Black history is not only about public leaders and national headlines.
It is also about Black men who held families together in quiet, steady ways during some of the hardest periods in American history.
Today, I honor Ed Rominger.
Born in 1870, just five years after the end of the Civil War, Ed entered the world during Reconstruction — a fragile and uncertain moment when formerly enslaved families were trying to define freedom for themselves. His parents had been enslaved. He belonged to the first generation born into legal freedom, but freedom did not mean safety, equality, or economic security.
Like many Black men of his generation, Ed became a farmer in North Carolina. Farming for Black families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not simply work. It was survival. It was land ties. It was identity. It was resistance in a society structured to keep Black families economically limited.
He could not read or write, but literacy was never the measure of his leadership. He built stability through labor. He maintained a household. He kept family connected along rural roads where extended kin were often the only safety net available.
After becoming widowed, he did not retreat from responsibility. He stepped deeper into it.
When his stepdaughter died, leaving two small children behind, Ed became their primary caregiver. In the middle of the Great Depression — under Jim Crow laws that restricted opportunity at every turn — he kept those children under his roof. He provided food, discipline, and structure. He relied on extended family. He did what Black families have historically done when formal systems offered little protection: he made family the system.
Census records show his household living on a farm, without modern comforts, categorized simply as “Negro.” In one later census, he was even misclassified as white — a reminder of how imperfect and inconsistent official records were when documenting Black lives. Yet the paper trail confirms one thing very clearly: he remained head of household. He remained present.
That presence mattered.
Ed represents a generation of Black men whose leadership rarely extended beyond their communities — farmers, laborers, guardians, grandfathers. They absorbed loss. They adapted. They endured segregation and economic hardship. They raised children who would later become part of the Great Migration, seeking expanded opportunity in northern cities.
His life formed a bridge between slavery and the modern era. Because he stepped forward, the children in his care survived, grew, migrated, and built new branches of the family tree.
That is Black history.
It is the history of Black men who labored without recognition, who raised children not biologically their own, who anchored families through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Depression.
Ed Rominger’s life reminds us that survival itself was an achievement — and continuity across generations did not happen by accident.
It happened because he chose responsibility.
And because he stood firm, this family still stands.
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