HISTORIC BLACK VEGAS: Let’s End 2025 in a Spirit of Joy

BY CLAYTEE D. WHITE

I will end 2025 steeped in joy, Black Joy — the healing balm of a mysterious, invisible power. I believe that joy is one of our superpowers. 

Beginning in 1619, Blacks endured slavery then Jim Crow and continued this trajectory into the 21st century’s systemic racism, Jim Crow 2.0. And yet, Black people are still thinking, building, working, writing, creating, dancing, and standing on holy ground. I propose an addition to the thinking surrounding Black Joy by adding a spiritual component. The church has always been important to African-Americans. 

The belief in the invisible has been a steady influence among all religious expressions in Black communities. Having faith brings hope and allows freedom to flow into our lives. Faith brings that feeling of joy even in the worst times and creates a path for light to radiate from within us. Faith and that inner joy probably kept the enslaved hopeful enough to pick one more pound of cotton, the strength to take the lashes from the whip, the vision to continue to put one foot in front of the other before escaping via underground railroad. 

Our careers, our jobs, our professions are immersed in the spirit that works through us. Paul R. Williams, the Black architect who designed Berkley Square must have felt that joy in his creativity; Helen Toland must have felt that Black Joy as she served as the first Black female principal when she was guided to expose students to as many local spaces as possible; Dr. James McMillan must have experienced that hope leading the community to integrate hotels and then attorney Charles Kellar as he wrote a consent decree for better jobs for the Black community. 

Ernest Holmes, author of “The Science of Mind,” wrote about the inspiration that joy can bring: “There is a song upon my lips today; it sings of the glad heart and the happy ways of life. I will listen to my song, for it carols to me the glad tidings of Great Joy, of Love, and Life. It tells me of the wondrous journey of the soul and the boundless Life in which my life is hid. I am filled with Joy.” 

Black dancers at the Moulin Rouge probably felt this and thus allowed their dancing to lead to community work in organizations like Le Femme Douze, the Links, Greek sororities, The Girlfriends, and all kinds of church-related organizations. 

Having the audacity to continue to believe in joy after witnessing a lynching, the destruction of Black Wall Street, the attempted walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Sunday afternoon in Anniston, Alabama where Freedom Riders were attacked, or the assassinations of Martin and Medger proves the power of hope and joy — the superpower. The Spirit of Joy within us is birthless and deathless. It was not born and it cannot die.