Celebrating Black History Month should be done continuously with intensity; nothing or no one can take our history, even while national forces aim to hide the accomplishments of Black people, women, and other marginalized groups. Let’s continue to highlight the sacrifices, diligence, bravery, and unyielding resiliency of our ancestors. All of that is in our DNA.

For example, in 1898, my maternal grandmother’s maternal grandmother, Louisa “Lue” Bobo Danner, pictured above, walked into the Panola County, Mississippi courthouse to purchase 100 acres of land for $1,050 near Como, not far from where she had been enslaved. I’m not sure if she’s the first Black female landowner in the county, but it’s a good possibility. Grandma Lue, as she was affectionately called, had lived and was still living during some tough times in a racist, unjust nation. But that didn’t stop her. Oh, no!

Grandma Lue was born 21 January 1842, near Cross Keys, Union County, South Carolina, to her enslaved mother, Clarissa Bobo, who was impregnated by Dr. William Bobo’s neighbor, Joshua Wilbourn. Her life and her perseverance were cemented in strength and endurance. She even had to endure the plight of her, her mother, her first-born child Jim, and her siblings being placed on wagons in 1858 and transported over 500 miles to Panola County, where Dr. Bobo decided to re-settle near Como. Her first husband, Mack Ray, was left behind in South Carolina, and she never saw him again.

Per oral history, Grandma Lue urged all of her children to get an education, especially since it had been illegal for her to have one. Subsequently, all four of her daughters became schoolteachers in Panola and Tate County. Her youngest daughter, Madam Mattie Ella Danner Hockenhull, would even go on to become a dressmaker, a shop and hotel owner, a milliner, and a Booker T. Washington protégé who presented at the 1914 National Negro Business League Convention in Muskogee, OK.

After the untimely demise of her second husband, USCT Civil War soldier Edward Danner, Sr., in 1876, Grandma Lue was left with ten young children to continue raising alone. She possessed the will and strength to do all of this and more. She applied three times to the federal government to get a Civil War widow’s pension, and she was finally approved. That was an attest to her determination.

Grandma Lue took her rest from this Earthly setting and joined the ancestors on 5 July 1921, leaving behind eight surviving children, 62 grandchildren, and more. She was 79. Let’s allow the lessons of their struggles and aspirations fuel our commitment to justice, survival, and resistance. That’s what they would have wanted. We owe it to those who came before us — and those yet to come — to keep pushing forward in a strategic manner. No weapon formed against us shall prosper.