Recording Your Family History

10/16/2026

You've probably driven down Ambassador Caffery Parkway hundreds of times. But have you ever stopped to wonder who Ambassador Caffery actually was?

He wasn't just a name pulled from a history book. He was a Louisiana native whose career took him from South Louisiana to some of the world's most important diplomatic posts.

And his connection to Lafayette is a piece of local history many of us never learned.

Full story in the comments. 👇

10/15/2026

At St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church in the heart of St. Martinville, the oldest Catholic parish in the Louisiana interior, generations of Black Catholic families worshipped the same Mass as their white neighbors while being required to sit apart from them, often confined to a rear gallery or the back pews closest to the door. 💿 This wasn't a footnote of slavery era Louisiana. Segregated seating in Acadiana's Catholic churches persisted well past emancipation and into the twentieth century, quietly enforced by custom long after any law demanded it, in a region that likes to tell itself its French and Spanish Catholic roots made it gentler on race than the rest of the Deep South.

For the Black Creole families who filled those gallery pews every Sunday, the church was still their church. They raised money for its upkeep, buried their dead in its cemetery, and baptized their children at its altar, even while the building itself drew a line they weren't allowed to cross. Historians who study Louisiana's Catholic parishes have found this pattern repeated across the state, from small country churches like this one to grand basilicas in New Orleans, a reminder that segregation in Louisiana often wore a rosary around its neck.

It's a part of the story that rarely makes it into the postcards of St. Martinville's "Petit Paris" charm, the Evangeline Oak, or the pretty bayou views. Did your family ever talk about which pew, which side, or which gallery they were expected to sit in at church, and did anyone ever push back against it?

10/15/2026

Senator Robert Kennedy opened empty Mississippi iceboxes after Marian Wright asked him to look. She was 27, a Black civil rights lawyer the country would come to know as Marian Wright Edelman. In the spring of 1967 she told four United States senators why those iceboxes were empty.

The reason she gave was a price. The government was charging for food it once gave away, and the poorest families could not pay.

The price was on a list the Department of Agriculture printed for its food stamp program. On Monday, April 10, 1967, Marian Wright told the senators what that list was doing. They were meeting in the ballroom of the Heidelberg Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi, to hear how Washington's programs for the poor were working.

And how were they working? "Food stamps cost money," she said. "People with no income can't pay money."

Wright ran the Jackson office of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the civil rights law office. She was describing the Delta, the cotton country of northwest Mississippi, when Kennedy, the late president's brother, stopped her. "Will you talk a little slower please?" he said.

Slower, then. In most Mississippi counties a poor family could still go to a county office and carry home free government food. It was flour, cheese, powdered milk and peanut butter, and she said it "could at least keep them alive."

Twenty-three counties had food stamps instead, and a county on stamps gave out no free food. A stamp was a coupon that spent like money at the grocery store, and it had to be bought.

A family handed over cash each month and got back stamps worth more than the cash. Families who could buy stamps mostly liked them better, because stamps bought fresh food.

The trouble was the buying.

A family could end up with no income at all, and in the Delta many had. Machines and farm chemicals were taking over the work field hands used to do.

The chairman of the hearing, Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, asked how much the stamps cost. Wright apologized for not having the list at hand and gave him its lowest price, two dollars a person each month.

"I have it here," Kennedy said, and he read from it. "Monthly income of less than $10, purchase requirement, $2, and bonus coupons of $10."

The purchase requirement was the cash a person had to hand over, and the bonus was the extra stamps the government added on top. It was a bargain for anybody who had the cash.

Kennedy read on down the list, where the charge climbed and the bonus shrank as income rose, then asked her, "Do you understand that?"

"Well, sort of," she said, and the chairman said he was not sure he did. "It doesn't make sense," Wright told them. She had tried to find out how the prices were set, she said, and found them "fairly arbitrary."

This was the list a hungry mother was supposed to follow.

Senator Jacob Javits of New York asked Wright a harder question. Was there any feeling that counties had gone over to stamps to pressure the very people who needed free food most?

