When I step to the podium, I never know what is going to come out of my mouth because I prefer to be led by the spirit. Last week at the unveiling for the second annual edition of Who’s Who in Black St. Louis, I found myself wishing I had my shouting shoes on and thinking the makeup I’d so expertly applied was a waste when some tears decided to appear.
It’s always a wonderful evening when you get to see the achievements of your people lifted up. Among them, Keith Antoine Willis Sr., a man with more dreams and thoughts and plans than he has time to fulfill.
As he set about creating the Who’s Who event, you know there were those who told him, “Man, how are you going to get the money to do that?” He ignored them and pressed toward the goal anyway.
So there I stood, ready to do my mistress-of-ceremonies thing, introduce so and so, crack a joke here, tell a story there and move the program along. But this was not to be your ordinary night. Only a few in attendance knew how moved we were going to be before it was all said and done.
This year’s Who’s Who book honors Attorney Frankie Muse Freeman. You may remember her book, A Song of Faith and Hope, and you may know that she was the first woman to be appointed as a commissioner to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1964.
You may not know that when she and her fellow commissioners went to Mississippi to conduct televised hearings to get a clearer picture of the state-supported discrimination and hatred that led to violence and the infamous church bombings, Dr. Freeman wanted to see the burned churches, but the federal marshals wouldn’t let her. As a matter of fact, she and the other commissioners weren’t allowed to go anywhere by themselves.
She was adamant. “I couldn’t believe anyone would burn a church,” Freeman said, “and I wanted to see it for myself.” A federal marshal finally escorted her to see the atrocities first-hand.
During the unveiling ceremony, a brief video tribute was played for Dr. Freeman. It was powerful. The minute the words of the background song became audible – “no weapon formed against me shall prosper” – I got a lump in my throat. The video was made up of black-and-white photos of the Civil Rights Movement and simple text on the screen that told her story. There was the photo of her on the steps of the courthouse in St. Louis, where she argued and won the case challenging racial segregation in public housing in St. Louis.
It is our story as well. We wouldn’t have a story without her. And we had a chance to celebrate her. The chance to stand so close to one of the reasons I can stand was overwhelming.