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I'm coming home again this summer. This time I'm driving, taking the scenic, historic route, the old back roads, just like my forefathers did over 100 years ago.
When I get home, I hope to have the opportunity to meet some of the many friends I've gained over the past two years, since I began writing with the talented, brave men and women of the Reporter, who saw something wrong in our beloved hometown and decided to do something about it.
I can't wait to hold in my arms my two little squirming twin grandnieces, who are walking now. The last time I saw them, at Thanksgiving dinner at my sister Joanne's house, they were scooting around on their bellies, while their mom lay gravely ill at Memorial Hospital, recovering from another Sickle Cell attack.
Like many of you around the country, I discovered the Reporter online while I was surfing the Internet for signs of life in Niagara Falls, after coming home a few years ago and finding what looked like a city in grave distress.
Again, like many of our readers around the world, I too am a former native resident who left home after my career options ran out with the virtual collapse of the economy in Western New York and some bad personal decisions.
With a good and rewarding academic start in the parochial schools, all the way from Our Lady of the Rosary on the beautiful, storybook-like, tree-lined Welch Avenue, to the shirt-and-tie world of Bishop Duffy High School in the LaSalle neighborhood, to Niagara University and University of Buffalo Law School, I worked very hard, and sometimes effectively, for the City of Niagara Falls, starting out as a playground attendant, hired by Chuck Boyer, one of the finest men in city government at the time.
He assigned me to work in my own neighborhood park, a few blocks down the street from my home on Mackenna Avenue. I worked with one of the area's greatest basketball geniuses, Frank Starkes. I shocked my father by refusing to go back to my better-paying, backbreaking summer job at Carborundum.
I was still an undergraduate student, studying Political Science under the auspices of Niagara University President, Kenneth Slattery, and Political Science Professor Bodkin. There were some pretty sharp students in those classrooms with me, one of whom, Bill Gallagher, was already showing huge political savvy and promising potential in local politics.
Another one of my classmates, Calvin Murphy, proved to me beyond any reasonable doubt that, notwithstanding all of his tips and Frank Starkes' instructions, I would never master the art of basketball.
But it was there, in my own hometown, that I was inspired by local heroes, men and women like Mrs. Blondeva Bond and Mr. Theodis (Sonny) Kimble, who carried on the tradition of struggle for human rights that was set right here by people like W.E.B. DuBois, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass and many others. They each left a lasting impression on me that is still with me to this day, driving me to document and celebrate the continuum, to inspire other people to come to my hometown and discover what they did to make this world a better place for everyone.
Although it was not easy for me as a child to find any physical evidence in this place of their existence, I knew that they had been here. I was discovering that Niagara Falls stood as a symbol for freedom and empowerment for a long time before I was born there.
Certainly, to DuBois, one of the founding fathers of the Niagara Movement in 1905 and the NAACP in 1909, Niagara Falls was the ideal backdrop for his new organization, which was taking a strong position against the beatings and lynchings of young black men by roving mobs, often under the direction of police officers.
Throughout the late 1800s and the early 1900s, thousands of innocent black men and women were terrorized, not only in the South, but in the North as well. Even Niagara Falls had its share of hate-mongers, some of whom formed a Ku Klux Klan which paraded openly and proudly on the East Side, threatening and beating Jews and Catholics, as well as black people.
Niagara Falls, Lockport, Rochester and many other small farm communities in and around Lewiston and Youngstown had served as hiding places years earlier for black men, women and children trying to evade their captors, who hunted them down like wild game for profit under the Fugitive Slave Laws.
A symbolic and virtual terminus of the Underground Railroad, Niagara Falls was the destination and salvation for a lot of people.
In fact, after being accused of collaborating with John Brown at Harper's Ferry, the site of Brown's failed insurrection, Frederick Douglass, who was living in Rochester, was forced to flee from the United States via Canada.
In October, 1859, he had to "make use of clandestine routes and Canadian contacts to make his own escape across the border under threat of indictment for treason for his alleged role in Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry."
According to a report in the Toronto Globe on Nov. 8, 1859, "Mr. Frederick Douglass, of Rochester, passed through Toronto yesterday on his way to Quebec, from which place he sails for England on Saturday on the Nova Scotian. He has been engaged to go to England for some time, and his present visit, therefore, is not the result of the late Harper's Ferry insurrection. It is a fact, however, that United States officials visited Rochester for the purpose of arresting him, and it is perhaps just as well that he will be absent for a time."
The story goes on to report that "the friends of the slave in Canada will wish him God speed wherever he goes." Diligent Globe readers already knew that Douglass was in the province. His "Open Letter from Canada West," dated Oct. 31, had been published in the paper on Nov. 4 and confirmed a Nov. 2 Globe report which contained other details: "FREDERICK DOUGLASS -- The whereabouts of this individual has been a matter of talk since the Harper's Ferry insurrection. We are assured that he was in Canada, near Suspension Bridge (Niagara Falls) a day or two since, and there intimated to a Rochester gentleman that he thought it was best for him to remain where he was for the present."
The story documented by Canadian historian Hilary Russell concludes that, in fact, Douglass did not actually depart for England. He hid out in Clifton, the former name of what is now Niagara Falls, Ont. "Even under indictment for treason and easily recognizable, Douglass appears to have gone no farther from the border than a mile or two from the Suspension Bridge."
My plans are to drive from Florida to Toronto this summer. I will be making quite a number of stops along the way. I will retrace the travels of another great Niagara hero, W.E.B. DuBois.
The first African-American Ph.D. to graduate from Harvard, DuBois traveled by train from the North to visit the South.
He wrote: "Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the depots; then again came the stretch of pines and clay. Yet we did not nod, nor weary of the scene; for this is historic ground. Right across our track, three hundred and sixty years ago wandered the cavalcade of Hernando de Soto, looking for gold and the Great Sea; and he and his foot-sore captives disappeared yonder in the grim forests to the west. Here sits Atlanta, the city of a hundred hills, with something Western, something Southern, and something quite its own, in its busy life. Just this side of Atlanta is the land of the Cherokees and to the southwest, not far from where Sam Hose was crucified, you may stand on the spot which is today the center of the Negro problem -- the center of those nine million men who are America's dark heritage from slavery and the slave trade."
I will, like he did, travel through the land he called the "Black Belt." He wrote, "Below Macon the world grows darker, for now we approach the Black Belt, that strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past."
I plan to be present at Harper's Ferry in August, 2002, to attend the Niagara Conference Commemorative Program honoring the 96th anniversary of the Niagara Movement's gathering at Harper's Ferry. I hope to meet some people there who believe, as I do, that it is time to recognize, document and celebrate the significance of the role that Niagara Falls has played in our and in Canada's heritage.
If my car and my beat-up laptop can handle it, I'll keep you posted as I travel, and I'll see you when I get home.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | July 23 2002 |