When a professor successfully bridges history – that is, when she makes those long-ago dates and locations link up to present-day relevance – she knows it.
“They’re feeling this,” Marjorie Fuller said on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that day.
“Because I’m feeling this.”
Fuller, the director of WVU’s Center for Black Culture and Research who is retiring at the end of this month, was known for leading college students on sojourns through the American South that were battlegrounds in the country’s civil rights struggle.
That’s what she did at her previous schools in Iowa and Illinois.
That’s especially what she did at the land grant university in a state that couldn’t have been shaped more by the politics, the ideologies and the real estate battles that are at the essence of every war.
All of which brought them to that Alabama afternoon a few years back.
If drone photography and video had been around then, you may have been able to regard that professor and her students, from on high.
Even today, West Virginia is still trying to forge a national identity after the original defiance of its Union-leaning denizens residing in the northwestern climes of the Commonwealth then.
Call it a place where the rugged and sometimes treacherous terrain could never be mistaken for landscaped, Tidewater gentility.
The hearty mountaineers dug in during the days leading up to the House Divided conflict of North-versus-South, and even more so, in the ones that came after.
Meanwhile, that bridge in the-then race war epicenter of Selma visited by the contingent from Morgantown was the site of the Bloody Sunday march – also an act of defiance that directly led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It was that legislation which released Black Americans from the shackles of the oppressive and tauntingly cruel Jim Crow measures framed with one purpose: the denial of permission to cast a ballot on Election Day.
Forget the traffic sounds.
Fuller and her students were hearing history on that bridge that spanned so much nearly 60 years ago.
From Bloody Sunday – to a progressive Monday
Monday is Juneteenth in West Virginia – and she hopes Mountaineers will still be listening.
Juneteenth.
A shorthand-melding of month and date for the observance long-deemed as Americas “second Independence Day.”
A day that jumped into the nation’s consciousness on June 19, 1865, when 250,000 Blacks who had been forced into slavery in Texas – and maybe more than that, even – were told that, yes, finally, they really were free.
This, two years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Fuller grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, only 50 miles from Canada by the waters of Lake Erie.
Ohio was a slave-free state.
And because of Ashtabula’s proximity to a friendly northern neighbor, the working-class, waterfront town in the Buckeye State was a key hub on the Underground Railroad.
Those fleeing slavery could easily take a boat to Canada, provided they could make Ashtabula.
As a kid growing up in a socially aware household – she was 10 when that bullet took Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis – Fuller spent lots of time walking the cross-ties of history and freedom’s flight in her adopted hometown.
She’s a West Virginian by birth: Wheeling, where her coal-mining father was also born.
Her mother hailed from Virginia.
Fuller lived in the panhandle city as a toddler, but after the mines tapped out, the family, like lots of families from Appalachia, moved north, where the jobs were more plentiful.
That doesn’t mean the professor ever stopped embracing her Mountaineer lineage – even though she’ll settle back in Ohio following her retirement because that’s where daughters are.
Still, for her, physically being in West Virginia for Juneteenth makes it all the more impactful, she said.
“We’re the only state born of the Civil War. I’m glad we get the experience the holiday here. It especially resonates. It’s about freedom. For us, and for every American.”
The calendar, in context
As anyone who ever marched for a cause and got beaten up and jailed for it will attest, civil rights victories don’t stay won.
Robin Stone, a New York City psychotherapist who writes the “Color of Wellness” blog for Psychology Today magazine wants to remind people of that.
Stone, who is also the author of books on Black family dynamics and body issues among Black women, wrote in her June 11 blog that the holiday is still experiencing growing pains, coming along as it did only in 2021, which was 160 after slavery in America ended.
For some, she writes, Juneteenth begins, and remains, with a white man’s knee on the neck of George Floyd.
Well past those WVU students on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the teaching of Black history is now under siege in many American schools, the psychotherapist adds.
And Juneteenth, like most holidays, she bemoans, has already been co-opted and commercialized in many instances – “reducing the significance of the day to a slogan on a T-shirt or soda can.”
She still wants you to enjoy the day with family and friends, she said, but she also hopes you’ll temper it with some quiet reflection.
Take the day off from work, if you can, she said.
Pause to ponder what “freedom” truly means for you, she writes.
And if you’ve been thinking about lending your time and talents to a social cause you truly believe in, she said, let Juneteenth be both your springboard and compass.
Taking it literally
There was no quiet reflection on the books this weekend for Aristotle Jones, the West Virginia singer, guitarist and songwriter known as the “Appalachian Soul Man,” for the Mountain State influences of his tunes designed to get audiences moving and thinking.
That’s because he was too busy set on making a joyful noise.
He was among the entertainers scheduled to perform Saturday evening at the West Virginia Juneteenth celebration concert on the grounds of the state Capitol Complex in Charleston.
Jones draws on sources from Mississippi John Hurt to jam bands and mountain ballads for his autobiographical songs about what it means to be both a West Virginian and a Black American growing up in a mostly rural place – where he’s often the only person of color in the room.
Not that he dwells on the latter, he said.
For him, West Virginia is already a celebration, just by appearing on the map.
A state, he said, with a real state of being.
“Look at our history,” he said.
Juneteenth, he said, echoing Fuller, is a celebration of freedom for all people.
“That what it is,” the Appalachian Soul Man said.
“All people.”
He likes that Juneteenth arrives right before June 20.
It was on that day in 1863 when West Virginia – funky, squiggly borders and all – became the 35th state in the Union, Virginia be damned.
“For those of us who live here, it’s right in our motto. Montani Semper Liberi. Mountaineers are always free.”
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