"That's right," Wright said, and she told him many people felt the state was leaving the Delta hungry on purpose. They believed it was meant to force Black families out, "because they don't want them here." Then Wright put it in numbers: for a person with no income, even the lowest price on the list was "tantamount to $1,000."

A person with nothing cannot pay a small price any better than a big one.

For proof she gave them Jones County, where two years earlier 17,500 people were getting the free food. Now the county sold stamps, and 4,700 were getting them.

Almost thirteen thousand people had stopped getting government food. People were leaving, Wright told the senators.

If your people left Mississippi for the North in those years, she was telling the Senate part of why.

Kennedy asked whether, for many of these families, it came down to starving or leaving. "They are starving," Wright said. "They are starving, and those who can get the bus fare to go north are trying to go north."

"I wish the Senators would have a chance to go and just look at the empty cupboards in the Delta," she said, "and the number of people who are going around begging just to feed their children."

Senator George Murphy of California called it an emergency. The President of the United States ought to be told, he said, and the ballroom applauded.

Then Murphy asked who she was. He did not know exactly, he said, whether she was "a free-lance lawyer" or who she represented.

"I am a member of the Mississippi bar," she said.

The bar is the list of lawyers a state has licensed. She had been on Mississippi's since November 1965, the first Black woman to practice law there.

Javits came back to the emergency. The senators wanted to move fast, he told her, but "you must give us the factual basis."

"I have that," Wright said, "and I have hundreds of supporting affidavits." An affidavit is a statement sworn to be true.

The hearing ended at about 5:40 that afternoon. Before it did, the chairman said the senators were going up into the Delta the next day. They would have the chance, in his words, to see some things "by eye as opposed to just by ear."

On Tuesday two of the senators, Kennedy and the chairman, flew up to the Delta with reporters and television cameras behind them. Inside the homes they visited, Kennedy asked permission before he opened an icebox or a cupboard, and they were empty.

In the town of Cleveland, Mississippi, they came to Ethel Street and the home of Annie White, a mother of six. Her county had given out free food as late as March, and by April it was on food stamps.

She had put her name down for stamps and could not buy them, because she had no money coming in at all. She had tried for welfare, too, and gotten nowhere. The list charged by the head and stopped counting at six, so her family's minimum was twelve dollars a month.

What she had to feed her children was rice and biscuits, left over from March.

One of them, a boy of about two, sat on the floor with a belly swollen the way hunger can swell a child's. Kennedy knelt beside the child and touched the boy's face. For several minutes the senator tried to get some response.

A boy that age ought to be into everything in the house.

Marian Wright had come up with the senators as one of their guides. She wrote later that she watched, out of range of the television cameras, as Kennedy "tried in vain."

Wright had not expected to think much of this senator. She had seen Kennedy, in her words, as "tough, arrogant, and politically driven." She changed her mind, she wrote, "as I saw him profoundly moved by Mississippi's hungry children."

The next day in Washington, Kennedy and the chairman went to see Orville Freeman, the Secretary of Agriculture. Freeman's department ran the free food and the stamps, and it could rewrite its own price list.

Kennedy told the Secretary the list was keeping food from people who had no money coming in. A Kennedy aide named Peter Edelman was in the room, and he later put the Secretary's answer in a book.

"Bob," Freeman said, "there isn't anybody in America who has no income."

"Yes there is. We met them," Kennedy said, and he offered the Secretary a deal.

The aide would take the Secretary's own people back to the same doors. If they came home convinced, the rules would change, and the Secretary agreed.

So how do you prove that a family has nothing?

You go back and knock on the door. A team from the Agriculture Department went down that same week. The aide rode with Marian Wright in her car, and the government car followed.

Their report reached the Secretary before the month was out. Its first finding was "clear evidences of malnutrition and unmet hunger," and one of the families listed under it was from Cleveland.

It was Mrs. Annie White of Ethel Street, signed up for food stamps but "unable to participate because of no income."

The second finding began, "There are families existing on no discernible income." That means no income anybody could find. The Secretary's own men had gone looking for such a family and come back with a name and a street.

The Secretary sent the findings to Senator Clark, the chairman, with a letter of his own. It came two weeks after the Secretary told Kennedy there was nobody like that in America, and it carried an estimate. Forty to sixty thousand people in the Delta, the letter said, might have "little or no cash income" that summer.

