CLEVELAND, Ohio — No reason for anyone to have heard the name Isaiah Thornton Montgomery. The man died 100 years ago.
I’d never heard his name either till a short while ago, but I find no consolation in my ignorance. Others had excuses for not knowing; I had none.
Montgomery was kin.
I had zero knowledge about him before I got a cryptic text from my cousin Sheila, whose message prompted this conversation:
Justice I’ve got a bone to pick with you ...
What?
You didn’t tell me about our family history … just found out about Isaiah Montgomery!!!
Whatever I did, I’m innocent.
You don’t get a pass on this one.
OK, cuz, blame me! I shouldn’t “get a pass on this one,” because I ought to have known about Isaiah Montgomery, whose DNA is our DNA too. As a man who values history, I should know about our ancestors if I don’t know about anyone else’s.
Isaiah Montgomery was a great uncle — on my mother’s side. He was the son of Benjamin Thornton Montgomery, a literate slave in pre-Civil War Mississippi. No doubt, both relatives had stature, although not as large as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and Elijah McCoy.
Neither of the Montgomerys needed to be as big as those notable figures; they merely needed to be themselves, men born into slavery who did more with their freedom than almost any Black father and son who called The Delta home.
Taking hold of his father’s dreams, Isaiah Montgomery built a Black town — Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where my oldest sister was born. He acquired wealth, and owned considerable property, a resource that wasn’t without its limits. A man can always earn more money, but he’ll run short of land he can lay a claim to. What land he does own, if he can keep it, he can turn into generational wealth.
Remember, though, my great ancestors were Black, and even an educated Black man in post-Civil War Dixie — and in most states in our union — knew he’d have to fight to keep that land. Mississippi had a template for how to steal it.
Was what Benjamin and Isaiah Montgomery owned stolen?
Land records there might offer a clue. Maybe if I dig deeper into newspaper archives, I’ll find information there as well. I doubt, however, the presses stopped to report wrongs done to Blacks.
I suppose, over the years, I should have displayed more interest in my ancestors. For whomever they were, these Montgomery men (and women) shaped who I am in ways too plentiful to recount.
What I don’t know about the Montgomerys, I intend to find out. I want to understand what made these men, and who the women in their lives were. I plan to talk to some of my older cousins and pull from them stories they recall listening to as they were coming of age.
Surely, they heard stories; they had to. A man with 26 “chillun,” the reputed number Benjamin Montgomery begot, stacked stories atop stories. I know from my sister, who gleaned these tidbits from our mother, that our great granddaddy loved three things: women, whiskey, gambling.
Well, these are starting points, I reckon. But my great granddaddy was more than that, wasn’t he? And Isaiah?
Sheila, I’ll have to find that answer for us all.
Justice B. Hill grew up and still lives in the Glenville neighborhood. He wrote and edited for several newspapers in his more than 25 years in daily journalism before settling into teaching at Ohio University. He quit May 15, 2019, to write and globetrot. He’s doing both.