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Lucas Johnson is the Executive Vice President for Public Life and Social Healing at The On Being Project. He grew up on the coast of Georgia, in Liberty and Chatham Counties.
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A letter from Lucas Johnson:
On November 3rd of this year, the news of a man named Daniel Smith’s death at 90 made headlines throughout the United States. Smith was said to be the last known child of a person enslaved in America. This history of American slavery, the Civil War, and its aftermath seems like forever ago to many of us. But told through the story of lives lived, history begins to feel much more present.
This way of approaching time is resonant in many of our wisest teachers, and it is available to us all. John Paul Lederach, the well known peacebuilder and a friend to The On Being Project, taught us the "200 year present" exercise first offered to him by the Quaker sociologist Elise Boulding. To identify and examine your own, take the year of the birth of the oldest person you knew when you were a child — and the hundredth birthday of the youngest person you have held in your arms. For most of us, that’s going to be about a 200-year present that touches our lives directly and that we directly touch.
When Mamie Hillman speaks of the people whose graves were not cared for in the Penfield Cemetery, she mourns for people not allowed to meet the full potential of their lives. She speaks of them with a tone of familiarity, and laments the fact that those who endured the brutality of racism and segregation in life would be so dishonored in death. Mrs. Hillman is drawn to her work out of deep appreciation for the sacrifices and commitment she witnessed as a child. She saw so many who, despite having their lives obscured in the dim light of segregation, poured themselves into her community and into her. To be in Mrs. Hillman's presence is to be in the presence of an incandescent and persistent joy that comes as a result of having been poured into. Mrs. Hillman knew some of the people buried in this place; what's more, she knows the value and the beauty they brought into the world.
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A neglected gravesite on the other side of the Penfield Cemetery wall - Image by Faith Lucas, © All Rights Reserved.
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The African cosmology that binds Mrs. Hillman, Patt Gunn — and me — orients us towards a different sense of time. On the floor of the Greene County African American History Museum, which Mrs. Hillman founded to connect people to the past, there is the symbol of Sankofa from the Akan tribe of Ghana. The image is of a bird with its head turned backwards holding a ball in its mouth. “Go back and fetch it” is the way the word sankofa is often translated. It has come to symbolize the importance of looking to the past in order to understand how to become who we must become for the future.
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Sankofa on the floor of the Greene County African American Museum - Illustration by Jeffrey Waller, © All Rights Reserved.
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There are many reasons why one might become dismissive of the admonitions of ancient texts — and yet, there are many lessons contained within them worth heeding. What must we go back and recover from the past in order to become who we must? What is the human story that connects ancient Greece to 18th-century Georgia, and what might it mean for our lives today?
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