A Complicated Concept

The Freedom Crossing Monument pictured here is located on the bank of the Niagara River in Lewiston, New York and honors the courage of fugitive slaves who sought a new life of freedom in Canada. Ironically, they had to flee the United States in order to find freedom.

 

[The following article was originally written and published in the March/April 2021 issue of Eville Events and has been edited here.]

I lived in Florida as a child and moved to Western New York in my early 30s. Some would say this was a reverse move in comparison with others who usually leave the northern chill for sunnier clime. At that time, I had been researching my own family history for ten years. No one in my father’s family ever strayed past the Mason-Dixon Line. My mother’s family was second and third generation American having emigrated from the Netherlands in the late nineteenth to very early twentieth centuries.  The only thing I had ever heard about genealogy research in the northern states was that New England kept very good records. I was disappointed when I started researching my children’s paternal line to discover they were never in New England and very early New York vital records can actually be hard to come by. I also learned over the years that the answer to one genealogical question can sometimes lead to just more questions. Nevertheless, my fascination with the topic of history has stayed with me. Following the motto of “bloom where you’re planted,” I stayed involved with local research as often as possible.

I was a child of the 70s and from an early age aware of the concept of race. Race itself is not so much biological as it is a social construct and passed on to generations through tradition and culture. It is hard to pinpoint just what cultural influences surrounded me, from television news and programming, family members, school and other childhood experiences. It could have even just my own pure innocence that led me to form an opinion at least by the time I was seven years old. I certainly knew somehow that declaring Regina, a black girl in my second grade class, was my best friend was somehow a bold statement to make.

Of course things have gotten more complicated since then. Social issues are defined as a problem that influences many citizens within a society. Examples such as poverty, discrimination and even public health are not easily resolved; otherwise we humans would have done so by now. Even examining such issues from a historical frame of reference does not provide quick and easy answers.

A short article (it’s origin remains unclear) written by Betty H.C. Hackett was posted to the Ellicottville Historical Society’s Facebook page discussing how the Ellicottville/Great Valley Central School District’s 1948 high school graduating class faced an issue of segregation when planning a class trip to Washington, D.C. Because of race, one student would not be able to go. According to the article, Dana Fitzpatrick, the class president, called a special meeting without that student’s knowledge and the rest of the class voted to go to New York City instead. I came to know Mr. Fitzpatrick more personally in the last few weeks of his life and it does not surprise me in the least that he responded the way he did; he was a very good man. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to ask more questions about the incident before he passed. One thing I am curious about is how the affected student took the news.

Mr. Fitzpatrick’s response then and mine at the age of seven are only individual examples; only one story, only one response to this complicated social issue. There are larger and bigger forces at play. Bound up in politics and our ideas about power, it becomes a more controversial subject. A thread of anxiety also runs through it, an inheritance of our history.

In 1963, Walter Moffitt explained in an article he wrote for the Ellicottville Post newspaper that the “segregation problem” which was then causing news all over the country “has never been a problem for Ellicottville because we do not have any negro citizens.” Walter Moffitt was the son of John A. Moffitt and grandson of James Moffitt (a civil war veteran) who founded the Ellicottville Post newspaper in 1884. Also in 1964, a local man submitted some prose for publication in the paper. He started with the lines, “A new colored family just moved into town, ‘Who’s going to tell them leave? You or me?’ Who’s to say, ‘This is a white town and you can’t live here. That if you insist, you’ll live always in fear.’” The submitter ended by asking the same question and a last line of “This is America, and we all should be Free.”

While researching for this article, I coincidentally ran across this quote from George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” It was published as quote of the week in a June 1967 edition of the Ellicottville Post. The notion of segregation seems most certainly to be an example of that precise idea. Orwell’s book was published in 1944.

In 1910, when John A. Moffitt had taken over the newspaper after his father, he wrote an article about the “anti-slavery agitation” that struck Ellicottville way back in the year 1836. In it, Moffitt wrote, “For a town which had so little in common with slavery, Ellicottville was strangely intolerant of any hint that it was not right.” He went on to discuss that the first anti-slavery meeting of record was held in Ellicottville on April 21, 1836 and indicated the historian Adams said it was done “under the shadow of the indignation of the conservative population of the village which outnumbered the anti-slavery element 50 to 1.” Clearly, it was a topic that people on both sides were passionate about and it created division among residents. The article explained that despite opposition by prominent citizens, a county anti-slavery society was organized. Further research shows that for the next several years after its formation, notices in the same newspaper reveal the society was active. It is unclear what happened to the society, but at least one of its known members relocated about that time to Chautauqua County.

Another point of reference on the topic is a proposed amendment to the New York state constitution granting equal suffrage to colored persons at the general election in 1846 that was voted against statewide 85,306 to 223,834. Cattaraugus County was one of the few counties in the state to which the proposition received an affirmative majority but the vote was close: 1800 for, 1552 against. Bennett Liebman writes in an article on the subject for the Albany Government Law Review (2018) that voters of New York refused to eliminate the property qualification for black voters twice more in 1860 and 1869 before the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 to the U.S. constitution ended legal discrimination against black voting males. Liebman also quotes George Bancroft in his book History of The United States as saying, “That New York is not a slave state like South Carolina is due to climate and not to the superior humanity of its founders.”

Ronald Reagan once said, ““Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.” The subject of race and other social issues is indeed complicated and historically intertwined. It would seem that today’s headlines only informs us that we still have a long way to go, but we should not grow weary. Everyone, in every generation, should have their own story to tell. When one of us is oppressed, all of us are diminished by that oppression. I will end here with this quote from none other than Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “No one is free until we are all free.”