EDITORIAL: Black residents helped shape Anderson

Feb. 17—Fifteen years ago, Lillie Givens Manuel died at the age of 91 in Monticello House on Anderson's northwest side. She is buried at Anderson Memorial Park Cemetery.

Her life's work was invaluable to the city of Anderson and throughout Madison County.

In 1967, when her husband, James, took on work at Delco Remy, she left her teaching position in Indianapolis and obtained an English teaching job at then Central Junior High where she was employed from 1967 to 1980.

She loved researching her family roots and, with Howard Eldon and Phyllis Leedom, took on a Black history project for the Anderson Public Library. It yielded six bound volumes of photocopied sheets of news clippings and a card index of personal names. The clippings dated from 1937 to 1967.

Most were from a weekly column that began in the 1920s as the "Anderson Colored Circles" in the former Anderson Herald.

Columnists included Ruth B. Jones Waughfield, Myrtle Renfro Parker, Bernice Renfro Butler, Lilly B. Gholston Leavell, Anna Katherine Bailey, Rowena LaRue and Madelyn Irvin.

The column's title would be insensitive today; it was removed in 1950. But the information about the city's Black population, whether it was about a social club meeting, a fundraiser or a resident's death, helped build Anderson.

So too did multiple sport athlete Johnny Wilson, bringing home a state basketball title for Anderson High School; AHS' first Black head coach, Nat Johnson; John German, first Black member of the Anderson City Council; Hughsten Broadnax, first Black captain in the Anderson Police Department, and Amos Cooley, first Black firefighter, among so many more.

These names should not be forgotten as we celebrate Black History Month, which began as Negro History Week in February 1926. February, of course, encompasses the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

"The Pedagogue Club will sponsor a community observance of Negro History Week this afternoon at 2:30 at the Community Center," Ruth Waughfield wrote in the column Feb. 16, 1941. One of the talks was titled "The objective for the Pedagogue Club and the origin of the study of Negro Life and History."

When the week was expanded into a month in 1976, President Gerald Ford urged Americans to "seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history."

That's why we mention some of the names associated with accomplishments in Anderson. Many of these achievements, in relaying news to build a community, were documented for posterity by Lillie Givens Manuel's efforts.

More names will come. Let's look forward to celebrating those, too.