Public Employee Press

Celebrating 25 years of Black history

District Council 37’s 25th celebration of Black History Month featured 16 events sponsored by locals and the Black History Committee to honor and build on the African American legacy.

Finale Night, Feb. 24, drew 450 union members, elected officials, local presidents andexecutives Lee Saunders and Vernon Watkins of DC 37’s national union, AFSCME.

A procession of drummers, local leaders and politicians followed DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts into the main hall where Local 420 2nd Vice President Togba Porte offered a libation in Dahl, a West African language spoken in his birthplace of Liberia. “Today we are all Africans,” Porte said as he called out for blessings.

“The future belongs to those who prepare for it today,” Roberts said. As New York labor chair of the United Negro College Fund, Roberts raised $110,000 for the educational charity. UNCF reps held a college fair at DC 37’s Black History Month Family Day, and will lead seminars starting in April for members and their children.

Before the Medgar Evers College Imani Singers performed traditional spirituals on Finale Night, the Black History Committee co-chairs, Cynthia Chin Marshall and Sherwyn Britton, invited Roberts to lead a candle lighting ceremony honoring the late Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks.

Disparities and hope
“These women devoted their lives to the movement and were in the forefront of a revolution for civil rights,” Roberts said.

The committee’s use of the Sankofa symbol, a Ghanaian term meaning to reclaim the past to understand the present and create a better future, is appropriate, Roberts said, “because the struggles and achievements of African Americans matter. We have a history to tell.”

“When we don’t honor our history, we risk going backwards,” said Saunders, the evening’s keynote speaker. “The contributions, triumphs and defeats of African Americans are emblazoned upon this nation’s soul.”

Giving an eyewitness account of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction “made worse by leadership failures,” Saunders noted the irony of the New Orleans mayor seeking aid from foreign governments when the Bush Administration, busy rebuilding Iraq, failed to help. History will place the 9th Ward with Rosewood, Fla., and Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Okla., as communities ravaged for profit, Saunders said.

He noted that disparities between the races in America include retirement security, access to quality health care, and household net worth, which for the typical white family is $121,000 while the typical black family’s net worth is $19,000.

Changes will come as more people “use knowledge to confront those in authority, call attention to the unfairness, and gather information needed to take greater control of our destiny,” Saunders said. “If we can rise up from 300 years of slavery and nearly 100 years of Jim Crow, we can certainly rise up from the problems we’re facing now!”

—Diane S. Williams