He cries when we talk about his parents. Sometimes his eyes just well up. Sometimes he sobs uncontrollably. But he always cries. He wipes away the tears, regains his composure and takes us right back into the center of his pain. With a sharp memory, vivid recall, and a great sense of pride and dignity as well as humor, he tells his stories to anyone who will take the time to listen.
"They call me 'W,'" he told me, settling his lean frame deep into the aluminum, folding camp chair. He says he actually did not know his real name until he went to Niagara Street School shortly after his family arrived here in 1926, when he was 6 years old. "The teacher asked me my name and I told her it was 'W.' She said, 'How do you spell that?' I told her it is spelled just like it sounds, D-O-U-B-L-E-U. She told me to go home and learn my name. She said, 'Your name is William Hunt.' I didn't know that until she told me. Everybody knows me as 'W.'"
In fact, to this day, most people still don't know his real name, but just about everybody in his community knows "W."
Born just outside of Augusta, Ga., in 1920, he says his family came to Niagara Falls by train after his father "got run out of Georgia by the Ku Klux Klan."
"I don't know what they were after him for. Maybe it was just because he had bought a new car." He says his father was driving his car home one day when they ran him off the road. "He jumped out of the car and ran as fast as he could. He left the motor running and just took off. He knew if they caught him they'd beat him to death the same way they had done to so many other black men for no reason at all."
Soon after, he left the state, heading to Niagara Falls to join his brother who had already moved here. He was working a full-time job in the factory, earning 10 times as much as he could make working as a sharecropper in less time. Within less than a year, the whole family took the train ride from a tough life on the farm to the "easy life" in Niagara Falls.
They moved in with his uncle who had already settled in an enclave on Ely Avenue near several other black families who, like him, had been lured to work the jobs nobody else wanted in the factories here. Later they moved into a rented house on 27th Street, right across from the Niagara Street School. But in 1927, a year after they arrived, the house was fire-bombed, and they moved over to Allen Avenue, eventually landing on Mackenna Avenue in one of the three neighborhoods where African-Americans could live in relative peace and safety from harassment, threats and very real violence.
"They did not want black folks living anyplace else in those days," he says. "My father said it was just like living down South except they had jobs. Instead of working out in the hot sun in the fields all day, they worked in the hot factories, doing the jobs the white men would not do."
It visibly upsets him to talk about the struggles his parents faced as immigrants from the Deep South to the land of New Hope in Niagara Falls.
"Truth is, they did not really want us here either," he says, his short breath interrupted by the constant wheezing he says he developed from years of work in the factories. But talking about it helps him to ease the pain that still lingers after all this time.
"They just wanted our labor."
For most of the afternoon, I sat in the shade of the long cool shadow cast by his family's huge camper, parked next to the Oasis Pavilion in Hyde Park here in Niagara Falls, on Saturday, Aug. 2, during the 26th Annual Old Timers Picnic. I spent the entire day listening to the endless stories told by one senior African-American citizen after another, about their trials and tribulations as the descendants of some of the area's earliest known settlers of the Niagara Frontier.
This was the culmination of months of work by a group known as the Black Pioneers of Niagara Falls, New York. Their objective, they said in their invitation to the public to attend the day's events, is to "interest younger family members in knowing each other and keeping our legacy alive."
My contribution was to videotape as many oral histories as I could. Unfortunately, one afternoon is not nearly enough time to get all the information people were willing to share. A much more serious effort should to be made to do this. It will take time and money, neither of which is in abundant supply, but somebody needs to do this NOW.
Area businessman Ted Williamson, a member of the committee that organized the gathering, said the group is soliciting input from some of the oldest black families in the area. "The Pioneers are mostly members of families who lived in Niagara Falls back to the earliest years of the last century and some before that. We are reaching back as far as we can to find people with similar backgrounds."
Art Ray, Michael Boston, Indiana Martin, Mildred Isom, William Williamson, Carlyle Miller, Leona Blackburn, Zola Crowell, Jallil Shipp, Vivian V. Thompson, Zora B. Boling and many others have been working for the past several months to organize the day's events as a continuation of the Old Timers Picnic, with a new aim to expand the concept into a much larger affair in the future.
"We would like to publish an annual calendar featuring a different Black Pioneer family each month," says Art Ray, who was also in charge of raising funds through the sale of tee-shirts. He says the opportunities for future growth are "limitless."
Michael Boston, who has written extensively on the history of the local black community in Niagara Falls from 1900-1940, says he wants to complete a book on the subject. He is working closely with the group to interview families in order to capture their stories in writing.
"The Niagara Falls black history is a rich one," he says, "full of interesting stories that will be lost if they are not told and recorded now. Every day, it seems, we lose another opportunity to document their legacy when someone passes on without their stories being heard, preserved and repeated to the younger generations."
"Black history cannot be relegated to a single week or month of celebrations," said one committee member. "This is something we need to do all the time."
"The kids need to hear these stories," said another attendee.
"They don't have any idea who we are or what contributions we as a people have made to the growth and development of this whole area," said Crystal Boling, whose parents and grandparents were honored at the affair.
Art Ray promised the event will continue to grow every year, recruiting more participants, especially the younger generations, to help the Pioneers collect and preserve the tradition. Ted Williamson reminded the participants that they each have a role to play in the preservation of their own history. He asked everyone to complete a short questionnaire to help the Pioneers develop a database as a starting point for their basic research.
Michael Boston said he will use the information to help him complete the book he began writing last year on the history of African-Americans in Niagara Falls, N.Y.
"Pitifully little real information is available now," he said, "and every time another older African-American from this area dies or permanently leaves the area, another opportunity is forever lost."
Anyone with old photographs and artifacts they wish to share is encouraged to contact any member of the Pioneers at any time, said Ray.
I asked Hunt why he cries when he talks about his parents.
"It just hurts me to think about what they went through for me and the rest of the family. They never really had anything, and I have so much," he said, looking around the park at all the people there to honor him.
County Legislator Renae Kimble told the gathering, which numbered more than 200 throughout the afternoon, to "keep up the spirit so that the legacy of our history will be preserved for the future generations."
"Things are about to change in Niagara Falls," she promised. "This is just the beginning."
I agree. It's a start.
Less than one week later, I attended a funeral service for Wilbur Haines. He was in his late 80s. I grew up across the street from him and his family. His son Hiram, just a few years older than I, was a role model for a lot of us kids growing up on Allen and Mackenna avenues near 24th Street in Niagara Falls.
"Things are definitely changing," I said out loud to my car, cautiously shifting my weary, but reliable, two-seater into fourth gear as I crossed the Grand Island Bridge on my way back to Florida.
I was already planning my next trip back home. "There is something we've got to do," I told my car, gently coaxing her to hold the road. "Steady, girl, we've got a long way to go and a lot to do."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | August 19 2003 |