POTTSTOWN — “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
That’s a quote from the late Maya Angelou, famed author, poet and civil rights activist. And it’s how Hannah Davis, assistant director at the Tri-County Active Adult Center, closed the Black history program she helped organize there on Friday.
The program included a sampling of Black History, awards for “Community Changemakers” Crystal Williams and Bob and Sandy Bauers, as well as remarks by a housing activist and a Black district judge, along with musical selections by the God Has Heard Production Company.
Ted Josey, one of the program’s two emcees, said the theme of “Black History Continued …” recognizes the breadth of Black History that will go on until, echoing the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Little Black boys and Black girls can join hands with little white boys and white girls together.”
His wife and co-emcee, Sandra Josey, highlighted 1905, at time when race riots and lynchings were commonplace, and educator and activist W.E.B. DuBois gathered with followers in Niagara, N.Y., and started a movement that called called for full political, civil, and social rights for African Americans and was the forerunner of the NAACP.
Bobby Watson, a member of the Pottstown chapter of the NAACP as well as the TACC board, spoke of growing up in Pottstown, living elsewhere and returning to Pottstown only to find little progress had been made.
“Why are we still at this point? he asked. “Just because of the color of my skin, you’re going to treat me differently, that’s not right. Just because you have cash doesn’t mean you can treat me like trash.” He told the group “don’t be discouraged by what’s happening these days. Stay tuned, and stay involved.”
Sandra Josey then recalled how share-cropping emerged in the South in the wake of the Civil War “when the landowners had to establish a new labor system,” and the one they established kept Black farmers from advancing. “No matter how long or how hard they worked, they usually remained in debt to the landlord,” she said.
All of these elements dovetailed into the topic on which Mike Hays, co-founder of the Montco 30% Project, chose to speak — how “zoning, politics and economics” are challenges facing the effort to create more affordable housing.
Zoning, which was created in the wake of Herbert Hoover’s presidency, was closely related to a practice called “red lining,” Hays said; named after the practice of drawing red lines on city maps to indicate neighborhoods were Black families would be excluded, thereby denying Black Americans access to one of the key foundation stones of building “generational wealth” to pass on to their children.
This was one of the ways that the nation created “a shortage of affordable housing, and we’re still paying that price today,” Hays said. His organization works to “help tenants organize, form community land trusts to make housing more affordable and offers first-time home-buyer assistance.”
Before he became one of Montgomery County’s 29 magisterial court judges, Norristown-born Hakim Jones was a Norristown councilman and involved in youth and workforce development and a mental health advocate, according to Ted Josey, who has known Jones for years.
And because his district includes Norristown, Jones handled 800 landlord tenant hearings in one year, all born out of the territory that is a three-mile radius around Norristown. And because of the many social service agencies located in Norristown, he also has a high volume of SNAP, Welfare and childcare fraud cases come through his court, he said.
“It’s heavy,” said Jones, who was elected with an eye-popping 80 percent of the vote. But on the bright side, he has also officiated at 40 weddings in his first year in office.
While in school, Jones said he was not taught enough Black history “in-depth” and set out to learn more on his own and that’s how he found Alain Locke. Locke was a leader in the Harlem Renaissance and a key figure in the New Negro Movement of the 1920s. Locke’s essay “Enter the New Negro” (1925) described the New Negro as a vibrant, self-confident, and self-determining generation.
“For generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being — a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be “kept down,” or “in his place,” or “helped up,” to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden,” Locke wrote at the time.
Jones said Locke taught him “we need a way of life to promote ourselves and promote our dignity. Why would we continue to allow this false narrative that we are lazy and have no work ethic?” Instead, “I ask myself how I can be the best African-American I can be; how I can be proud, found and driven for better days ahead.”
When it came time for awards — in this case, the Community Changemaker Awards — first up were Bob and Sandy Bauers. Retired journalists who are spending their retirement with the Pottstown chapter of the NAACP have spearheaded an initiative called “The Road to Reading,” through which 16,000 free books have been put into the hands of Pottstown area children.
“There’s nothing like sitting at the table with a pile of books, watching a child pick one knowing he gets to bring it home and doesn’t have to bring it back,” said Sandy Bauers. Bob Bauers said the anonymous donor who is funding the program recently pledged to continue it for another five years.
Crystal Williams earned her Community Changemaker award through three decades of working with Pottstown youth, said Sandra Josey. It was a lifetime of service that began as a volunteer with the Head Start pre-school program and progressed through its policy center, to being the Montgomery County representative for the program, to being the representative for all of Pennsylvania.
She moved on to working at Pottstown’s Ricketts Community Center, where she was instrumental in partnering with other organizations, installing a computer lab and being the center director for many years.
“I have always joked that they paid me to do something I would have done for free,” said Williams.
Source: Berkshire mont