IGNORANCE IS OPPRESSION!
Last July, 2016, our family visited the Benjamin Banneker Museum in Maryland, just between Baltimore and Washington, DC. I had lived in Washington for seven (7) years, as a student at Howard University, but that site did not exist in the 1970s.
Similarly, in 2005, en route to and from Orlando, Florida, our family bypassed Eatonville, Florida, the heralded home of our great writer, Zora Neale Hurston. Her home is now a museum to her scribal gifts.
Had I then that appreciation for the great, Zora Neale Hurston that I do now, from having read her works, I would have stopped and paid her respectful homage, as an alumnus of Howard ('24), and as a fellow THE HILLTOP newspaper editor in chief, like me, that she founded as a student! Alas I did not then know.
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse," is the churlish expression used by certain judges before adjudication, entry of judgment in certain cases.
Is ignorance then ever an excuse? When? Surely! No one knows all. Everyone is ignorant of something!
Benjamin Banneker banished his ignorance by acquiring books on stars and mathematics from his neighbors, the Ellicott's, owners of a nearby mill. Already endowed with a gift for precision and accuracy, he, the free black man, had already constructed the first wooden clock made in America. From his study of the stars and mathematics, he made himself into an astronomer, a surveyor, and ephemeris (a farmers' almanac publisher for his area: Maryland , Virginia, Delaware) for six (6) years. He is buried in an unmarked grave on his own land, whose papers were either lost, stolen, destroyed.
Zora Hurston acquired a Master's Degree from Columbia University, where she studied anthropology under Dr. Franz Boas, after Howard before settling into a sinecure, a sponsorship paid for by an older white woman, with whom she later quarreled and lost her meal ticket. Zora had also collaborated for a time with Langston Hughes on a play, before their creative rupture. Amid all of this Zora had blessed us with an amazing corpus of black racial authenticity that flows with ethos, pathos, aphorisms, humor.
Zora was, like Benjamin, buried in an unmarked grave, in Florida, until Alice Walker, celebrated feminist author, resuscitated her memory in her own writings in the 1970s. That our people had, in the main, grown ignorant of Banneker and Hurston explains in large degree our angst.
We must do better! Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is oppression!