That August Marian Wright went to see Kennedy at his house outside Washington before heading home to Jackson. Four months on, she told Kennedy, help was moving slowly and food stamps still cost money. Kennedy gave her a message to carry to Atlanta on her way home, for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader.

Tell him, Kennedy said, to bring the poor to Washington, where the country would have to look at them.

By her own account she found King in his office there, low and unsure of his next step. When she gave King the message, his eyes lit up, and he called her "an angel sent by God." By December King had announced the Poor People's Campaign, a plan to bring thousands of poor people to Washington.

By February 1968 the food stamp minimum was down, nationwide, to fifty cents a person. It was a quarter of the old price, and it was still a price.

In 1968 Marian Wright moved to Washington to be the lawyer for King's campaign and its go-between with the government. King was killed that April and Kennedy that June. That same year she married Peter Edelman, the aide who had ridden in her car, and took his name.

She stayed in Washington, and she opened a law office for the poor.

By 1971 the poorest families were getting their stamps free. In 1973 her law office became the Children's Defense Fund, a voice for poor children, which she led for more than forty years. In 1977 Congress voted to end the charge for everyone.

If you have heard this story before, you probably heard it as Robert Kennedy's. The Senate's own book on how Washington learned about hunger, printed in 1968, opens with a list of dates. The first one is April 10, 1967: "Excerpts from testimony of Miss Marion Wright in Jackson, Miss."

They spelled Marian with an o.

Whoever tells this story next should say Kennedy's name and two more. One is Annie White, and the other is Marian Wright, with an a.

I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter.
If you'd like to support the work, here's the link:
https://ko-fi.com/blackhistorystories
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10/15/2026

10/14/2026

10/14/2026

In 1716 John Law opened a bank that issued paper notes instead of relying on scarce gold and silver. The next year his Company of the West took over Louisiana. The bank printed millions of French currency in notes so people could keep buying the company’s shares. New Orleans was founded in 1718 while Law’s company ran the colony, and it was named for the regent, Philippe, duc d’Orléans, who backed Law’s plan.

The bubble burst in 1720 and Law fled France. But his company had already spent the cash on ships, trade goods, port facilities, and people, including enslaved Africans brought in through its slave-trading arm. That spending was the biggest wave of money and labor Louisiana had seen since its founding.

Full story from HNOC website.

10/14/2026

On this day in 1914, inventor Garrett Morgan received a patent for his “breathing device,” a safety hood designed to help people breathe in smoke-filled or hazardous spaces.

The invention was created with firefighters and workers in mind and later became one of Morgan’s best-known contributions to public safety.

10/12/2026

They turned Frederick Douglass's son away from a Maryland resort, his wife beside him. That is the story as it has come down about Charles Douglass, youngest son of the man who fought slavery and once advised Abraham Lincoln. Charles and his wife, Laura, left the Bay Ridge resort and walked down a creek and over a bridge.

What they found on that walk is still on the map of Maryland. So what was waiting out there?

A farmer was there, on land of his own. As the story goes, Charles and Laura came across him along the way.

That farmer's name was Daniel Brashears, and he was a Black man.

The Brashears land ran along the Chesapeake Bay south of Annapolis, right next to Bay Ridge. Bay Ridge was a summer resort and amusement park known as the Queen Resort of the Chesapeake. Charles was standing on a Black man's farm, with Bay Ridge right next door.

So who was this man the resort had sent away?

Long before Bay Ridge, Charles was a boy in Rochester, New York. John Brown was staying in Frederick Douglass's house there, and Charles carried Brown's mail. Brown was the anti-slavery fighter who led the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.

In the Civil War, Charles served in the 54th Massachusetts, one of the first Black regiments in the Union army. In 1867 the War Department hired Charles as a clerk. A directory printed in Charles's lifetime said he was only the second Black man the federal government had ever hired as a clerk.

Charles lost his first wife in the 1870s, and of their six children only one would live to grow up. At the end of 1880 Charles married Laura Haley. That same month Charles helped organize a militia unit in Washington, and in time it made him a major.

