WOODBURY – “I’m going to tell you a story about my family.”
With these words, Milton W. Hinton Jr. began his presentation to K-8 students at Holy Angels Catholic School.
The Feb. 23 visit during Black History Month was an opportunity for Hinton, the former Gloucester County director of equal opportunity and past president of the Gloucester County chapter of the NAACP, to show youth that “Black history is American history” and to demonstrate what positive changes in civil rights “has allowed people to do.”
Through personal history, photos and heirlooms, Hinton shared the two sides of his heritage – on the maternal family side, freedom; on the paternal, slavery.
His mother, Thelma Octavia Gilliam, lived in a 17-room house in City Point, Virginia, while his father, Milton Hinton, came from a family of sharecropper slaves who traveled from Missouri to Virginia after being sold to a slaveowner named Hinton.
His presentation included many artifacts and stories, including: the fact that Hinton had to carry a copy of his birth certificate with him at all times to prove that he, a dark-skinned boy, was the true son of his lighter-skinned mother; his father being one of the two, of four, siblings who his family could afford to send to college; a photo of his uncle Billy, an Episcopal priest; the hat and cane from his beloved grandfather, George Washington Gilliam; a handmade quilt from his aunts Mary and Sarah; and first-edition Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver stamps from the 1930s, gifted to him by his aunt, Octavia Hilton, a surgical student at Tuskegee University in Alabama.
The fact that his father came from a family of sharecroppers but went on to graduate from Glassboro State Teachers College (now Rowan University) is something Hinton said “changed my life.”
Eighth-grade Holy Angels students assisted Hinton with passing around the artifacts or reading passages from the book “We Kept Them Flying,” a personal memoir from his uncle David H. Hinton of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Forces.
School staff and students praised Hinton’s tales of his family’s hardship, love and sacrifice.
“I’m thankful that he could share his phenomenal storytelling and experiences,” said school Principal Patti Paulsen.
Ryan Stoehr, one of the eighth-grade assistants, said Hinton “did a good job directing his talk to a young audience,” while classmate Quinton Cavanagh “liked getting to know about his family,” adding that African-American history “needs to be brought up to a younger generation.”
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