Too Much History

 When I was a little girl, my father always told me to study history.

Not as an official college major, the practical side of him steered me away from the humanities and toward a degree where I, his youngest daughter, would be able to take care of myself. My first degree is in Secretarial Technology (not something they have these days) and my Bachelor's is in Marketing and Management. My father was a Korean War Veteran and keenly remembered what it was like to migrate from his home state of Arkansas to a northern state of Michigan so that he and his siblings could have a chance denied them in the Jim Crow South.

My daddy was born the same year as Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. He even met with him with King came to the Midwest and told my idealistic father who wanted justice, that his kind was needed in the halls were policy is made. So my father took that path, earning his law degree and taking it into public service. He ran for office and then, finally, settled into what would be his primary career for the remainder of his life. He was the Chief Human Relations Officer for the Department of Mental Health in the State of Missouri.

Daddy's job took him to every nook-and-cranny of his adopted state.

He drove everywhere in his Lincoln Towncar with his "Arkansas shot gun" kept on the floorboard because in the 1970s Missouri, sundown and shotgun towns were a real thing.

So daddy understood the state and taught me.

He didn't teach me to feel afraid or inferior of those people he called an epithet that I did not know was an epithet when he said it.

My daddy was after all, an ordained Baptist minister. He would go on to be re-ordained in the Disciples of Christ by a woman, no less. He put his entire life into public service.

Daddy took the history he lived and the faith he cherished to work for the common good.

He, along with a Republic Governor, opened up the doors for opportunity in state government. This was on the heels of the national Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Affirmative Action would soon follow, so Daddy crafted the State of Missouri's first Executive Order that held and was advanced by every governor until after 2014 and that racist-not-to-be-named-governor did his slash-and-burn of anything that resembled equality. This as before Project 2025 would jump on the scene and destroy any semblance of anyone other than pasty white men.

My Daddy never touted his own horn. He lived as he told me, to cast my bread upon the waters and to do good.

So in his doing good, he also set a foundation for me, he taught me history, to care about the people of the world, even the ones who did not look like me.

He gave me a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank and made us learn about The Holocaust.

When I protested that we weren't Jewish (came to find out later, though, that on my late mother's maternal paternal side, we were a smidgen Ashkenazi), Daddy told me I was a citizen of the world and what happens to one, happens to all.

When the cross was burned in our front yard in Jefferson City, Missouri, daddy used it as a teaching lesson to remind us that racism is never ended or even over. He told us that equality was never guaranteed and that each of us would have to fight for our education. The cross was burned because he dared enroll my older step-brother into Algebra in 1972. 

When a certain actor was elected in 1980, my father told me that we were on a fast slide backwards away from all that was gained. Now, I was only sixteen back then and what he told me was the erosion of civil rights would be long until they didn't exist anymore.

Daddy taught me to use my right to vote and do it in every election. All the time.

That is what I've done for decades. I even ran for school board once, so ingrained in me was the commitment we all share in this democracy, in this history, in this humanity.

So, I found myself vexed and perplexed. 

2016. 

I was dumbfounded when my seminary sister called me, after we had been at the university election watch party and left after midnight when a result hadn't been called, only to pull into my driveway and she rang my phone.

"You won't believe it," began her missive.

I went into my home with my older daughter, a still newly minted high schooler, and fell into my husband's arms. He had already left the watch party a few hours earlier when my younger daughter said, "Daddy, this isn't good, please take me home." She had been on the phone with her fellow 7th graders coloring in the electoral college. She knew before the rest of us could phantom.

The morning after the election, I had my biblical interpretation class at the seminary.  My professor usually started in with her lecture but said, "who's in the room?" and invited us to talk.  

It was a jarring moment, one I thought I would never see.

I was born a few months after The Civil Rights Act was signed and was named for the only Black nun who marched at Selma. My late mother was the reason why two universities in my birth city finally integrated. She was supposed to be a test because pre-Brown, but she got married soon after her college dreams were thwarted. But she never stopped fighting and instilling in her children a sense of their worth and belonging. 

