This story is part of America @ 250: The Questions Before Us, a series from IPM News and the Illinois Student Newsroom.
CHAMPAIGN — A birthday is a time for celebration and reflection: Where have we been? Where are we right now? And where are we going?
IPM is celebrating America’s 250th birthday by inviting people from across east-central Illinois to share what they think are the most important questions facing Americans at this historic moment.
Barbara Suggs Mason’s family has been part of Champaign County since at least 1865. She grew up in Champaign and worked in public education in Illinois for 38 years. Until recently, she was co-chair of the Champaign County African American Heritage trail.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
In the 1980s, I visited Germany. I visited the Reichstag. I visited Dachau. And I saw how one person took that country of great artists and poets and manipulated the population. I see a lot of those things happening to us in the United States. It’s frightening.
I spent 38 years in public education in Illinois, and I think that somehow we’ve missed telling history in an accurate way so that people understand what can happen to a society.
Back in 1976, I was young. I was hopeful. And the bicentennial, I was aspirational about what I could achieve and what African Americans could achieve in the future. Now, here we are, 50 years later. I think that there is a movement afoot that resents the progress that African Americans have made in this country.
I watch the way, particularly Black women, but almost all women are attacked for their physical appearance, for their intelligence.
I watch the cutbacks in aid to HBCUs in this country, the fact that in the military, the recognition—and this is personal to me—of Black men and women who fought in every war since the Revolutionary War, the fact that their names are being erased, that Black men and women who have achieved positions of stature within the military, their jobs are ended, they’re having to retire, they’re not allowed their promotions.
We’ve seen all of this. We saw this when my uncles fought with the Tuskegee Airmen, when my cousin Vince fought with the Marines back in World War II, when my grandfather won the Purple Heart.
They gave all that they had to this country and its democracy. And they earned the right—more than earned the right—of their citizenship, even though they weren’t respected in their own communities.
The Klan burned a cross in front of my grandparents’ home, in Champaign, we think around 1921, ‘22. And then in 1946, they burned a cross on Fifth Street. So we have been through this before.
There’s a gospel song that says, ‘I don’t feel no ways tired; I’ve come too far from where I started from; nobody told me that the road would be easy; But I don’t believe he brought me this far to leave me.’ I believe in that hope. And I pray that we come together to turn things around.
We’re making decisions right now that are going to affect future generations.
What kind of world do we want them to live in? What kind of education and health care are we going to offer them, what kind of supports, in a global society where we thrive as a people? What is that vision? What can we come together, as allies, to achieve for our country and for our future and for our children? What does that look like?
This story was reported by University of Illinois Journalism Professor Charles “Stretch” Ledford. If you have an idea for the America @ 250 series or would like to be featured in an upcoming story, please contact Stretch at stretch@illinois.edu.