(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Howell County’s Sadie Brown Cemetery a touchstone for community connection [1] [] Date: 2023-10 Those differences are something Carol Silvey also sees. Silvey has spent decades in Howell County, serving as a professor of history at MSU-West Plains and in development leadership positions with the college, the CFO and Ozarks Healthcare. She’s also devoted much time to significant community service, which includes her role as past chair of the MSU Board of Governors. When she arrived in West Plains in the early 1960s, however, she was a high school teacher in a classroom where Black students wouldn’t have been able to be just a few years prior. There wasn’t significant visible racial conflict — but that fact created a unique challenge, she says. “There’s really never been tension. I think the Blacks would have been better served had there been a little bit,” Silvey said. “I think tension causes people to realize there’s an issue. As it was, we treated them as individuals, not as a race. I don’t know that you develop an understanding and an appreciation of race when you’re looking at an individual.” While it might have felt that things were “fine,” a specific example Silvey shares is a local Black woman who, in the past, regularly cooked for white families — including on holidays, leading her to postpone her own family celebrations. Such examples perhaps contributed to a sense of stability, but not complete equality. “I think one of the dominant reasons why racism never really impacted this community to the point of there being riots and lynchings and things of that sort is because African Americans understood the line,” Oaks said. “They understood the line as evident as the line on this notepad. And they didn’t cross it.” The evolution of community When Oaks grew up, West Plains still had a thriving, tight-knit Black community. Over time, and like many Ozarks towns, numbers have decreased as older generations have passed on and younger ones headed out to find new opportunities, just as Oaks and his brother did. After graduating from high school, Oaks earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and worked in a variety of occupations, including as a special agent with the FBI and a police officer in Oklahoma City. For more than 33 years, he has trained for a variety of roles as an Army Reserve officer and currently holds the rank of colonel. That work took him across the country and around the world, but family health challenges ultimately led him back to West Plains in 2021. “For those that are still here, that sense of community is very much alive and thriving — but it’s an aging fleet,” he said. “Folks are just getting up there in age, and their offspring have moved out of the area. It was an anomaly, really, in my community for me to move back.” Soon after he arrived, his focus fell on Sadie Brown. There were the foundational connections through his family and his father’s longtime dedication to caring for the cemetery. It grew in a new way after Dr. Dennis Lancaster, chancellor of MSU-WP, asked Oaks and McCollom to give a presentation on Sadie Brown, leading them to discover more of its history. In the months since, Oaks’ work to recognize the area’s Black history also led him to commission “The Protector,” a large mural showing a Black woman and two children off the West Plains square. Painted by Dr. Bolaji Ogunwo of Nigeria, it’s based on artwork by the late Charles Kimberlin, a West Plains artist, and cites Isaiah 66:23: “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you.” “You have the Sadie Brown Cemetery, you have a few of the namesake streets and fields that were named; the baseball fields that were named after African Americans,” he said. “There are a few things around, but nothing, I think, that really solidifies our history and the sense of pride associated with that history.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.cfozarks.org/resources/howell-countys-sadie-brown-cemetery-a-touchstone-for-community-connection Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/