The show Unsung deserves so many awards and I think the series should be sold in a boxed set. Recently I was watching an Unsung episode featuring Eartha Kitt. If you don’t know her “back story” you need to read it or download that Unsung episode. Kitt was blackballed for speaking out about the Vietnam War and had to leave the United States for more than a decade.
I am so proud to have a photograph of her in my living room. It is a part of my personal Teenie Harris collection. Each photograph tells a story. I’ve had people who come in my home and tell me the pictures remind them of being in a museum. I love to tell them stores about the pictures and some of the other memorabilia in the house. In this particular picture she is signing autographs for children when she was in Pittsburgh appearing in the Owl and the Pussycat. I looked it up recently and that production began in September of 1965. The reason I bring this up is I am finding that too much history is being lost, changed or overlooked.
I was listening to a young man recently. I would say he was in his early twenties. He was speaking about Donald Trump’s choice for his vice presidential running mate. If you don’t know Governor Mike Pence he is well known for signing a controversial “religious freedom” bill into law last year that could allow people to discriminate against the gay community. This young man went on to say he could not imagine how someone could do that; by “that” he meant deny someone service just because of who they are. I could no longer keep quiet, I explained to him that when I was a little girl we could not go into certain restaurants just because we were Black and that we could not try on clothes in most stores but we could buy the clothes and there were banks were we could not have accounts. He looked at me in disbelief and asked me did that really happen? If he didn’t think it happened there is a whole generation out there that does not know the history of this nation.
That story brings another story to mind. Last month a friend of mine who is White was watching television in my house on June 12, and there was a story about Loving Day. Loving Day is an annual celebration held on June 12, the anniversary of the 1967 United States Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia which struck down all anti-miscegenation laws remaining in 16 U.S. states.” In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws were U.S. state laws banning interracial marriage, mainly forbidding marriage between non-whites and Whites.
He listened to the story and looked and me and said “I had no idea that there was a law about
Blacks and Whites not being able to marry.” This history is not taught in schools and unless you see it on television or have a friend who likes to share you will not know about history missing in action.
(Email the columnist at debbienorrell@aol.com)
Like us at https://www.facebook.com/pages/New-Pittsburgh-Courier/143866755628836?ref=hl
Follow @NewPghCourier on Twitter https://twitter.com/NewPghCourier
About Post Author
