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 Here is a follow-up to yesterday’s historical refresher:   

 “I Grew Up Celebrating New Year’s Eve Like Frederick Douglass”  

By Esau McCaulley 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/opinion/watch-night-new-years-eve.html 

 

Excerpt: 

 

Each New Year’s Eve reminds us that the work is never finished. Douglass knew that. He said, “The slave having ceased to be the abject slave of a single master, his enemies will endeavor to make him the slave of society at large.” Because of his prophetic imagination and the painful lessons of history, he saw that something like Jim Crow was on the horizon. He knew that law and custom would endeavor to return us again and again to servitude. 

 

What is the solution to that ever-present threat? Douglass said, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” Each generation of Black folks has taken up this watch keeping, guided by a moral compass that transcends the limited imagination of the powerful. We have done so out of respect to the generations whose vigils — filled with prayer, thanksgiving and sanctified dissatisfaction — won us the freedoms we now enjoy.” 

Watch Night celebrated survival. To be Black and alive for another year in Alabama felt like a miracle. The elderly among us had survived the cotton fields and Jim Crow and the crack epidemic and the war on drugs. Often a few faces young and old who had attended Watch Night in the past were no longer with us. Alongside the celebration, there was the memory of those we had lost to injustice and human frailty.


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