African American History

ALHFAM President’s Message

What is it to be “woke” and why would someone be tired of it? According to the dictionary, it is the past tense of “wake”—to cease to sleep; to be brought into a state of awareness. My American Heritage Dictionary was published in 1982, so it was long before the current informal definition of “to be alert to injustice in society.” I, for one, am in no way tired of being woke. Why would you not want to be in a state of awareness? There is a moral imperative to call out injustice. All people have a right to dignity, and by claiming their dignity and their story, they do not lessen mine. They expand it.

On the Program Relevance of Slavery

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African culture was a particularly major component in the development of southern U.S. culture as well as American culture as a whole. In interpreting American and largely southern history, it is so easy to slip into saying how certain great and wealthy men built this and grew that, when in reality much of what is spoken of was not only done by the labor of enslaved African Americans, but were also accomplished through the skill and knowledge of these people. These skills were passed from generation to generation and have often carried forward to today.

Reclaiming the Dream

August 18, 2020December 17, 2020 alhfamLeave a comment

Hidden in the stories of African American involvement in agriculture are the truths that African Americans struggled, sometimes at the cost of their lives, to obtain land and to become productive citizens by cultivating it. In addition, African Americans were involved in the creation of educational institutions and business organizations dedicated to the self-help and economic and spiritual improvement of Black farmers and their families in the South.