That was the man standing in front of Daniel Brashears. It was 1892 by some accounts and 1890 by others, and Charles was a government clerk in his forties.

Daniel Brashears was ready to sell. In 1893 Daniel and his wife, Mary Brashears, sold Charles a stretch of their shoreline. How much land depends on who you ask, anywhere from about twenty-seven acres to a little over forty.

Charles set out to turn that shoreline into a summer resort, and he did not carry the cost alone. Frederick Douglass bought a lot there the same year and put money behind it.

By May 15, 1893, the place had a name. "I have named the place as you will see 'Highland Beach,'" Charles wrote that day, "because the land at that point is higher than either side of me on the Beach."

So Highland was not just a pretty word. Charles was describing the ground, which stood higher than the beach on both sides of him. Bay Ridge was the neighbor on one of those sides, and the letter does not say whether Charles meant anything by that.

Charles drew streets across that ground and named the longest for his father. The others honored Black men Frederick Douglass had worked beside after the Civil War, a United States senator and two congressmen among them.

It was a private beach. Charles sold the lots to family, to friends, and to buyers a Baltimore directory later called prominent Washingtonians.

The first summer visitors came in 1893, and one early buyer was Mary Church Terrell, the educator and suffragist.

In August 1894 the Colored American, a Black newspaper in Washington, ran a line about Highland Beach. "No such opportunity has ever before been offered our people to secure themselves such a desirable outing site," it said.

Charles put up the first cottage at Highland Beach that same year, for his own family. Charles and Laura's son was named Haley, which was her family name.

Haley took to the bay. One summer the boy wrote a letter about it to his grandfather, Frederick Douglass.

"I am down on the Bay spending the summer," Haley wrote. "I go out fishing and crabbing almost every day. I have learned to swim real well and I can swim over a hundred yards without stopping to rest."

The copy I read carries no year, but Haley was still a boy, born after his parents married at the end of 1880.

Frederick Douglass had been born enslaved in 1818 on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The Eastern Shore is the land on the far side of that same bay.

Now Haley was spending the summer swimming in it.

In 1894 Charles started a second house at Highland Beach, and this one was for his father. It was a tall wooden house with a porch wrapped around the ground floor and a tower at one corner. Upstairs it had a balcony.

The balcony looked east across the water.

Maryland's own file on the house records a tradition that Frederick Douglass designed it himself. The tradition has Frederick Douglass asking for the balcony "so that I as a free man could look across the Bay to the Eastern Shore where I was born a slave."

From that height a person can see across to the Eastern Shore. Frederick Douglass was seventy-six years old, and by that tradition a balcony was what he asked for.

The house was not finished when winter came. On February 20, 1895, Frederick Douglass died suddenly in Washington. He was seventy-seven.

He never lived a day in the house on the bay.

Frederick Douglass missed that balcony by a few months. Charles had the house finished that year.

People kept coming. In August 1908 Booker T. Washington, the famous Black educator, came to visit, and the Washington Bee reported that he proved himself "the best swimmer of the party."

By 1919, twenty-five years after that first cottage, there were eleven cottages and a summer post office. Charles was seventy-four and still working as a government clerk, and he died in November 1920.

In 1922 Maryland made Highland Beach a legal town with its own government, a first for any Black community in the state.

Its mayor was Haley, the boy from the swimming letter, by then a Harvard graduate teaching high school in Washington. Haley kept the job for more than thirty years, until he died in 1954.

The Douglass family kept the house on the bay until 1986. Today it belongs to the town and holds a museum named for Frederick Douglass.

The county around Highland Beach has only two places with a government of their own. One is Annapolis, the state capital, and the other is this town.

Today the town does not allow a single business inside its limits. About sixty houses stand there, and descendants of the first families still own some of them. The 2020 census counted 118 residents.

The town still answers to the name Charles gave it. It is worth knowing what Charles was describing when he chose it, and worth passing on.

In his own words, "the land at that point is higher than either side of me on the Beach."

I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter.
If you'd like to support the work, here's the link:
https://ko-fi.com/blackhistorystories
Every coffee helps me keep creating.