This past Sunday was August 28, which passed almost unremarked. Which surprises no one. I mean, how remarkable could a random August 28 be, after all?
You might be surprised.
Since the 1970s, starting in the California penal system, August has been called “Black August” by Black people, an observance less well known than Black History Month, and another opportunity for white people to consider and learn from the history of Black people in America.
In Black August, the 28th is rather something. Here’s a sampling:
1833 — The Slavery Abolition Act was passed in Britain and its colonies, which would have a “trickle-down effect” on American slavery.
1945 — The Brooklyn Dodgers told Jackie Robinson (signed that April) they were about to make him the “face of integration.”
1955 — Emmet Till was murdered in Money, Mississippi.
1961 — Motown Records (according to at least one source) released its first #1 hit, Please, Mr. Postman.
1963 — The first March on Washington, and Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech.
2005 — Hurricane Katrina reached Category 5 as it decimated Louisiana.
2008 — Barack Obama accepted the nomination for president. (Then, Aug 28, 2014, Pres. Obama created a scandal by wearing a tan suit.)
2016 — Colin Kaepernick faced the press the first time to discuss why he’d sat through the national anthem at the game that week. (He would, of course, later kneel.)
2018 — Andrew Gillum became the first Black nominee for Florida governor.
2020 — Chadwick Boseman, who played the Black Panther and other important Black roles, died of colon cancer.
And in 2020, at the height of the racial justice cries across the country, on Aug 28, people marched on Washington again, calling for equity and an end to police killings.
Maybe you knew some of those, but here is something you’d have no way of knowing: Aug 28, 1960, I was baptized.
Which really has nothing to do with anything, I suppose, except to say this: We live in context. We are born into a context, grow up in a context, live our lives in a context. We are people of our world, for good or for ill.
I’ve just finished reading a book about Jewish scholars and poets during the Holocaust, who spent their 20s and 30s risking their lives to smuggle Jewish books, cultural treasures and history from the Nazis — poets and scholars who surely thought they would be doing something else in their 20s and 30s. And I wondered as I read: What might their lives have been otherwise?
It’s really a useless question to ask. They didn’t get some other life; they had this one, and this is the way it went.
One of the woman who was part of the smuggling operation, Rachela Krinsky, left her toddler daughter in the hands of the Polish nanny when it became apparent Rachela was to be arrested and likely murdered. She somehow wasn’t murdered. She lived through the war, albeit in various camps, then reclaimed her daughter and lived out her life in New York.
At the 60th anniversary of the horror, wrote the author, at an event honoring one of the smuggler-leaders, “a young journalist asked Rachela a question. Why had she risked her head to rescue books and manuscripts? Without batting an eye, she answered: ‘I didn’t believe at the time that my head belonged to me. We thought we could do something for the future.’”
It seems to me that our heads, like most everything else we have, don’t really belong to us. We are part of a world, a generation, an era of time, a place in which things are driven by a larger concern. I suppose every era is like that, some more compelling than others. I don’t know what I would have been doing had I come of age in the days of Hitler. I don’t know what I would have been doing in the days of freedom riders or anti-Vietnam protests or the earliest days of labor strikes or … anything. I don’t know.
But I was born in this context, this time, baptized — dedicated to God’s imagination — on a day when so many things before and since point to a tremendous injustice. There are things in life that mark us. We are better people when we pay attention.
Anyway, Sunday was August 28, the anniversary of my baptism, and this is what I’ve been thinking.