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The history of Lily Golden, a Russian African-American professor of history, is an inspiration to those fighting against supremacists worldwide. Nassor Said Ali reports.
We may have to look towards Russia as the only white homeland left, says the American Renaissance, a white supremacist organisation which eulogises their Russian comrades-in-hate for waging a violent campaign against racial minorities in Russia in the years between 2002 and 2007.
But the life and family history of Lily Golden, a 75-year-old Russian AfricanAmerican professor, still active in the intellectual and racial rights world, have proven the supremacists in both America and Russia wrong.
A third-generation member of a BlackNative/American-Jewish-Russian family which settled in the Soviet Union in 1931, Gulden's life is a challenge to historians who limit the history of black people in Russia to the confines of the Moscow International Youth Festival in 1957.
Thanks to the British writer, Hugh Barnes, we know that the history of black people in the Soviet republics goes a long way back. Barnes made the groundbreaking research on the black Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin's great-grandfather, Ibrahim Petrovich Gannibal, who had seven children but whose progeny's whereabouts are shrouded in mystery.
Barnes revealed in his book, Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg, that Russia's prePushkin black communities had made an immense contribution to nation-building. It is no surprise therefore that Lily Golden, a legend in her own right, has followed in their footsteps.
"By the time of Catherine the Great, negro slaves were a common sight in St Petersburg," Barnes wrote. "In the grand saloons of Millionnaya Street, they appeared in a variety of roles, such as pets, pages, footmen, mascots, mistresses, favorites and adopted children."
Golden, with her unusual combination of African, Native American, Jewish and Russian ancestry, has become a tower of strength for those fighting against racial bigotry. She says: "I belong to all races. I am African-American, a Polish Jew and a Red Indian who became Russian in everything but blood."
Her grandfather, Hilliard Golden, was an African slave freed in Mississippi in 1865 who married a Native American (or Red Indian) woman and had 10 children with her. Hilliard soon became one of the wealthiest black landowners in Mississippi, but had to flee the notorious Ku Klux...