narrative of our family history and origins into the United States
When I asked my uncle Adam Morrison to narrate our family history and origins into the United States, he went into his old cabinet and brought out a photo of a tall black guy in a military uniform. According to Uncle Adam, the person in the picture is my great, great, great Grandfather Philip Starker, who served in the 10th cavalry regiment of the U.S army war against the Indians in the southwest in 1869. He does not know where Philp originated from, but we suspect it was from the North of Africa where most immigrants were shipped from to work in the coffee farms in the south. After the war, Philip moved to Arizona where he joined the civil rights movement to fight racial discrimination it is in such a rally where he met her wife Sara Sharise and together they had four sons and a girl.
After the summer of 1919, John Richards’s grandson to Philip and my great grandfather in a bid to escape the oppression of the Jim Crow South (Brown and Stentiford 75-123) moved to Detroit, Michigan. Around this period Detroit was known as the Paradise valley with black businesses booming all over (Ernest, 7) John started sewing clothes in his basement with his wife Dorothy Todd and because this period blacks were liberated thanks to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the business did well they moved out to open a store in the 5th street. According to the Historian Juliet Walker, the period within 1920-1930 was the “Golden Age of Black Business.” Thanks to the motivation of leaders like Booker T. Washington of the National Negro Business League, small entrepreneurs like John got the support they needed to grow their ventures.