Taken by Steve Rhodes
The delegates at the Democratic Convention ended their roll call when they agreed to nominate Barack Obama as the party’s presidential candidate by acclamation. But they left some unfinished business.
Some names need to be spoken.
In his seminal book on African religion and cosmology, the great scholar John Mbiti explained that the ancestors are not completely dead until their names are forgotten. So I’m taking this moment to call the names of our ancestors on the day that Barack Obama became the first African-American to win a major party nomination.
Call it a libation.
Aaron Henry, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray Adams, Ed King, and Annie Devine, and other the delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party who insisted that the convention unseat the all-white state delegation at the convention in 1964.
Medgar Evers, the fearless NAACP field secretary who was assassinated in his driveway in front of his family.
Herbert Lee, who was murdered because he chauffeured civil rights workers around Amite County, Mississippi during Freedom Summer, 1964.
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered during Freedom Summer, 1964 for daring to register African Americans.
We will never forget you. You taught us that the race is not given to the swift, but to those who continue. And we vow to run on, and see what the end will be.
Update: Two of my readers have added names of their own to this list. Therefore, I’m asking others to add to the libation: Call the names of ancestors – whether in blood, example, or spirit – who should be remembered and honored.
