24 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
The Black history
lost to COVID-19
BY JANELL ROSS
developed, many states enacted laws
barring slaves from learning to read
or write. People who are not allowed
to read and write don’t leave behind
journals and letters or other personal
documents, explains Kelly Elaine Na-
vies, a museum specialist and oral his-
torian at the Smithsonian’s National
Museum of African American History
and Culture (NMAAHC). So oral his-
tory has been a key tool to fill gaps in
the “official” history.
Today, although the written record
of Black American life has grown and
continues to do so, oral history main-
tains a special place. The informa-
tion it can convey remains unique and
valuable. That’s why the Smithsonian
has made available online a detailed
guide for collecting oral histories, a
place to share some materials with the
museum, as well as information about
the particular importance of and ideal
way to gather Black stories.
“Oral history can tell us things that
written records often cannot,” Navies
says. “Not just when something hap-
pened or that someone was at a certain
place but how did they feel about it?
What part of that experience was most
important, so important that they ac-
tually remembered it?”
The experiences of the past twoi always Take noTe of picTures of women who are
not flashing a camera-ready grin.
They make me wonder what such a woman has done
with her life that it need not be rendered more palatable
with a big, uncomplicated, toothpaste-ad smile. So the first
photo I saw of Claudia Booker—the one the people who
loved her selected for her obituary when it ran nearly two
years ago—held my attention from the beginning.
As I explored the life of Claudia Booker, who died on
Feb. 19, 2020, at 71—after careers as a teacher, a com-
munity activist, a lawyer, a Carter Administration staffer,
an administrative judge, and, finally, a doula, childbirth
educator, and midwife—I found not simply the story of a
woman with a remarkably agile mind. A few days before
she died, Booker texted another Black birthworker, one of
the women into whom she’d poured so much of what she
knew, that she was getting better. She texted about the ba-
bies she was going to catch, the mothers she was going to
calm. Booker had no plans to rest or sit down, her daugh-
ter Canida Azulai Booker told me. But Claudia Booker died
anyway, struggling to breathe and suffering through what
she believed was the flu. Her body was ravaged by cancer
but, with her death coming as the pandemic just began to
grip the U.S., those who knew her still wonder if she fell to
an early case of COVID-19.
As the world edges toward the end of a second year of
disruptions and distancing and death caused by a global
pandemic—even if Booker’s demise can’t be confirmed to
be among its impacts—the loss felt by those who loved her
has been sadly shared by people around the world. But in
the U.S., it has not been equally distributed. Because of dis-
parities long unaddressed, Black, Latino, and Native Amer-
ican patients have been considerably more likely to be in-
fected with or die from COVID-19. So for these Americans,
layered sadnesses hang particularly heavy.
When a person dies, they often take with them much of
what they knew, what they have seen, and what they have
felt. If they are fortunate, there is time to pass at least some
of it on. In a pandemic, mass unprepared-for death is so
common that knowledge loss also becomes part of the toll.
Eyewitness accounts of the civil rights movement go un-
gathered. Recipes passed through the generations but not
written down will never be cooked again. Claudia Booker’s
know-how and direct instruction can no longer help a new
generation of midwives. As we mark Black History Month,
we know that a critical part of that history has, in these past
few years, been lost.
The loss is all the more staggering when one consid-
ers that oral history has for Black Americans always been
essential.
As the American way of enslaving Black Americans
When a
person
dies, they
often
take with
them
much of
what they
knewThe photo of Booker
that accompanied
her obituary