Haitians risk it all to come to America

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Guy Trammell Jr. and Amy Miller | Color Us Connected

This column appears every other week in Foster’s Daily Democrat and the Tuskegee News. This week Guy Trammell, an African American man from Tuskegee, Ala., and Amy Miller, a white woman from South Berwick, Maine, address recent discussions about Haitians and other immigrants in the United States. .

By Amy Miller

People have asked me how I feel about the stories that have come out recently about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. They ask because I work with a school in Haiti, and travel there regularly, having gone more than a dozen times in the last two decades. They ask because this work has brought me friends in Haiti.

It's hard to know how to answer. I don't want to talk politics. I don't want to address immigration, which right now means talking politics. So what is there to say?

I can say that in all my time in Haiti, I've never seen anyone eating any animals other than goat, chicken or beef. I can say that my Haitian friends in the States cook the best rice and beans, not to mention plantain, I have ever eaten.

But I do not need to add to the profusion of voices working to dispel a story almost no one believes, not even the person who originally told the story.What I wish I could do is find words to point to the humanity in each human being who leaves a homeland to find something better for their children or themselves. My daughter, as I have written before, is working on a tourist boat that serves backpackers who want to travel by sea around the infamous Darien Gap, to get from Colombia to Panama, the only stretch of land between Alaska and Patagonia that cannot be traversed by road.

There, Haitian families wait in tents on the banks off the Gulf of Urabá in the southern Caribbean Sea looking hopeful, if scared, hoping for their own passage through a swath of jungle considered one of the most dangerous crossings in the world. Each year this remote northern corner of Colombia hosts tens of thousands of desperate Haitians, as well as Venezuelans, Ecuadorans and Angolans heading north.

Life is unbearable in Haiti, so intolerable that people leave everything they know to find something better.

We are lucky. We know that. Life is not perfect for Americans, and it is very un-perfect for many Americans. But it is not so bad that people pack up their children, use their last dollars, and head at high risk to a country where they will likely be told “you are not welcome.”

People can say whatever they want about immigration and the need to close borders. You can believe too many people are pouring over our borders. You can have your own opinion about that.

But if you choose to believe that people born in much lesser circumstances than you were are by nature evil and inhuman, you have sold your soul. That I believe.

By Guy Trammell Jr.

North of Tuskegee, Sylacauga, known as “Marble City,” sits on a large, 32-mile platter of white Madre Cream marble, 1.5 miles wide and 400 feet deep. Its 2020 population of 12,132 was 66% white, 29.5% African American and 2.4% Hispanic.

A female citizen falsely complained about Haitians at Sylacauga’s September 2024 City Council meeting, claiming “Third World” immigrants would trash the town because in her travels she’s seen how they trash their own countries.

A male citizen declared, “A lot of people in Sylacauga and surrounding areas are concerned about the migrant influx that we are seeing.” He falsely said Haitians were causing “housing prices to skyrocket” and “raising tax values on properties.”

He ended: “If you’re not gonna stop it, we’re gonna have to stop it. You understand? We want something to be done. And it’s gonna be done. Whether it’s you guys or someone else.”

This is stochastic terrorism - causing violence on a specific group of people - as in Sylacauga’s evil past, reported by John J. Holley at KKK Congressional Hearings in 1871: “They would go to the Negroes’ cabins and take them out and whip them for some alleged offense.”

A second male citizen at the council meeting pointed out immigration is being served on a large platter of racism.

“When there were Croatians working at Coosa Valley Healthcare, nobody was asking about their immigration status,” he said. “We have a large Mexican population in town. I don’t hear anyone crying about their immigration status, or all the people from the Middle East.”

He finished: “The bottom line is you mad because they brought some Black people in Sylacauga.”

U.S. immigration is fine for anyone not Black. (Racism at its finest.)

Criticism is easy from a distance, but City Council President Tiffany Nix and her Creole-speaking pastor friend actually visited Haitians in Sylacauga, reading their legal papers, learning they worked for a temp agency and stayed in locations only three months, or until jobs opened elsewhere. Some have already left.

Instead of false accusations, a group of churches planned Creole classes for church members and English classes for Haitians, serving a Sylacauga platter of true care and concern.

Haitians make up America’s fabric: Chicago founder, Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable; Haiti’s Air Force founder, Tuskegee Airman Raymond Cassagnol, who stopped Nazi submarines in the Gulf of Mexico; actors Lela Rochon and Garcelle Beauvais; Suzanne de Passe, who launched Motown’s Jackson 5; and many attorneys and judges. In 1849 at New York Central College, Charles L. Reason was the nation’s first Black college professor and first Black teacher of white students in the U.S.

Let’s stop all the disgustingly evil, close-minded criticism of strangers, and make strangers friends - visit, talk, share a meal, get to know them. As Native tribes say, “Walk a mile in my moccasins.”

Amy and Guy can be reached at colorusconnected@gmail.com

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