Preserving legacy
E-mail story
It's easy. Send a link to the story you were just reading to a friend. Just fill out the form on this page and we'll send it along.
Your name and e-mail address are transmitted to the recipient. Otherwise, it is considered private information; see Privacy policy.
As the keynote speaker at the 5th Annual African American Research Series, held Feb. 10 at the Family History Library, France A. Davis, a Baptist pastor, emphasized the importance of recording personal and community histories.
"I am one of those who believes that if you don't know where you've come from, you will miss wherever it is that you are trying to go," he told the gathering, which was co-sponsored by the newly organized Utah Chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society.
About 70 members of the community attended the series, which emphasized beginning African-American research and included a class on DNA connections in family history. The series is held to help the community become aware of the "tremendous resources" of the library that are available to all at no charge, said Karen Jepson, community relations manager of the Family and Church History Department.
"I have a goodly heritage, and my heritage is worth celebrating," the Rev. Davis said, after telling about his life experiences. These experiences included attending Tuskegee University in Alabama during the 1960s and participating in civil rights marches. He also told of his father, who instructed his family not with directions, but by stories.
Once, he said, his father was on jury duty in a drug case that became deadlocked. His father gathered the jurors and told them a story about bird hunters in the woods. When the bird hunters came to a woodpecker, one of them turned to shoot, but was told, "Never mind. You never have to shoot him. Just let him keep pecking."
This was a reference to the many times woodpeckers are found dead of their own foolish actions. The jury acquitted the man, but in a year, said the Rev. Davis, the man was caught with such overwhelming evidence that he was sentenced to jail for 50 years.
"The story-telling days are dying out," he continued. "The old men used to sit around and the children would gather and listen to the stories being repeated. Those days don't exist much any more. We'd rather spend our time with iPods and video games and television and so forth instead of listening to those old stories.
"So it behooves us to do what we can to put it down. You put your family records down, you put your immediate history down and you put the larger community history down, and you put it down in such a way that it speaks loudly about where we have come from and the foundation on which we build as we go forward."
He told how he was dismissed from Tuskegee University for not attending classes because he was so heavily involved in civil rights marches. He later served in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War. Afterward, he enrolled in five universities at once with 15 credit hours in each and graduated in a year and a half. A fellowship offer from the University of Utah brought him to Salt Lake City. He has been pastor of the Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City, Utah, since then.
"We need to write more.... Every one of us in this room has a story, and that story is part of our history and our heritage," he said. "If we are going to celebrate our history and our heritage, we can't just take my story, but we need yours and all of the other stories recorded and put in a form that we can pass on so that the generations that will come later will be able to catch hold of them.
"If we are going to bring to our young people's remembrance and teach them the history and heritage, we have to preserve it and make it available to them in a way they can grasp it and take it with them."
