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African American Folkways in St.
Mary's County
Economics
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Education
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Health & Home
Remedies |
Religion
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Values
folk·way [fōk'wā']
n. A practice, custom, or belief shared
by the members of a group as part of
their common culture. Often used in the
plural - the ways of living, thinking,
and acting in a human group, built up
without conscious design but serving as
compelling guides of conduct.
St. Mary's County has been
historically one of the more
"Southern" counties in Maryland in
its racial attitudes. This
reality is reflected in the fact
that African Americans, who
currently constitute 14% of the
county population and comprised the
majority during most of the
nineteenth century, have been
largely neglected in the official
histories of the county. As
the county that is the center of the
17th-century Maryland colony and
site of its first capital, St.
Mary's City, St. Mary's County has
played a large role in the state's
history and is the site of Historic
St. Mary's City and other historical
sites and museums. Throughout
its history African Americans have
played a prominent role in the life
of the county, but one would not
know it from visiting the county's
museums or reading its histories.
The Unified Committee for
Afro-American Contributions (UCAC)
brought about a significant
corrective step forward with the
building of the
African
American Monument in Lexington
Park, Maryland in 2000, and,
hopefully, another advancing step
with this
book.
African
American life in the county has been
particularly affect both positively
and negatively by the establishment
of the
Naval Air Station at Patuxent River,
Maryland in the 1940s. It
displaced many African American
residents and yet drastically
improved their non-agricultural
employment opportunities. It
has also recently contributed to a
rapid increase in the county's
population and development.
The oral histories that the UCAC has
collected have served to capture
what these twentieth century
developments have meant to the
African American community, and what
contributions African Americans have
made to county life. Both the
general public and the African
American community need to hear from
what has definitely been an
"alternative voice" in the life of
the county - a voice that has only
in the last generation begun to feel
"free" to make its views and
contributions known. Virtually
all of our interviewees have been
the product of a segregated
community and have experienced a
very rapid transition to the new
order. Their experiences and
views need to be known and
preserved.1
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Health & Home Remedies
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"... And if you were bleeding,
one of my father's relatives, he
used to say, "Put tobacco on it" and
they would put–-fold tobacco and put
that on to stop the bleeding ..."
~
Everlyn Louise Swales Holland
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Economics
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"... People see blacks as a
financial risk. No matter what
credit you have; no matter what
property you own; no matter how your
payment record is. Being Black makes
you a risk...." ~
Clarence Smith
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Education
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"... The first Jarboesville
School was built. It was done by the
parents. Children brought bricks.
They had a brick contest, and they
said some of the students were
taking bricks out of their parents’
chimneys [laughter] to build this
first Jarboesville High School!"
~
Elvare Smith Gaskin |
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Values <<
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In St.
Mary's County, if I walk in a store and
say, "Hello," You know, I'm going to
have a half-dozen people say, "Hello" to
me. It's just because it's part of our
community. It's just, you know--. It's
just the way it goes. You know. And in
St. Mary's County, you're better off--.
You'd much rather wave or say hello to
somebody that you don't know than to
miss somebody that you do [know]. . .
I just
wave going down the road.
And [my
friends] say, "Well who is that?"
"I don't
know. I'm not sure. It's just, you know,
somebody."
And, the
people wave back. . . .
~ Alonzo Gaskin
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Religion
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And,
every Sunday, we go to church. So, you
could go one--no, five, four seats from
the front, anywhere after that you could
sit. And then, one Sunday, they had a
rope. They had a little yellow rope come
all the way across, and I didn't, you
know, I didn't know. I said,--. Bea, you know, she was saying, "No,
Emma. Come back. Come back. Come back
here."
I said,
"Why? Why?"
"Come on.
Come on. Come on. Come back. Sit back
there."
So, we
got out of church and she said, "No.
That's for the White people."
~ Emma
Hall
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1
In Relentless
Pursuit of an Education: African
American Stories from a Century of
Segregation, 1865 - 1967 (Lexington
Park, Maryland: Unified Committee for
Afro-American Contributions of St.
Mary's County, Incorporated, 2006),
Preface. |
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