Former Morgantown mayor: Juneteenth jumpstarts awareness

Jun. 18—Morgantown is hardly in the Heart of Dixie — yet it is located just below the Mason-Dixon Line.

And that spot on the map, below that demarcation, as Morgantown's former mayor Charlene Marshall found out, has implications that are just as sociopolitical as they are geographic.

Marshall was mayor of the University City from 1991-98.

She was the first Black woman to hold that position here.

In fact, she was the first Black woman at the time to be elected mayor of any municipality in West Virginia.

As Morgantown mayor, and later as a member of the state House of Delegates, she often traveled the country, attending conferences, workshops and the like.

The once-and-former civic leader recounted some of those interactions in a 2001 profile in The Dominion Post.

People were interested in the Black woman mayor from a state that didn't always know if it was North or South or Mid-Atlantic.

Be it pigment, gender or politics, she made an impression. A lot of those people she talked to had West Virginia pegged on the map in their mind.

That's in the South, some people would marvel. How did you get by ?

"I always answer the same way, " Marshall said then.

"I always talk about the good people in Morgantown and Monongalia County. I've stood on a lot of shoulders to get where I am."

Calendars and character Today — Sunday, June 19, two decades later — it's officially Juneteenth in America.

Actually, it was officially Juneteenth two days ago in West Virginia.

That's the date of proclamation signed by Gov. Jim Justice making it a holiday on the books of the only state born of the Civil War.

Juneteenth.

A shorthand-melding of month and date for the observance long-deemed as American's "second Independence Day."

A day that jumped into the nation's consciousness on June 19, 1865, when 250, 000 Black people — maybe more — were finally told they were free of their enslavement.

This, two years after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

Marshall grew up in the Osage coal camp near Morgantown.

At Osage, it was a coal mining Melting Pot, where Blacks up from Alabama were neighbors with Italians over from Calabria.

Everyone in Osage was looking to carve a purchase of the American dream in the dangerous depths of a West Virginia coal mine.

Osage was where her dad died in a mining accident, and her stepdad, too.

Osage was where she was old enough to have awareness of just what it really meant — when those photographs of 14-year-old Emmett Till's battered corpse began appearing in the nation's Black press.

And Osage was where she learned that institutional racism just was, even if she was blessed with good friends and good neighbors in the camp.

Good families, too: who watched out for her like she was their kid.

Circle the date Juneteenth, as an official holiday, is still slow-going in some parts of the country.

Lawmakers in Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina have yet to advance it as a federal holiday, for example, and the day, Marshall said, is hardly a fix-all to begin with.

Not in a post-George Floyd world, she said.

Not after the most recent targeted slayings in Buffalo, she said.

However, a real holiday, she said, is a start.

The federal odyssey of Juneteenth, she said, means awareness.

Awareness begets understanding — and understanding begets empathy, she said.

Realization that this date is a shared cause, she said. Just like the Osage of her girlhood.

Juneteenth, for her, means history that is sometimes worth repeating.

"Young people need to be aware, to really be aware, of just where we've been, " she said.

And not just in the shadows of racism and other bad behaviors, as she asserts.

'It gave me chills to stand there'

Society works, she said, when people — without lobbying, without pressure — are allowed to intuitively follow their better angels.

Marshall, as said, likes to acknowledge her debt by saying she's "stood on the shoulders " of supportive people who helped her and never judged her.

In 1994, she stood on the stage of Morgantown's landmark Metropolitan Theatre as city mayor.

The Met then wasn't the ornate showplace it is today. That's why she was there.

She was accepting a $1 million federal Housing and Urban Development check for its purchase and refurbishing by the city.

"I didn't really say anything at the time, but it gave me chills to stand there. Here I am, as mayor, in this theater, accepting this money, " she remembered.

"And when I went there as a little girl, I had to sit in the balcony. African-Americans weren't allowed down front."

TWEET @DominionPostWV