Commending African American Efforts

“How we have all strived for and worked for the same common goals,” Gatling said. “Even though we may have been doing it in separate vineyards, we’ve still been asking for the same thing. Black history is still very important because we don’t know the full depth of our history. We’ve not explored the fullness of our contribution. And so, therefore, we have to know who we are, where we’ve come from, what we’ve done and why we’re pushing so hard for a brighter future.”

“And so, it’s kind of easy to take it for granted and say, ‘Well, yes, we have all this, we have Black history in our textbooks and in our classes,’” Starling said. “But I think if you start, maybe, taking some of this away, or maybe downgrading it, that doesn’t happen as much. And so, I think it’s easy to take something for granted until it starts to slip away then you realize how important it is.”

“Many of them have come to America before any of the white people, but still didn’t get the same privileges, same rights, even after the abolishment of slavery,” Bacili said. “It took another hundred years to gain equal rights, up until the Civil Rights Movement. So, this is a long struggle, and that’s why we need to recognize this. That struggle goes on daily, everywhere. So, even though we have rules, laws and regulations preventing racism, but it doesn’t mean it is not happening.”

“And so, there are several sites in this area, such as what’s known as the Jackson Ranch, which is in Pharr,” he said. “That’s another historic site that was actually, in what was locally called the Underground Railroad that would enable slaves to escape slavery.”

“The families that pioneered for us [in] this area,” Gatling said. “Coming into work and what they owned and what they contributed and what they gave. So, it gives us a great opportunity to just dig deeper, find out more, understand better, and then to rehearse that because most history has to be passed on orally. So, we get an opportunity to talk to our older community and learn from them. What they’ve seen, what they’ve experienced, how they quote unquote, to steal from the song, overcame.”

“For instance, at Fort Brown near Brownsville in 1906, there was a very famous incident in Black history, in which a group of soldiers were accused of a crime and put on trial,” he said. “And many people felt that that was a very unfair process. But it was a national story that happened here.”

“It’s not just about those three or four famous historical figures who led Civil Rights Movements or other such movements,” Starling said. “But looking at a wider range of experiences, sciences, you know, movies like the movie Hidden Figures … maybe not just focusing on two or three famous names, but looking at larger Black contributions to American history.”

“Obviously, jazz, hip-hop, soul, R&B, but even things like rock and country that we don’t necessarily think of as African-American music, the structure of that music comes from African-American sources,” Starling said. “And so, I think a lot of that’s also something that students encounter when they take these courses, and they really appreciate how fundamental African-American culture is to the United States and to other parts of the world.”

“And along the way, you know, discriminating other groups is actually disturbing the peace in the society,” he said. “And then it [slows] down the progress.”

“And there was actually a movement … to enable Black students to enroll in schools like Pan American College at the time, in the late ’50s and early ’60s,” he said. “And so, I think a lot of that history is relatively unknown here. What Martin Luther King did in Alabama in the 1960s might not sound like it means much to us here, but it was a big part of why, for instance, we have programs like the pell grant and financial aid today to enable young people who might not have wealthy parents from all backgrounds to go to college and have access to financial aid.”

“Today, students are studying together,” Bacili said. “They learn [from] each other, they meet each other, they know that we are not much different. So, the change is happening by communication. We communicate to each other. If you segregate us from different people because they don’t look the same [as] us, they don’t speak the same way with us, then this is an obstacle for change.”

“So, that helps them to bring different perspectives and different solutions,” he said. “It actually helps the businesses because there are so many people who are qualified, but they are excluded because of their skin color.”

“So there are groups of volunteers that actually do that sort of work,” he said. “And so, they physically keep Black history alive in that they’re maintaining these places and protecting them … from development, meaning that people might want to, you know, build something that might block or obstruct or even destroy some of these sites. And so, you sometimes have to mobilize people and say, ‘Look, this piece of land is actually very important because this is the gravesite or this is a historical home of someone that was important in Black history,’ and we can’t just bulldoze that and forget it.”

“And serving with more than just your dollars,” he said. “Your dollars help, but having a physical presence, actually going in and doing the work, rolling up your sleeves, playing in the dirt with them, helping to build things that have longterm impact, I think that then becomes a way that you can serve communities long term is by helping to build the things, the infrastructure in those communities that lead to real growth, real education, real relationship, real understanding.”