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Commentary By Eloise Samuels

Continuing the African American Tradition of Civil Society

Culture Civil Society

Community uplift without government support has deep roots among African Americans. This Martin Luther King Jr. Day, it’s time to rediscover them.

Each year, Martin Luther King Jr. Day encourages an upsurge in volunteer work and charitable giving. Unfortunately, it tends to be just a one-day commitment. The annual one day of celebration each year of civic-mindedness isn’t enough to keep African American communities like mine thriving, especially when so many are struggling economically in the wake of the pandemic. For inspiration, we should look back to the Reconstruction Era, during which African Americans established civil-society institutions and organizations to keep their newly freed communities intact.

The African American tradition of civil society is deep but often overlooked. It began with those generations of former slaves who, after the Civil War, bought their freedom and established civic and business organizations during the Reconstruction Era to uplift and helped other enslaved Africans to strive and grow into the middle class in America. Many African Americans did not wait for the government to decide their fate. Instead, they took their future into their own hands and established schools, churches, businesses, and other groups.

My organization, the New Jersey Orators, is living proof of this attitude. A group of African American executives concerned by the lack of formal language skills of young people who interviewed for jobs at their respective companies founded New Jersey Orators in 1985. Since then, we have grown from one to multiple chapters across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Our organization helps students improve academics through mastery of public speaking, appreciation for all forms of literature, develop literacy and critical-thinking skills, enhance their self-esteem and leadership skills. 

Yet, we are not alone. There are many organizations with roots that date back more than a few decades. I am one of the New Jersey Orators founders who is a descendant of Rev. James Holmes, a former slave who bought his freedom and became the first black pastor of the First African Baptist Church in Richmond. In 1862, Holmes purchased his freedom with $1,800 in Confederate money. Nine years later, with his daughter, Lucy Brooks, he helped establish an orphanage for African Americans and a school. Brooks was motivated to open the Friends’ Asylum for Colored Orphans as an orphanage after having experienced her children separated and sold into slavery years before. Today in Richmond, this civic organization called the Friends’ Association for Children remains an orphanage, and the charitable Lucy Brooks Foundation, created in 1984, is named in her honor. 

In other words, civil society, that proud American tradition of individual uplift, is alive today and is in my DNA. So, too, is our concern today for the education of African-American youth.

African Americans have continued to demonstrate civil society from the Reconstruction Era to today by expanding freedman education and setting up schools in the aftermath of the Civil War. Its foundation was built by religious associations (American Baptist Home Mission Society), black colleges and universities (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), national civic organizations (National Association of Colored People), and fraternities and sororities that are known collectively as the National Pan-Hellenic Council and the Prince Hall Freemasonry. These accomplishments are often referred to as living examples of achievement against the odds, and they provide models of the values and principles that African-Americans embrace.

While economic and educational conditions today are far better than when James H. Holmes lived, we continue to work to improve them. Non-profit organizations, including New Jersey Orators, need funding to sustain themselves, whether it is from the federal and state government or private and corporate foundations. They also need volunteers, which are the lifeblood of our organization. But as Martin Luther King Jr. Day approached, COVID-19 left organizations like ours with a loss of volunteers administering our programs and a negative impact on the quality of our programming. Widespread remote learning has left children across the country without quality education, especially the most vulnerable.

Nonetheless, we continue to press on and hope that by using our unified voices to speak out that we are listened to. As Tocqueville states, we African American organizations “have found one another out, they combine. From that moment, they are no longer isolated men, but a power …whose actions serve for an example and whose language is listened to.”

This piece originally appeared at the Washington Examiner

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Eloise Samuels is a civil society fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the cofounder and president of the New Jersey Orators.

This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner