Telling my story teaches us about Miami, Florida and American history. It needs to be told | Opinion

On Wednesday, I dressed in my African attire and drove downtown to Miami Dade College’s Wolfson Campus to tell my version of Black history in “a chat…” setting.

It was a delightful event, with Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava giving her best wishes via video, and even presenting me with a proclamation naming Feb. 28, 2024, “Beatrice (Bea) L. Hines Day!”

My very own day. How about that!?

I am amazed that I have lived long enough to be a real history maker. And that people want to hear my story. When I tell my story or stories, it is almost like I am telling a dream that I had. As I talk, flashes of my past come to mind. I remember details — like what I was wearing on a certain day when a certain thing happened. Some of my stories really do seem to be a part of a dream. And some of them seem to come straight out of a nightmare.

But it’s not a dream. Good, bad, or indifferent, it is my life, my history. It is a part of Miami’s history, Florida’s and even America’s history.

As we came to the close of this year’s Black History Month, I felt a little sad because of all the efforts to squash Black history, as if our history doesn’t matter. But on Wednesday as I sat before the audience at Miami Dade College, who seemed to wait eagerly to hear my story, I knew that Black history, which is all wrapped up in American history, needs to be told. And that some people want to know about our contributions to America’s history.

I am 86 (thank you, God) and my journey from Jim Crow to now has been strewn with all kinds of hurdles. I have had to climb many hills and forge many streams. But as the old gospel song goes, “I wouldn’t take nothin’ for my journey now…”

So, I am honored people want to know how I, and other Blacks, made it over. I love to tell them that I never would have made it without the help of the Lord. My faith is a part of my story, my history.

Yet, I am still in awe that I have lived through so many personal events that changed the course of my history, while also living through so many other events that have changed the course of history in this city, state and country. As another, also favorite gospel song says, “I am, a living testimony…!”

I remember the day we got the news that World War II was over, and the jubilation that followed in the streets as the news spread. I was 7. Women and men were crying for joy, and people were literally dancing along Northwest Second Avenue in Overtown, where we lived at the time.

A night to remember

I remember another time, one hot summer’s night, sitting outside in the yard where we lived at 135 NW Ninth Street. It was a special night and we children were excited because we allowed to stay up after dark.

Someone had hooked up a radio and placed it on small platform nailed to a tree in the backyard. Neighbors came from all over, bringing their kitchen chairs to sit and listen to the 1946 boxing match between Joe Louis (the Brown Bomber) and Billy Conn (Bold Billy), who were fighting for the heavyweight title in Yankee Stadium. Louis knocked out Conn in the eighth round. And I can still hear the roar that went up among the grownups as the referee counted Conn out.

Life for Negroes (as we were called back then) hadn’t gotten any better after the war. Decent housing was scarce and so were jobs. Even as a child of 8, I knew this was more than just a boxing match. This was Negroes vs whites, fighting for a place in society. It was symbolic and that night the Negroes won. Only for a little while. But it gave us hope.

Then, when I was 10, my family lived briefly in Fort Worth. It was an election year. And I can remember, like it was just yesterday, seeing the big black headline of the Star Telegram newspaper declaring Thomas Dewey as the newly elected president. The paper had to make a major retraction for its next edition, because it was Harry Truman, not Dewey, who had won the election.

Many of these historical flashbacks happen as I am sharing my stories with others. They are a part of my history, our history, and they should be remembered and passed on to generations to come.

As I grew up, there were other historical milestones that I have been witness to. One that comes to mind is Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision that was to mark the end of school segregation in America.

The day the decision was passed down, the Miami Herald sent a photographer to Booker T. Washington Junior/Senior High School, where I was in the 10th grade at the time, to get student reaction. The photographer’s job was to interview several students from the school and take pictures of them for the paper.

One of those interviewed was Tee Stewart Greer, a senior and Student Council president. The photographer was to do the same thing with white students from a white school.

When the paper came out the next day, our principal Charles L. Williams, was furious. He called an assembly and had our students explain how they had been duped. The four white students in the paper all flashed smiles and looked directly into the camera. The Black students all held their heads down like they were afraid, or not intelligent enough, or too scared to look at the white photographer.

That was because the photographer had asked them to read the document while he shot their pictures. (Years later, Greer would become one of the first Black Miami-Dade County Public Schools administrators, serving as interim superintendent for a while.)

Readers couldn’t see the document. All they saw were silly-looking Negro teenagers who were too shy to look at the white photographer and/or too simple to look into the camera. It was a dirty trick. And it angered our principal. When we learned the truth, it angered the rest of us, too.

But there is a just God, who also seems to have a sense of humor. Years, later as The Herald’s first Black female reporter, that same photographer would be sent out with me on assignments. I so wanted to remind him of that time, years before. But I never did.

So, as the 2024 Black History Month celebration becomes a memory, I see the need now, more than ever, to tell our history. Black history is an important part of our American landscape. Perhaps the powers that be who are trying to demolish our history by banning our books and making it harder and harder to tell our history, will give up trying if we keep on fighting back.

Maybe they will just get tired and give up. But I am here to let them know, in the words of yet another gospel song:

“I don’t feel no ways tired… I’ve come too far from where I started from… Nobody told me the road would be easy…, I don’t believe He brought me this far to leave me…”