Sister Days: Kuumba (Creativity)

Kwanzaa day six: The day of Kuumba, “creativity”: “to do always as much as we can in whatever way we can in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than when we inherited it.”

On December 31, 1967, Anna Arnold Hedgeman retired as a commissioner on religion and race of the National Council of Churches.  Her career there marked neither the end nor the begin-ning of an era, but a continuity of our history.  Best known as a deft organizer of the 1963 March on Washington (see August 28), Hedgeman had long shown creativity in getting a job done.  In World War II, when the military was segregated and Black nurses had not been assigned to tend the Black troops White hands would not touch.  Hedgeman, creatively engaged First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.  “I sat in the second row where she was speaking and then I made myself last in the receiving line.  I had my sentence ready, ‘Mrs. Roosevelt, the Negro nurse is being cheated by our government in terms of the war effort, and I need to talk with you.’  She looked at me and said, “Of course,’ and invited the organizers for tea at her apartment.”  Within two weeks, things happened, said Hedgeman: “She knew people.”  Hedgeman knew people, too; how to motivate them.  “I’m my father’s daughter,” she said.  “I’m a product of 1865 as well as 1900.  He had come out of the slave system.  His mother and father had been slaves and they were in our household in St. Paul, Minnesota.”

At this pivotal juncture―poised on the cusp of two millennia―we are all our fathers’ and our mothers’ daughters.  Daughters, too, of a system that would deny and dismiss us, we have come from many places to this point in our story of family and sisterly pride.  Look at where we have been and all we have done.  All we are and have been is in our household; all we can and will be is in our hands.

-Dr. Janus Adams

In partnership with SwagHer Magazine, Dr. Janus Adams, Emmy award-winning journalist and historian presents SISTER DAYS Inspiring Moments in African American Women’s History.

During Kwanzaa Adams will share seven days of uplifting meditations on courage, daring, and resistance that bring us valuable reminders of how real women in real times– from the Daughters of Africa to Mary Johnston to the first African American  diva to perform at the Metropolitan Opera Marian Anderson – created a better way of life for themselves and a better world for others. In reading their stories, we ensure that these women live on–as shining beacons to light our own quests for happier, more fulfilled lives.