Having Our Say by Sarah L. Delany and a Elizabeth Delany With Amy Hill Hearth

¶ … American History?

The technique of oral history, sampling the life of one person or several people to gain a portrait of the era is deployed in a uniquely effective fashion in Having Our Say. Simply by virtue of their longevity, the Delaney sisters had lives that intersected with the most seismic national and international events that shook the 20th century, including the American civil rights movement, the Great Depression, as well as two world wars. As African-Americans and as women, they could not help 'having a say' about the social history of the 20th century.

But these women are more than real-life 'Forest Gumps.' They are not mere witnesses to history. They are unusual and extraordinary in the sense that they are, respectively 101 and 103 years old are unmarried, and they still live together. These facts alone would make them distinctive. But the sisters are also both former working professionals. Sadie devoted her life to teaching domestic science. She was first black domestic science teacher in the New York City high schools. Although a quiet woman who calls herself a mama's child, she held herself proud and strong in the face of racism. Bessie faced so much racism and sexism when she was black female member of her Columbia University Dental School class in the 1920s; she said she emerged alive out of the bracing academic experience via sheer determination alone. Then, Bessie went on to practice dentistry in New York after her graduation.

Although born Southerners and living in the South when their story was chronicled by the New York Times reporter who co-authored the book, the sisters spent most in the 1920s in Harlem. During the height of the citywide popularity of the Cotton Club and the Harlem Renaissance, they became involved with black activists and were active integrationists. They moved to the before all-white Mount Vernon suburb of New York together as an act of social defiance and to seek a more comfortable place to reside.

In a way, both sisters collectively are a reproach to the 'Forest Gump' construction of history as something that happens to other people, while most of us observe it from afar. Although unknown, these strong-minded and willed women are history in their very persons, suggests the author, who writes the text in their voices. The two women were born during the era of sharecropping in the South -- Sadie was born 1889 and Bessie was born 1891 in Raleigh, North Carolina. But they went on to become historical forces, rather than become oppressed by history.

This may be rooted in their parentage. Their father was born into slavery and only freed because of the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet he became an administrator at a college and America's first elected black Episcopal bishop. Thus, the story of the Delaney family stands as a powerful refutation to the idea that somehow, African-Americans where 'liberated by whites,' of that the history of African-Americans in America is merely of oppression -- it is also one of triumph and constructive achievement, even before the laws and social policies caught up with the achievements of individuals such as the Delaney sisters and their father.