My lineage traces back to very far in this country. My foremother was one of the Creole founders of St. Louis. New Orleans French Quarter is where part of my story began. Kentucky and Arkansas are other parts of my story. We are seeped in the soil and history of this place.

So I shouldn't have been surprised.

As I held onto my serenity in the arms of my husband, I looked at my little girls. 

My husband has traced his family to over two hundred years in this country with origins in Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana. 

We should have known.

This country, after electing a Black man in 2008 and 2012, could not bring itself to elect a woman in 2016. Even if she was white, even if she was more than qualified.

So they opted for the carnival barker, bankrupt, rapist, womanizing, adulterer, cheat, racist.

America showed herself to be who she was.

Then, after the pandemic and all the failures of that one they elected, they righted themselves and in 2020, we had a bit or reprieve.

Or so we thought.

History still matters. 

In the background were all the sore losers, the ones who used religion and their twisted reading of the ancient library, who took away women's rights, who had done everything they could to ensure that only white men would be the ones to lead.

So much so that they bullied the white man who was running for re-election.

I know too much of history. 

I should have seen it coming, even as home gave us a glimpse in an AfroIndian woman who had more experience in her pinkie than that carnival barker had in his pretend-to-be-shot-off-ear.

But 2024 became what my father told me. If we don't study history, we are doomed to repeat it.

I've been trying to make sense of it so I can tell my grandchildren the truth.

And I've been doing what the #92percent said we would do - rest. I haven't gone to any marches or take up the call to join white women in yet another march when they marched in 2016 and then turned around and voted for that man again - twice. They showed us who they are and are now only calling for the "sisters" to come out when that thing they thought would only legislate away their rights, turned out to executive sign away theirs.

White women, followed by Asian and Latina, have always benefited from the so-called DEI programs much more than the over-qualified, most-educated African American women they try to blame for not-earning-their-place.

So, we sat back.

I turned to my books and also joined in with my community to boycott the companies that said our lives didn't matter. So our dollars don't matter.

Even with my 72-hour-a-week schedule as a Chaplain, I've found time to cook at home and make coffee at home. 

My sisters and I are engaging in mutual care and doing what we have 400 years of experience doing - caring for each other.

The history they don't want their own to know is the reason their kids even had lunch in school is because of the Free Breakfast and Lunch Program of those black-beret-wearing-community-folk. The same for community healthcare, that they are now gutting with the stroke of a sharpie.  

White America, poor and willfully uneducated, decided that the color of their skin was worth more than actually listening to the vision of an AfroIndian woman who wanted billionaires to pay their fair share of takes, wanted women to have rights over their own body, who believed education was a much a human right as health care, and wanted people to be able to afford a home and then have assistance to care for their aging parents in their own home.

White America chose the side of depravity and inhumanity.

Like history has taught us they always do.

What I am hoping is that the protests we have seen all over the country - not with African Americans because we know this time, it is not our fight - will actually result in them realizing that the privilege they thought they gained with siding with the oligarchy is the very reason why their food stamps, medical care, housing, and farm subsidies have all been cut. I wonder if they will turn around against those 800 and maybe have a better outcome of a 2025 version of Bacon's Rebellion and realize that white skin promise was as empty as the back check they wrote to African Americans.

"I know too much history," is what I uttered in my chaplain class.

"No, the rest of us don't know enough," replied my Orthodox Rabbi professor.

©2025. Tayé Foster Bradshaw Group LLC. Antona B. Smith

This writer is sipping a latte, preparing for another day, reading The Humanity Archive: Recovering the Soul of Black History from a Whitewashed American Myth by Jermaine Fowler. 

Celebrating Black Herstory Month.

History Matters. Even if Google tries to take if off the calendar and rename bodies of water.