WS Chronicle

Editor’s note: Danny and Debora Freeman of Winston-Salem visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture when it opened Sept. 24. Debora Freeman shares her photographs and her thoughts upon attending the event.

BY DEBORA FREEMAN

FOR THE CHRONICLE

I think the one moment of the opening celebration that stands out for me most was Patti LaBelle’s rendition of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.”

As I stood looking at the crowd around me, at all the African-American senior citizens around me, I got teary thinking about how they probably never imagined Saturday, Sept. 24, 2016, would ever come to fruition.

I thought about how my mother’s principal begged my grandfather not to take her out of school because she, being the oldest of six children, had to leave her education on the shelf to help her parents harvest crops to survive and how she, who never sat in a college classroom, was the most knowledgeable person on world affairs and explained Ronald Regan’s Cold War policies to this college daughter and tried to get this daughter to understand why she was so upset when the Iran hostages were released after President Reagan’s swearing in and not under President Carter’s term.

As a young college student in 1981, I realized I’d never know as much as my Mama, even with all The University of Georgia could offer in a classroom. I thought about she would have been among the many Seniors who were sit-ting listening to 44, who she would have proudly called “My President” and shook her head in agreement as her Southern brother John Lewis took his place at the mic. She would have thought like Langston: “I, too, am America.”