The cold Black truth

Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq.
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

February is known as Black History Month in America. When I was growing up, it was Negro History Week. We’ve gone from a week to a month. That’s progress, but wouldn’t you know they gave us a month with several missing days—making February the shortest month of the year! Even though we have a month now, that’s not nearly enough time to restore the legacy and the numerous accomplishments of Black people in business, education, philosophy, theology, science, law, medicine, inventions and the list goes on.

The great thing about living in this day and age is that there are a lot of honest folks, making honest efforts to bring to light the many, many great accomplishments of Black men and women, and they are doing it with no hidden agenda—just truth—as in Sojourner Truth! My hat goes off to ESPN Television Network, and the Fosty brothers in their brilliant research that ended up in one of the most powerful recorded stories in a book called Black Ice.

Black Ice tells the story of the true origin of the game of ice hockey. Before hearing this story, I know that many people, including me, thought of ice hockey as being a white man’s game, but let’s talk about this game. In the beginning, there were Black men who gave life to the game—not just Black men, but the sons and grandsons of former enslaved people, many of whom got their freedom through the Underground Railroad from Jericho on Long Island, New York which was one of the drop off locations for the Underground Railroad. From there, many Black ex-slave families wound up in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

At that point, ice hockey was invented by these ex-slaves who played and formed a hockey league. The book, Black Ice, by George and Darrill Fosty brought the story to life for the world to know that what is now known as the whitest of the four major sports, did not begin that way.

When I googled the words Ice Hockey, Blacks, Canada, ESPN, I came up with information that made me so sad that a group of people could hide the truth so long about a simple game! If they can do this about a game, I had to wonder what else is being hidden from the world about the achievements of Black men and women.

Let me give you an example. The world watched something that had never happened before in the history of the universe—the American astronauts landing on the moon. Can you imagine if one day that story could be twisted to show that all of the astronauts were Black Men?—not from America, but from the continent of Africa? In the early 1960s, Africville in Canada, the birthplace of modern Canadian hockey, was destroyed and “The outright theft and destruction of Afric-ville … remains one of the most shameful chapters in modern Canadian history.”

Until ESPN and the Fosty brothers’ book, Black Ice, brought the story of Blacks’ origination of ice hockey to light, we had never read about it in our history books, nor had we heard about it any other place.

We’ve regarded sports as a model of teamwork and fair play; however, for many years later, the National Hockey League had not yet recognized the role of these Black players in inventing the game of ice hockey. As I write this article, I cannot help but wonder how long it will take for the truth to come out about so many other accomplishments of Black people.

Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq. is National Chair of the National Congress of Black Women. She’s also Chair of the Board of the Black Leadership Forum in Washington, DC. To reach her, call (202) 678-6788; e-mail dr.efa­yew@gmail.com or see website at www.nationalcongressbw.org.

This article originally published in the July 4, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.