A White Man's Journey Through Black History Month
Education about Black history requires a 12 months per year commitment.
There was this guy. A long time ago.
He built bridges. The best bridges in the South.
You’ve never heard of him.
They were massive truss bridges1 that crossed “nearly every major river from the Oconee in Georgia to the Tombigbee in Mississippi and at nearly every crossing of the Chattahoochee River from Carroll County to Fort Gaines,” according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia.2
His name was Horace King. He was a slave for much of his working life.
He overcame the trauma of slavery and the obstacles presented by deeply held prejudices to become the most respected bridge builder in the South during a busy fifty-year career. He built bridges, homes, and churches.
He even helped design a new state capitol building in Alabama after its predecessor burned down in 1849. The twin staircases he created for the capitol building look like they came out of the twenty-first century (see the image at the top of this article).
They were conceived by a bridge builder’s mind, so the guts of the staircases used a cantilever design,3 unseen by human eyes, that turned the staircases into gorgeous vertical bridges that racist legislators would later climb so that they could do the business of stomping on the human rights of people like Horace King.
King was born a slave on September 7, 1807, from African, Catawba,4 and European ancestry. His enslavement papers were transferred in 1830 to a prominent contractor named John Godwin. Some reports suggest that King had blood ties to the family of Godwin’s wife. In those days, sexual human plunder against slaves was as common as the rats on a Middle Passage ship.5
It’s unknown how King acquired his bridge design skills, but slaves frequently did the bulk of construction work in the antebellum South,6 including bridge building (the more dangerous the work, the greater the likelihood that slaves did it). It‘s possible that he learned by simply doing. Much of his design sense appeared to be influenced by bridge architect Ithiel Town, who built a bridge in King’s home region of Cheraw7 in 1824.8
King was eventually able to use his considerable earnings from bridge-building and architecture to buy his way to freedom, but it took more than a hundred years for his work to be discovered by anyone other than the most committed historians. The people of his day appeared to know him well, but the history of his work was snuffed out over time in the Deep South.
Sadly, after gaining his freedom, King went on to own a slave, J. Sella Martin, in 1850.9
Martin didn’t take well to this type of relationship with King. He fiercely resisted his enslavement. After one of Martin’s escapes, King gave up on his human chattel experiment and sold Martin, who escaped for good and was eventually elected to the Louisiana state legislature in 1872. Martin went on to become a prominent abolitionist.
King’s story is the African American story of magnificent contributions in the face of unimaginable (for us) circumstances.
There are hundreds of these stories locked away in the vaults of time that nobody will see. They are classic stories about people who have had to work harder than so many others around them, sometimes just to be able to go to the bathroom in a place that didn’t make them gag and vomit.
Some of the stories manage to filter their way up through hundreds of years of dissimulation, but most of them remain buried deep in the caves of white prejudice in a part of the nation that refuses to celebrate the contributions of the people who built this country while others took credit for it.
Prominent contributors of all kinds have been suppressed. Their stories, because they are part of a historical burial ground designed to open the eyes of white children only to a whitewashed history, are difficult for modern historians to accurately transcribe.
Stories like that of Lucy Craft Laney,10 a prominent Georgia educator, who founded the Haines Institute in Augusta.
Whether they’re accomplished quilt makers like Harriet Powers, sought throughout the South...11
…or prominent Baptist leaders like Andrew Bryan, who was one of the founders of the Savannah Baptist Church,12 or his mentor, George Liele, who was the “First African American to be ordained and first Baptist to go as a missionary to any other land (Jamaica)…”13
…their stories have only become known because (mostly Black) historians have accepted the responsibility of becoming archaeologists who furiously blast away at the historical record with unrelenting patience.
I spent more than three years researching part of this lost past, learning about both atrocities and wonder, while researching my novel Restive Souls, an alternative history novel during which the slaves are emancipated in 1778.14
I still know almost nothing of African American history. Almost none of it was presented to me when I was growing up. Even today, I’m the last person you’d want to reference as an expert.
Still, I can say that I’ve spent a lot of time treating Black History Month as if it happens every day of every month of the year.
I’ve always been fascinated by the accomplishments of Black Americans, especially when they rise from the graveyard of suppressed history.
It’s not altruism on my part. I just like stories of the underdog. It warms my heart to see underdogs rise to the top. Especially when they do it with the kind of grace that dresses Black America.
These are histories that everyone should be thrilled to teach their children. They’re stories about people who have overcome grinding difficulties and risen to the top anyway. Every Black person you meet has attained his or her station in life through a continuous volley of fierce resistance.
It is the essence of the African American story. But it’s also the essence of what is claimed to be the American story. The more I learn, the more perplexed I become by the fear of stories that teach our children about such profound accomplishments.
These folks didn’t just pick themselves up by their bootstraps, something wild-eyed conservatives love to preach about. They slogged through the mud in their bare feet, found some leather, wrapped it around their feet, and then picked themselves up by the flimsy straps that bound the leather around their ankles before they marched towards impossible victories.
Before I became active on Substack, during several years on the Medium platform, I wrote, not so much about the African American experience (which I’m not at all qualified to do), but, instead, on how it benefits white folks in my peer group to learn about the travails and successes of our brothers and sisters, most of whom come from families who have a much longer ancestral claim to the land than the rest of us (aside from the First Nations).15
Some of these stories have been rants against blatant, unacceptable, and stupid racism: 4Channers16 and other pissants who used to live under the rocks but have been emboldened by two Trump elections to stalk the streets more boldly to spew their hate. Others are stories about how we can think about solving some of the issues created by hundreds of years of oppression.
