SHADRACH’S CLIPPINGS:

My mother started my first scrapbook of newspaper clippings when I was a baby in 1955, and now I have over two dozen. I’ve got something from almost every historical event in my lifetime.

She taught me no one will ever believe something if it hasn’t been published in the paper. And if you don’t clip it to keep a copy, you can’t prove it. Newspaper clippings are proof for history.

One day I’ll forget all these things, and when I do, I’ll be able to go back to my scrapbooks, look at the clippings, and remind myself what happened.

Allow me to show one to you. I’ll flip to a page in the middle.

Well, this isn’t really a good example. I’m not going to show it to you. This is my birth announcement. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend Matthew and my cousin Penny when I showed it to them for the first time. This is how the conversation went when we were teenagers back in 1968. Read it and you’ll understand.

“What’s this?”

“It’s the clipping of my birth announcement, man.”

Penny and Matthew study it closely, and both look up at Shadrach with perplexed expressions. Shadrach wonders why they look confused. “Don’t you two have copies of your newspaper birth announcements in a scrapbook?”

Matthew shrugs. “Yeah, but—.”

Penny interrupts Matthew. “It doesn’t look like this.”

Shadrach looks at the piece of paper his mother created and glued to the scrapbook page. Bits and pieces of printed letters, words, and sentences have been trimmed and fixed in place to replicate a newspaper announcement of Shadrach’s birth. What Penny and Matthew see appears modeled on the writing style used by the newspaper, and for anyone with less than sharp eyesight and the will to believe, it can pass for a real clipping. However, Matthew knows better, and Penny never misses any detail. While Matthew is sensitive to his friend’s feelings, Penny finds it best to put it out there.

“That’s not a real clipping. It looks like it’s been cut with scissors and pasted with glue, like a ransom note on TV.”

Shadrach shrugs without looking up. “Yeah, well, they don’t publish birth announcements in the local paper for Black babies, so my mother made one for me.”

Matthew and Penny watch Shadrach looking over the clipping. His lips move as he reads it silently. “Isn’t this interesting? I weighed twenty-five pounds when I was born.”

Shadrach’s birth weight claim does not faze Matthew as he does not know about that sort of thing, but Penny takes exception. “You weren’t twenty-five pounds when you were born, not even twelve pounds. Six pounds, maybe.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m a girl. I know these things. You’re a dumb boy.”

“My mother said I felt like I was twenty-five pounds, so that’s what she put down.” Shadrach continues to flip through the scrapbook, revealing a combination of real newspaper and magazine clippings with a smattering of homemade articles Martha created. There is a made-up announcement for Shadrach’s parents’ wedding, his mother’s graduation, and Shadrach’s first few birthdays.

“Where’s your father’s obituary? They print those.”

Shadrach turns to the next spread and points to the empty pages. “My mother didn’t want to remember the details. Besides, the newspaper doesn’t print Black death notices unless they’re paid for.”

Yeah, that conversation was over fifty years ago. I took it directly from one of the chapters in The Agitators: A Reminiscence.

Here’s some of the real clippings I have in my scrapbooks. Mr. Emmerich of Emmerich Newspapers was kind enough to allow me to share them with you. Be sure to subscribe to one of his newspapers. I recommend the print version so you can start your own scrapbooks. But if you want to keep everything on your computer instead, subscribe to his digital version opens a new window, and you can research all the really old clippings in newspapers yourself.