This week Morgan and I fought back tears of joy at our teacher focus group held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Teachers examined primary sources that included:
the meeting minutes of a group of single Black women from the 1830s showing how they supported each other financially,
the 1792 calligraphy of Black students in school in Philadelphia, and
the organization of a 'Civil Rights' committee to pay legal fees to fight for restorative payment to the widow of a Black pastor who died due to racist trolley car regulations in 1862.
Within just one sitting with the visible history of The Philadelphia Black Metropolis, we started to hear the words, painkiller and antidote used in conversation.
The documents were eliciting an emotionally restorative response.
It was healing....something.
What is that something that we are carrying?
I saw this video the other day and I found the words. We can consider these two waves, one to be the lived experience of Black people in the world and the other the commerce of Black bodies through the emergence of the global financial slave trade. After these two forces collide, the ripples are on-going.
Our ancestors' coherent existence was dismembered by white supremacy. Suffering and pain was magnified again and again and again.
Today we constantly live with the rippling pain of our ancestors as well as the reverberation of anti-Blackness in all spheres of our lives.
Somehow, the Philadelphia Black Metropolis is a balm to that pain.
Thousands were freed and then helped thousands to escape who then created space for thousands to exist in stability. They intentionally built a Black transatlantic capital here in Philadelphia where they lived coherent lives and continued daily work to free our people.
This disrupts the narrative that enslaved liberation movements were few and far between and wholly suppressed.
The Black Metropolis was an ongoing liberation movement, it was a permanent strike against the global financial slave empire.
That is a balm to open wounds that many of us carry. It's a first aid kit with instructions on how to heal.
After one of our tours, Whitney Grinnage-Cassidy wrote the poem Ancestral Painkiller, which we are re-sharing here with their permission.
“it pains the ancestors when we forget”
and they’ve been in enough pain before.
which is why when I can picture them
walking the street
and heading to school
and experiencing joy
and starting their life,
I hope that they are in a little less pain.
It is not easy to picture that.
To mourn what came of violence and oppression
To mourn what was created but is no longer there
To mourn what were the lives of people who struggled
so that you did not have to.
But it is a job that I am willing
more than willing,
obligated,
to do.
To give the ancestors a little less pain in their already painful journeys.
These are people who probably knew they would be forgotten.
Who knew they would not live to see the fruits of their movement.
Whose very existence was denied from the start.
And so when I see them
walking the streets (they built)
and heading to schools (they run)
and experiencing joys (they earned)
and starting lives (they deserve)
They are telling me that they are here.
That they exist.
And that there is space for them
where there was previously no space at all.
The quote "it pains the ancestors when we forget" from Lonnie Bunch, founder of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC
And this is what the teachers seemed to realize.
And so, we were moved to tears.
Special Thank You to our Sponsors for this event:
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