the theme of their Black History Celebration held Saturday at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys.

More than 80 people gathered at the college to be reminded, as its president, Tyree Weider, put it, “of who we are, where we came from and where we need to go.”

“We’re constantly taught we’re nobody, we haven’t contributed anything in history, we don’t deserve respect,” said Ron McMillan, 26, a Valley College student. “It’s important to hold events like this because it gives us an opportunity to see who we are essentially as African people.”

Their celebration began at the beginning, in Africa, with a performance by the Zadonu African Music and Dance Company, a Valley-based dance troupe.

Following the pounding rhythm of the master drum, a small group of women performed agahu, a social dance, and bawa, a harvest dance originated by the Dargati people of northern Ghana. Dressed in brightly colored Kinte cloth, the dancers told their story, whirling, kicking, dipping, sliding, all to the beat of the drum.

An enthusiastic audience clapped and rocked side to side, encouraging the dancers on.

Later, the Pacoima-based dance group Positive Youngstas and the 2 Hype Possee stunned the spectators with blindingly fast, hip-hop-type drill-team routines.

Aside from the music and the dance, the event also offered visitors a chance to fill in some of the missing spots in the understanding of their history.

Throughout the day, celebrants toured the Black Inventors Museum, a traveling exhibit that chronicles the inventions of African Americans.

The exhibit, which includes photographs of the inventors and replicas of their products, offered many surprises. There were exhibits on T. J. Marshall’s fire extinguisher, built in 1872, and Hiram Thomas’ potato chip, first fried in 1867. And one on the first open-heart surgeries performed by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams at Provident Hospital in Chicago.

“Let’s see who invented the aspirin!” said 7-year-old Jordan Hightower, as he rushed to one side of the table, with his friend Gyasi Bryant close behind.

“Look!” Gyasi said, “J. Ricks invented the horseshoe.”

Neither had heard of most of the inventors, nor had Jordan’s aunt, Erni Frazier, who brought them to the event.

“I’m embarrassed that at age 49 a lot of these things I’ve not been exposed to,” she said. “We live in a system that denies our contributions.”

For Valerie Moody, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, the celebration was a time to reflect.

Back in the 1960s, she and her family could not rent an apartment in Van Nuys until after they had filed and substantiated a discrimination complaint, she said.

“It brings back many, many memories,” Moody said.

The celebration and its theme offered a simple but poignant lesson: History is a tool that can lead to solutions for the problems of the day.

The Rev. Andrew Wright, 50, an associate pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, remembers when things were different.

“I grew up in the age when a whole community was actively involved in each child’s life,” Wright said. “The neighbors looked over the children, and they actively participated in the discipline. I believe in that concept now.”

For Kobla Ladzekpo, founder and leader of Zadonu, the same was true of his childhood in Ghana.

“You were a child of the community, not just your parents,” he said.

For all its benefits, some parts of history are not easy to revisit.

Keynote speaker Shirlee Taylor Haizlip) was raised “by many villages,” she said, but growing up, her family “village” was a lot smaller than it could have been.

The author of “The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White,” Haizlip told of her painstaking search for a long-missing part of her family’s lineage.

In 1916, some of the family members elected to separate from their darker-hued relatives, and their heritage, and pass for white. “Passing” referred to the practice of very light-skinned African Americans living as white people.

Because of their darker skin, Haizlip’s mother and uncle were sent as children to live with relatives as African Americans, while Haizlip’s light-skinned grandfather and most of the rest of her family assumed a white identity.

The audience listened intently as Haizlip described the search that led to her mother’s one remaining sister, who had lived all her life as a white, and the eventual reunion of the two sides of her family--one black, the other white.

“I think the important thing to understand is that it’s not just my family’s story, it’s the story of many African American families,” Haizlip said. “Some part of their family was lost.”

And the majority of African Americans and white people--whether or not they are willing to admit it--share a mixed lineage, she contends.

“That’s the history of our country,” she told the audience. “It’s intertwined.”