A man named Imam Plemon El-Amin stood on stage a Morehouse College in Atlanta on Sunday and accepted a posthumous degree on behalf of his uncle Dennis Hubert. Why wasn’t Dennis Hubert there to accept his degree, you ask? Well, according to CNN, on June 15, 1930, in the midst of a rash of hate crimes happening in Georgia’s capitol city, Dennis Hubert was accosted by seven white men accusing him of insulting a white woman.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before…
On the playground of Crogman School for Negroes, Hubert was surrounded and shot in the back of the head in broad daylight in front of a crowd of witnesses. The crime was so brazen and shocking that even in a time where accountability was as rare as interracial marriages, the men involved were indicted for murder.
The hate crime still resonates to this day as Morehouse President David Thomas spoke about Hubert calling him “son of Morehouse, a martyr of justice, and what history now sees as the Trayvon Martin of the 1930s in Atlanta.”
The day was undoubtedly emotional for El Amin as his familial roots at the iconic Atlanta HBCU run deep with 10 men in his family graduating from the college and 7 women graduating from it’s sister institute, Spelman College.
“Many prayers were said in his name,” El-Amin said about the ceremony, where the 75-year-old accepted the posthumous degree on his uncle’s behalf.“Many people remembered him and were informed about his life and his legacy, and so the knowledge was there, as well as the charity of him sacrificing his life so that we would be more conscious of the value of young life and the value of human life, but also the value of justice.”
“I was proud of Morehouse to give Dennis the honor, and I’m quite appreciative,” El-Amin said. “The whole Hubert family is really appreciative of that.”
A classy move by Morehouse College and a feel-good story that still reminds us of how the legacy of American white supremacy has affected generations even 100 years later.
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