You remember the feeling. Wednesday was the first true day of summer vacation for the seniors at the Syracuse Academy of Science. Their graduation was held that night at Onondaga Community College, but they had basically spent 13 years of their lives — going back to their day of kindergarten — earning the right to sleep late that morning.
Instead, shortly after 8 a.m., Ibrahim Abdul-Qadir and three of his classmates were at Loguen Park on East Genesee Street, for the unveiling of an historical marker they helped create to honor the Rev. Jermain Loguen, an abolitionist legend.
Though as they realize now — considering all that Loguen and his wife Caroline did — maybe not quite legend enough.
“I didn’t want to wake up,” said Ibrahim, with a bemused smile, of the chance to sleep in. But he said the entire point of all the research done cooperatively by the seniors, for many months, would somehow seem empty if the marker went up and “there was nobody here,” meaning student representatives.
All four teens at the event were students of color, each of them keenly aware of how every day of their collective lives serves as a living testament to Loguen’s fearlessness.
“It’s a perfect ending,” said Bob Searing, curator of history for the Onondaga Historical Association, speaking of the ceremony. “Somewhere Rev. Loguen is smiling down on these children. I can almost guarantee to you that he and his family, at some point, walked past that spot.”
The timing for the unveiling was built on a pragmatic rationale: The Syracuse-based William B. Pomeroy Foundation, which puts up historical and cultural markers across the nation, wanted to be sure the SAS students could be part of it, before they take a fast breath after school lets out — and then scatter to many colleges or other new endeavors.
Yet as Searing and Mayor Sharon Owens both noted, to do it this week feels particularly fitting. Juneteenth, the national holiday inspired by the 1865 emancipation of enslaved families in Texas, is officially Friday — though the rolling Syracuse celebration will go deep into the weekend.
As for Sunday, that’s Father’s Day — and it’s no stretch to say Loguen held a father’s love, pride and concern for the generational fate of millions upon millions of American children, including the ones who honored him from SAS.
Wednesday’s ceremony was the result of a conversation months ago between Bill Brower, a strategic adviser to the Pomeroy Foundation, and Dr. Tolga Hayali, superintendent of the Science Academies of New York Charter Schools. Brower related the foundation’s dream for a new Loguen marker. Hayali brought the idea back to Donald Dwyer, an SAS history teacher, who turned it into a senior project for 16 students.
Among them were Abdul-Qadir, ZaLeya Derby, Paw November and Adarius Rucker, all in attendance Wednesday. They are bound for college in the autumn, nurturing big dreams — while intensely conscious that in the United States of Loguen’s time, they would have faced segregated barriers at every turn in the North, and a life of enslavement and oblivion in the South.
Knowing that, ZaLeya and her friends made a point that Searing also emphasized: Growing up, ZaLeya recalled hearing many accounts in her history classes about four or five major figures of abolition and civil rights, notably Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.
Loguen is a reminder, the students said, of the staggering courage of quiet contributors throughout the nation. They risked everything for the cause of freedom, but today are easily overlooked.
“I think it is something that should be remembered,” said November Paw, who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand after her family, of the Karen community, was forced to flee Burma — and a young woman, bound for college, who now dreams of a career in a radiology.
Searing said Loguen is “underrated,” in a staggering way, among the great figures of 19th century America. Loguen’s early life, Searing said, was “nightmarish:” Loguen’s mother was a free Black woman in Ohio who was kidnapped and forced into enslavement in the South. His own birth in Tennessee was the result of sexual assault by a white enslaver, Searing said.
As a teen — roughly the same age as the students who helped prepare — Loguen knew he was going to be sold away as property, and instead joined a friend in a harrowing escape.
He eventually settled in Syracuse, where he risked his own freedom by speaking publicly and forcefully against the Fugitive Slave Act, which ruled that by law all escapees on American soil were treated as property, and ought to be apprehended and returned.
This year, Searing said, marks 175 years since the “Jerry Rescue” — the daring jailhouse raid in Syracuse to free a fugitive, and a high-stakes gamble Loguen helped to organize. Searing finds searing corollaries between today’s world and those times, and he said some accounts say Loguen and his equally courageous wife Caroline helped as many as 1,500 people use the “underground railroad” to escape enslavement on the way to freedom in Canada.
Think of that: 1,500 people, each one liberated while Loguen himself was at high risk of capture, which Dwyer said was an especially compelling revelation for his students. Still, Loguen is a hardly a household name. In one of those emblematic civic decisions that won’t ever make sense, the Loguen home at Pine and East Genesee streets — a refuge for so many, and a precious historical site in Syracuse — was demolished, eventually replaced by a chain drug store that later closed.
The nearby park, named for Loguen, now serves as centerpiece of his public legacy. At a time when references to American enslavement, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement are being softened or erased federally at many sites, Owens, Searing, Brower and city parks commissioner Syeisha Byrd all reinforced an essential truth:
Loguen’s hope, bravery and fierce vision of freedom, as the nation nears its 250th birthday, represent the highest measure of American ideals.
“Democracy,” Brower said, “depends on memory,” while Searing called Loguen “a beacon of moral clarity” — a guy whose friends and peers included Douglass and Tubman. Byrd said Loguen lives on in “the courage of these students,” as they prepare to face the world.
As a culmination of their research, the teens suggested the message for the plaque, which was then reviewed by Pomeroy historians and crafted into these words:
“Jermain W. Loguen, ca. 1814-1872, lived nearby. Reverend, educator and abolitionist in Syracuse, aided freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad.” The plaque credits the Syracuse Academy of Science and is the first of its kind to include an engraved badge that reads, “Researched by students,” according to Pomeroy spokesman Steve Bodnar.
Several parents were on hand Wednesday, including Dr. El-Java Abdul-Qadir, Ibrahim’s dad, and Iris Howard, ZaLeya Derby’s mother. They reflected on Loguen’s importance — historically, nationally, culturally, personally — and emphasized how the 21st century power of the marker goes straight back to the teenagers who see the living point.
“It means everything, just to put up something so great at such a young age,” Howard said.
Owens, the city’s first Black mayor, felt an intensely personal connection. She is still mourning the recent death of her mother, Rev. Ester Daniels. As a teenager — barely older than the students Owens met at Loguen Park — Daniels left behind suffocating Jim Crow conditions in Florida to take a solitary bus ride to the North.
The mayor posed for a photo with the teens, and then — from the dais — spoke of the staggering importance of Syracuse as a 19th century engine of liberty, how it can change your whole vision of the city just to understand that heritage. She suddenly paused in hope and wonder for an impromptu reflection on what’s typically fast-moving traffic along East Genesee, speed that embodies the pace at which we live our lives.
Those drivers, the mayor said with delight about the marker: In a sudden break from long routine, they were slowing down to look.
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