I found hope in an old book.
It was during the pandemic that I re-read a massive history I first read in 1977. Perhaps its 1,100 pages (plus a 60-page index) is why I waited 43 years to tackle it again. It dives deep, and that’s where I found some treasure, in an otherwise grim chapter on the Civil War and Reconstruction. It was a time of tragedy and ill-fated idealism: the victorious North assumed that the legacy of slavery could be legislated away, while a deeply entrenched culture of White supremacy refused to surrender. Reconstruction, by all accounts, ended in failure.
But meanwhile, there were teachers…
A massive, privately-funded, faith-based effort sent teachers and administrators into the South, dedicated to serving now-free Black children and adults: “One of the noblest and least recognized chapters in Reconstruction history was written by these poorly paid educators, most of them women, as they struggled amid penury, ridicule, hostility, and sometimes outright violence to demonstrate their faith in the nation’s ideals,” and more—their conviction that their students had the “natural capacity to enter fully into American life.”* Their hopes for “a new South” fell short, yet their efforts contributed to the emergence of universities that still live a century and a half later: Shaw, Fisk, Tougaloo, Morehouse, Hampton, Howard, Talladega—those and more began in that brief window of hope, some of the nation’s 100-plus historically Black schools.
Add that to what was happening in the last three years: teachers creatively teaching without classrooms. Health care workers showing up in overcrowded hospitals. A woman of wealth giving away $4.1 billion, and planning to give more. Neighbors, when one family’s Black Santa was vandalized, filled their own yards with Black Santa’s in support. Resilient people in awful times: singers still sang, from their living rooms but to a YouTube universe. Preachers brought the Word through iPhones. Doctors made home visits on FaceTime. Imperfect, less than ideal, but hope wins anyway. We couldn’t hug, but we could Zoom. By the grace of God, hope, and an unleashed imagination, we found a way.
(*“A Religious History of the American People;” Sidney Ahlstrom, 1972, p. 694-95)
Old Book, New Hope
