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Acknowledgments
- University of New Mexico Press
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xxix AC K NOW L E D GM EN TS We acknowledge that we are here today because of something someone did before we came. —Sweet Honey in the Rock IBEGIN BY ACKNOWLEDGING my paternal great-grandparents, Jacob Octavius Dozier and Lelia Dozier, and my maternal grandparents, Bertha Bond and John Henry Leary. Jacob Octavius Dozier was born in 1852 in Virginia among the community of the enslaved. Following emancipation , he learned to read and write and dedicated his life to the education of Virginia’s African American population. After the Ku Klux Klan twice tried unsuccessfully to end his life in Virginia, he fled to Bertie County, North Carolina, where he continued his educational mission, opened a general store, purchased three hundred acres of land, and built an eightbedroom house on a lake that became the site for social activities for African Americans in a segregated South. He met and married his wife, Lelia, who became a renowned midwife, skilled herbalist, and known healer to the Bertie County, North Carolina, community and who eventually gave birth to my grandmother, Margaret Dozier Hucks. Together my paternal great-grandparents bequeathed to me the interconnected roles of educator and healer. My maternal great-grandparents, Metta and John Bond, gave birth to my maternal grandmother, Bertha Bond, born in 1914 in North Carolina as a member of the Snowbird people of the Cherokee Nation. She acknowledgments xxx and my African American grandfather, John Henry Leary (named after the famed folkloric figure of power and strength) were among the vast southern migrants to New York City in search of a better life. It is through this maternal lineage that I eventually came to be born in the rich cultural nexus of Harlem, New York, where this study flourishes. These ancestors are among my family’s divinized dead and are the sources of my inspiration and sacred reverence. Other sources of inspiration have been extended family members from the Dozier, Bond, Leary, Speller, Sutton, Catten, and Hucks lineages. I especially give thanks to Joseph and Doretha Hucks, whom I would choose forever and again as parents in every lifetime. I thank my sister, Terri, who embodies love and protection for me. It is she who gave birth to two of the greatest gifts in my life, my niece, Kareemah Shaeton Mims, and my nephew, Omar Kasim Mims. My grandnieces, Sanai and Kareemah Mims, begin a new generation for those of us “who gone up North.” To Dr. Darrell Cleveland Hucks, you fill me with immense pride, love, and laughter. Charlene Hucks Richardson—you are the light of God in my life, God’s divine favor in this world. In 1999, my family expanded with the marriage of my father to Joan Dalton Hucks, bringing a new family of brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces. I thank my siblings Dawn, Dondi, and his wife we affectionately call Lu, my nephews Kevin, Drew, Dee, and Julian, and especially my niece, Cheyenne, who is one of my greatest and most endearing fans. Life has also encircled me with a compassionate circle of friends: Cynthia Alvarez, Marcella Hyde Roulhac, Amira Delle, Sunni and Juhudi Tolbert, Evelyne and Ronel Laurent-Perrault, Lamine Diaby, Stephanie Sears, Tracy Rone, Ian Straker, and James Noel. To the “teachers of my sound,” I thank you. I give particular thanks to the late Manning Marable, Josiah Young, Harvey Sindima (who taught me to write from my center), Lewis Baldwin, Perla Holder, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Christopher Vecsey, Marilyn Thie, Don and Wanda Berry, Coleman Brown, Anne Ashbaugh, Margaret Darby, John Ross Carter, and Peter Ochs. I also give thanks to Nell Painter, Albert Raboteau, and Cornel West, whose mentorship and teaching were invaluable to me while on graduate exchange at Princeton University. I extend special thanks to David D. Hall, who devotedly taught his doctoral students “the instincts of the historian ” and “the commitments of an interested fieldworker.” An added debt of gratitude goes to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and J. Lorand Matory, [44.203.235.24] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:18 GMT) acknowledgments xxxi who modeled and expected nothing short of quality and excellence; I thank them immensely for their high standards. While under their collective tutelage at Harvard University, Hall, Higginbotham, and Matory subsequently taught me deeply meaningful and enduring lessons in loving partnerships as they engaged their beloved Betsy, Leon, and Bunmi. Even in the midst of losing Betsy and the Judge, I never lost their commitment and support as their student. I...