6 Comments

  1. Jay Young on February 25, 2023 at 9:48 am

    (Cont’d)  I tend to think we are allowing cultural snobbery to overlook the reality of slavery which is but a condition of involuntary servitude, not an absence of cerebration, which the "slaves" were still able to do.  So coming from a slave background is not cause to gasp at the very possibility of high achievement.  On the contrary.  For example, Solomon the Great married a slave girl, according to history (fact check, please).  And the "illegitimate" offspring of a Medici and slave servant woman went on to be recognized as a Medici, his background notwithstanding.  Under Catholic and Islamic slavery, there appears to be a flexibility to an enslaved person becoming an engineer because to become so only improves the value of his/her servitude.  Apparently, reading and writing were not forbidden as they were to the enslaved under English speaking authority. The Carnegies, Vanderbilts, and Astors, who went on to great wealth and influence, started out poor, according to historian Stephen Birmingham,.  And many an historian suspect that the only true class of to the manor born expatriates coming to New England and the South were German and Spanish Jews, most of whom coming to these shores with rich cultural achievements which might explain away the rapid, almost overnight assimilation, especially a South quite deadly to the negro (e.g., the establishment of Lehman Bros. in Alabama in 1850,some 16 years before the emancipation of the negro).   So Herndon’s birth — by the way he was a child and probably remembered nothing about slavery — is nothing to belabor since most peoples coming to these shores were coming to get rich and started poor, if not indentured servants.

  2. Christy Herndon on February 25, 2023 at 9:50 am

    This is my great great grandpa

  3. Shonda Feather on February 25, 2023 at 9:56 am

    He is a cousin of mine. My great grandmother was a Herndon.

  4. Jay Young on February 25, 2023 at 10:05 am

    It would be incomprehensible for any child of color to grow up in the rich, cultural history of the African American in Atlanta, what with some of the foremost HBCUs located there.  The Herndon family are beacons of positive psychological reinforcement for children of color growing up in Atlanta.  I do wonder, too, why the concept of "integration" wasn’t fine tuned to reinforce the positive effects of the HBCUs on the psyche of the African American.  Let me put that another.  Booker T. Washington address at the Atlanta Exposition of 1896 should be more close examined with a view towards the economic base he was trying to advance but widely misunderstood.  I personally have done a complete 180 degrees on the Washington-Du Bois debate.  Moreover, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., might’ve done more to uplift the community by fine tuning his drive for "integration."  Meaning, we should’ve concentrated more on the economics of it rather than concentrating so much on "moving on up to the East Side" and leaving behind a treasure trove of black cultural wealth.  By the way, is one of the avenues to economic independence, the funeral parlor, a feature of life in our community?

  5. Granger Greenback on February 25, 2023 at 10:27 am

    This was kept so quiet for so many years and it amazes me how we just learning about him and his great history now

  6. Granger Greenback on February 25, 2023 at 10:38 am

    The story truly amazes me in the South during that time. It’s hard for me to believe they didn’t find a way to kill him some kind of way of course you making it his fault this is truly amazing I think this story needs to be told a lot more

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