Tag: Black History Month

Assembly covers Black history in Santa Clara County

Last week, a special middle school assembly featured author and historian Jan Batiste Adkins, who shared the history of African Americans in the Bay Area and Santa Clara County area. “I think that understanding each other’s history … is crucial,” said Adkins, who has taught community college for 15 years. “We have to learn from each other. We have to live and experience each other’s experiences and that’s what history does for us.”

Adkins’ most recent book covers African American history in San Jose and Santa Clara County. Her talk began with the record of the first Africans making their way to what was once called New Spain in the 1500s. After the establishment of Puebla de San Jose de Guadalupe in 1777, people of African descent, Adkins explained, mingled and intermarried with Mexican, Spanish and indigenous people of the area.

Mexico later achieved independence from Spain and until 1850 controlled the territory known as Alta California, the last governor of which was Pío Pico, a politician and entrepreneur of mixed African and Native American-Spanish ancestry. Numerous locations in California are named for him, including Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles and the city of Pico Rivera in Los Angeles County.

Following California’s statehood in 1850, plantation owners took their enslaved workers west to seek gold and encountered resistance from the local population, who contended that the enslaved laborers unpaid work amounted to unfair competition. As a result, the sale or purchase of enslaved labor became prohibited in the state. California’s abolitionist movement also helped many of these workers free themselves of slavery by providing them funds to hire lawyers. One such landmark case was that of Sampson Gleaves, who was released from bondage in 1854. Gleaves’ manumission papers are still preserved and maintained by History San Jose.

Another enslaved man named James Williams was taken to California in the 1840s to help search for gold. He was allowed to work at night for other miners and eventually purchased his freedom. The descendants of Williams’ former owner still live in San Jose, Adkins said, and in order to retrieve Williams’ photo for her book, she had to first contact this family, who requested anonymity.

In 1861, Rev. Peter Cassey established the first Black secondary school in San Jose, which was also the first in the state. It also admitted Asian American and indigenous students. The First AME Zion Church was founded just a few years later in 1864, and still exists today on 20th Street in San Jose, where it has resided since 1972.

Black-owned businesses also became increasingly common, Adkins explained, including San Jose’s first Black barber shop, which was established in the 1860s by the White brothers, who also founded the Afro League to address the ongoing problems of racial inequality.

One artist who rose to prominence around this time was Edmonia Lewis, a sculptor who arrived in California in 1873 and the first Black American sculptor to achieve widespread renown. Her work is still viewable today at the Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library in San Jose. Lewis came to California at the invitation of Sarah Knox, whose husband owned the Knox-Goodrich building in San Jose.

During the latter half of the 20th century, San Jose State College (now known as San Jose State University) became known for its athletic dominance, and two of its track and field athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, became famous for raising their fists in a Black Power salute during the medals ceremony at the 1968 Summer Olympic games in Mexico City, where Smith won gold and Carlos won silver. At the time, Adkins explained, San Jose State did now allow Black students to stay in the campus dorms, forcing them to find housing options off-campus.

Toward the end, Adkins briefly discussed recent figures such as Maynard Holliday, the robotics engineer who attended graduate school at Stanford University and later worked at Livermore National Laboratory and the Pentagon, designing robotic and positioning systems. While working as an engineer in Santa Clara County in the 1970s, Jerry Lawson led the team that developed the video game cartridge, which became the most widely used format for the video game industry for decades, popularized by platforms such as the Atari 2600. Francine Bellson, educated at MIT, also worked at Fairchild and later in research and development at IBM.

February 10, 2023Tags: alumni-express, Black History Month, DEI, eweekly, express, guest speakers

Bettina Love delivers webinar on Black history, racism and abolition

Yesterday, to recognize the beginning of Black History Month, Harker’s Black Student Union and Student Diversity Coalition hosted a webinar by Bettina Love, the Athletic Association Endowed Professor at the University of Georgia and author of “We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom.” She is also a co-founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network.

Love noted the importance of designating February as Black History Month “to honor the history and creativity and brilliance and love of Black people,” adding that “This is a very interesting time to be having a conversation about Black history and justice in a pandemic after the summer we’ve had,” referencing the massive wave of protests and unrest that took place following the police killing of George Floyd in May of last year.

One part of Love’s presentation displayed Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of Ruby Bridges on her way to school after the passing of school integration in New Orleans, escorted by U.S. Marshals, with a racial slur scrawled on the wall next to her. “What we don’t talk about is that Ruby Bridges is 66 years old,” Love said, illustrating the point that images of the racial segregation and oppression do not represent ancient history. “This is not a long, long, long time ago. This is one generation removed.”

Love used the example to show that racism is a structure still alive and well in American society, and that Black Americans continue the fight to make Americans realize their humanity. As examples, she pointed out that white medical students believe Black patients have greater resistance to pain, and that students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) pay more for student loans, a situation she called “educational redlining.” Black COVID-19 patients are also dying at higher rates, which some have attributed to pre-existing conditions. “What if I told you that racism is a preexisting condition, and your country makes you the most vulnerable?” Love countered, citing that Black Americans have had their access to well-paying jobs, education, housing and other aspects of what she called the “social safety net” severely limited.

“When there’s a global pandemic and you need all of those institutions to work … if you are not allowed all of those things, you are not allowed a social safety net,” she said. Love also recapped Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight to redistribute wealth and political power in his multiethnic Poor People’s Campaign. “What we have done is not only try to free ourselves but try to free everybody else as well,” she said.

Repeated exposure to incidents of vicious racism being visited on Black people can be very traumatic. “We are living in a world where every solution is punishment,” she said. “We are murdering children’s spirits.”

Love also emphasized the importance of realizing that “Black folks’ lives are more than just trauma, more than just oppression,” and to recognize “how we try, how we get knocked down, how we get back up, with swag.”

Black Americans have learned to adapt and innovate largely because “we’ve studied this place so well. [As a Black person], you know you can’t go through the front door and you can’t go through the back door. You have to know every angle.”

To reinforce her point, she quoted poet Nikki Giovanni, who said, “Style has a profound meaning to Black Americans. If we can’t drive, we will invent walks and the world will envy the dexterity of our feet … if given scraps, we will make quilts … take away our drums, and we will clap our hands. We prove the human spirit will prevail.”

In order to create a just society, Love proposed that a radical transformation is necessary and not just a reforming of the current system. Her concept of abolition involves first instilling “an imagination to create a world without oppression. It is a radical framework that asks us to look deeply at our institutions, and not try to reform them, but to build something new,” she said. “We are trying to go to the very root of oppressions. We have to look at the very structures that create prisons, the very idea of jobs and education.”

Love ended her talk by communicating the importance of being a co-conspirator instead of an ally, by calling out forms of oppression and actively working to avoid creating systems of injustice, imploring people to “live your everyday life trying to make this world better.”

February 2, 2021Tags: alumni-express, Black History Month, DEI, eweekly, guest speakers