Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – I have been on the road lecturing virtually nonstop the last few months, and one of the great, bittersweet, existential joys of my life was returning to the land of my forefathers, in the haunted capital of the former Confederacy, in the birthplace of American slavery.
There I was, speaking on the stage of the Richmond Forum in a magnificent theater whose front doors my Virginia ancestors would not have been able to enter not that long ago.
Standing there before a packed house and an overflow room beyond, I could only think of my beloved father from southern Virginia, my first and most devoted champion, ever the worrier and protector, who never had the chance to see the full fruits of his sacrifice, never had the chance to see the books that his daughter would one day produce.
It was an unimaginable honor to speak in the same forum where Desmond Tutu, Colin Powell, Tony Blair, Mikhail Gorbachev, Bob Woodward, Barack and Michelle Obama once spoke.
I looked out from the podium into the sea of expectant faces and felt my father there with me as I spoke of the history that we ignore at our own peril. How I wished he could have lived to see this day.
He was a Tuskegee airman; but, after the war, he and his fellow airmen were prohibited from working as pilots, barred from the very work at which they had excelled. They had to forgo their dreams and remake themselves. He went back to school and became a civil engineer. He became a builder of bridges. So I am, quite literally, the daughter of a builder of bridges.
And everything I do and every word I write, I do in honor of that legacy and of the ancestors — the people whose names I will never know and whose faces I can never conjure, who somehow survived the Middle Passage and landed in ports along the Chesapeake.
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Photos 1 to 8, courtesy of @richmondforum, whose audience so generously graced me with their warmth and ovations. Photo 9, my father as a Tuskegee Airman.
#history #richmondforum #tuskegeeairmen | Posted on 08/Dec/2023 02:30:20