You’ll be seeing these kinds of stories here on Ruminato going forward, too.
A lot of white folks think, “I’m not a part of this problem. I didn’t create any of it.”
All white people have old tapes in their heads. I know I do. They were downloaded when we were children, whether we had racist parents or not. If our parents weren’t racist, we had an aunt, an uncle, or a grandparent who was.
Erasing those tapes requires active participation.
When I set out to write Restive Souls, it wasn’t because I was born with a level of egalitarianism that others in my demographic lacked.
It all started because I watched a movie called “Hidden Figures”, which is based on a book by yet another accomplished African American, Margot Lee Shetterly.17 The book and movie were about the hidden accomplishments of Black female NASA mathematicians.
Later on, I noticed a bit of American history around Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775, which promised emancipation to slaves who joined the British Army in the fight against rebels.18
These two different facets of American history combined to form a question in my head: Wouldn’t the magnificence of Black creativity, determination, intelligence, and perseverance have created a wondrously different history if slaves had been emancipated in the 1770s?
It would have been Wakanda on steroids.19
Whether I like it or not, every day is Black History Month. My hope is that if you’re not a Black American, you’ll take the time to take this amazing journey, too. If you are a Black American, I hope you’ll forgive my continued ignorance, and know that I continue on this journey well aware of my limitations.
Notes
If there’s a more thorough and detailed Black History resource on Substack than William Spivey’s Black History Channel, I’m not familiar with it (and my apologies for the slight if there is). Subscribe to it. The stories he tells are amazing.
Ironically, his lead story for today is a warning not to tell only the uplifting stories of Black America. So what do I do?
Footnotes
The. 2019. “Truss Bridge | Definition, History, & Uses.” Encyclopedia Britannica. June 10, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/technology/truss-bridge.
“Horace King - New Georgia Encyclopedia.” 2021. New Georgia Encyclopedia. August 31, 2021. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/horace-king-1807-1885/.
Contributors. 2002. “Beam Anchored at Only One End.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. December 22, 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantilever.
“The Catawba Nation - Home Page.” 2025. Catawba.com. Catawba Indian Nation. 2025. https://www.catawba.com/.
“Africans in America/Part 1/the Middle Passage.” 2025. Pbs.org. 2025. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p277.html.
Contributors. 2005. “Historical Period in the American South.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. July 6, 2005. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antebellum_South.
“Cheraw, SC.” 2025. Cheraw.com. January 18, 2025. https://www.cheraw.com/.
Contributors. 2003. “American Architect.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. November 5, 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithiel_Town.
Turner, Cory, and Cory Turner. 2014. “John Sella Martin (1832-1876) •.” Blackpast.org. June 15, 2014. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/martin-john-sella-1832-1876/.
“Lucy Craft Laney - New Georgia Encyclopedia.” 2020. New Georgia Encyclopedia. July 21, 2020. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/education/lucy-craft-laney-1854-1933/.
Smithsonian Institution. 2025. “1885 - 1886 Harriet Powers’s Bible Quilt | Smithsonian Institution.” Smithsonian Institution. 2025. https://www.si.edu/object/1885-1886-harriet-powerss-bible-quilt%3Anmah_556462.
“Andrew Bryan - New Georgia Encyclopedia.” 2021. New Georgia Encyclopedia. August 26, 2021. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/andrew-bryan-1737-1812/.
“Liele, George (C. 1750-1828) | History of Missiology.” 2025. Bu.edu. 2025. https://www.bu.edu/missiology/missionary-biography/l-m/liele-george-c-1750-1828/.
Bastille, Charles. 2020. “The Timeline for Restive Souls - Restive Souls - Medium.” Medium. Restive Souls. December 15, 2020. https://medium.com/restive-souls/the-timeline-for-restive-souls-82da4305e26a. (free link, no Medium account required)
Bastille, Charles. 2021. “Celebrating the Name behind the Chicago Blackhawks - Ruminato - Medium.” Medium. Ruminato. March 5, 2021. https://medium.com/ruminato/celebrating-the-name-behind-the-chicago-blackhawks-d684dcb2d9ef. (free link, no Medium account required)
Hsu, Tiffany. 2024. “Fake and Explicit Images of Taylor Swift Started on 4chan, Study Says.” Nytimes.com. The New York Times. February 5, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/business/media/taylor-swift-ai-fake-images.html?unlocked_article_code=1.tk4.ninX.H2Ah-_oojcnv&smid=url-share.
Lee, Margot. 2017. “Margot Lee Shetterly: Research. Write. Repeat.” Margot Lee Shetterly: Research. Write. Repeat. 2017. http://margotleeshetterly.com/.
“Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, 1775 | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.” 2025. Gilderlehrman.org. 2025. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/lord-dunmores-proclamation-1775.
Contributors. 2004. “Fictional Country from Marvel Comics.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. December 28, 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakanda.
Thanks for the link, Charles. I wasn't familiar with Horace King. We all have much to learn.
Wonderful start for Black History Month, Charles. But as you point out, it should be year round. Thank you for the link so that I can get even more expert historical perspective. So much remains hidden because it is truly horrific. And de facto segregation still exists.