August 9, 1997

A Salute to The Black Family -- The Washington Afro's 105th Birthday

The Santos Family: Worked for tribute to Black Revolutionary War patriots

Submitted by Lena Santo Ferguson

When my family's picture was taken in 1945 I could not have imagined that my mother's Black and White ancestors or my immigrant father's love for America, could inspire a monument on the Mall, near the Lincoln Memorial, to Black Revolutionary War patriots or that I would be a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

My parents, Oveidio and Ida (Gay) Santos, and sister, Margie (back row, r.), have passed away. Our house in Plainville, Connecticut where I grew up is long gone. The smiling teenager (standing behind my mother's right shoulder), who couldn't wait to leave home, is now a retired grandmother. I didn't realize then that coming from such a humble background could be so enriching and that you may leave home, but its poetry never leaves you. My mother was the child of parents whose backgrounds were so different that they should never have met, fallen in love or married in 1898. Her father, Alphonso Gay, was a White Maine sea captain who sailed coasting schooners from Maine to Virginia.

Her mother, Rosa King Gay, was a strong-willed Black woman of native American blood. Grandmother Rosa's father, Thomas King, had served in the Union army during the Civil War. Her mother worked on the farms of Bermuda Hundred, Virginia, which is where my grandparents met and my mother was born. Eventually, my grandfather took his family to live in New York. Neither was ever far from their beloved daughter. My grandparents are buried in my home.

My mother grew up in a serene, watery world aboard a confined coal barge that drifted between New York Harbor and the Connecticut shore, weaving past the city's skyline and the Statue of Liberty. Her father gave her reading and writing lessons on the deck daily. Although my mother was a woman of few words, she expressed her feelings so well in the many letters she wrote to me after I came to live in southeast Washington in 1954. She nurtured eight natural children and more than 40 foster children. Besides the drudgery of "woman's work," like a ritual, she painted the house annually, inside and out. She transformed what could have been a drab rural environment into an oasis. Her flowers and fruit trees enticed even strangers to stop by for tours. Pictures were printed in the local paper. When visitors asked for cuttings, my mother always obliged.

Of African and Portuguese ancestry, my father came to the U. S. from the Cape Verde Islands as a boy. He worked on the docks at the Erie Lackawanna railroad in Hoboken, New Jersey and later operated a coal barge in New York Harbor where he met my mother. When they went to live on land, he found work at the railroad yards of New Haven, Connecticut. He eventually moved his growing family to Plainville and worked in New Britain's factories. At night, he shoveled coal into furnaces. During the day, he tended the pigs and chickens and cultivated lush vegetable and strawberry gardens. The children sold his produce at a roadside stand. My mother canned his fruits and vegetables to keep us fed through the winter. The older children looked after the younger children. We each had a role in the family's survival.

Current events were important to my father. We were sounding boards when the family gathered around the radio on those bitter-sweet evenings to hear news of the Depression, the impending world war, Marian Anderson and Joe Louis. Although he didn't have an education, he could talk politics with anyone in town, including the lawyers and politicians who were grateful for his help in getting them elected. A tough and crusty contrast to my mother, his penetrating eyes said as much as his blunt woods. He urged us to "Stand up for your rights! Vote! Be good citizens!"

My sister Margie's son, Maurice Barboza, also grew up in Plainville around his grandparents, aunts and uncles. He spent many summer afternoons under my mother's weeping willow trees quietly absorbing the boisterous conversations that sometimes drifted to speculation about our family's peculiar roots. Like me, Margie was a disciple of my father. She drilled his lessons into Maurice and showed him the pictures and told him the stories our grandmother, Rosa, had proudly shared with her.

Years later, in 1978, when he was working on Capitol Hill his inquisitiveness and quiet persistence began to uncover my family's history. He started with an important clue -- an ever-present "spirit." Present even in the family portrait, the "spirit's" uniform and bayoneted rife are visible in the picture on the wall behind my older brother's left shoulder. This Civil War soldier is my mother's other grandfather, John Curtis Gay, whom Maurice discovered died of wounds inflicted in 1864 at the Battle of Cold Harbor -- only a few miles from my mother's birthplace (34 years later) near Richmond.

Besides her Black grandfather, Thomas, her White grandfather, John, also served in the Union army. Maurice set out to trace the ancestry of both my great grandfathers. In 1980, after he discovered that ancestors of John Curtis Gay had served in the American Revolution, he suggested that I join the Daughters of the American Revolution. Although I wasn't eager to do it, I thought it would be a wonderful way to honor my mother's memory.

For four years, the D.A.R did everything possible to bar my membership because of my race until the story became national news and the group's nonprofit tax exemption was threatened. When the 250,000 member organization offered so accept my application, I declined until they agreed to make it easier to open the doors to other Black women and research every Black soldier who had served in the war.

Once the battle had ended, Maurice convinced the U.S. Congress to authorize the organization he created in 1985, the Black Revolutionary War Patriots Foundation, to construct a memorial to the more than 5,000 Black soldiers and tens of thousands of men, women and children who ran away, sued or petitioned for freedom. Ironically, the D.A.R. became an active supporter of the memorial whose site would be just a block from famed Constitution Hall where Marian Anderson was denied an opportunity to perform in 1939.

The hurt the D.A.R. caused me has long-since healed. I have been warmly embraced by the organization during the past 13 years of my active membership. The greatest wounds Maurice and I suffered, and the worst thing we could have done to the memorial's cause, was to allow my White D.A.R. sponsor, Margaret M. Johnston, to chair the Board of Directors of The Patriots Foundation. This person, whom we considered a livelong friend, betrayed us.

In 1992, she used her familial connections to a major donor, General Motors Corporation, to manipulate the foundation and removed us from the project like what America did to the history of African Americans; she has denied my family the opportunity to pass on the pride of this potential achievement to future generations. Five years later, she continues to head this shaky organization.

When I look at my family's photograph and think of how to explain the memorial's debacle to my four-year-old grandchild, Grayson, when he's older, I feel overwhelming sadness, loss and inadequacy. I want to tell him about Phyllis Wheatly, Prince and Primus Hall and Paul Cuffee. I want him to be inspired by the heroism of Pomp Liberty and Austin Dabney. I want him to know how the clever Elizabeth Freeman sued Massachusetts for her freedom and how she reminds me of my grandmother, Rosa.

I want to feel joy in my heart when I give him the 13 bound sets of research the D.A.R. has nearly completed on the Black Revolutionary War soldiers. I wish that one day he can stand at the memorial site with me and feel proud that his great grandparent's ordinary lives helped inspire this national tribute. It would enrich his education and give him the additional strength and pride he'll need to face life's challenges and disappointments. It would do the same for every Black and White child, like the thousands I came in contact with for over 30 years at the Queen of Peace School in southeast Washington.