The City, Winston-Salem of North Carolina names Liberia Street for Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
The city of
Winston-Salem named Liberia Street for Liberian President Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf in a ceremony Saturday in the city’s oldest black neighborhood.
Mayor Allen Joines
read a proclamation naming the street “President Sirleaf Lane” to about
50 people who attended the ceremony. Many of the attendees are current
or former residents of the Happy Hill Garden neighborhood.
The sign in Sirleaf’s honor is at the intersection of Liberia and Alder streets.
“She is a true definition of
freedom, justice and equality for all people of Liberia,” Joines said of
Sirleaf in the proclamation.
Sirleaf visited Winston-Salem
this weekend as part of her trip to the United States for the U.N.
General Assembly’s annual meeting in New York. She is the first foreign
head of state to visit the city during Joines’ 15-year tenure as mayor.
Sirleaf, 77, is the first
democratically elected female president of an African nation. A graduate
of Harvard University, Sirleaf is a former World Bank economist.
She is serving her second term as
president of Liberia after she was re-elected in 2011. During that
year, Sirlear shared the Nobel Peace Prize with two other women — Leymah
Gbowee of Liberia and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen.
Sirleaf said it was a great honor to have Liberia Street named after her.
“I’ve resisted at home people
naming things after me because I said ‘you don’t that when I am in
office. Do that when I leave office,’” Sirleaf said jokingly. “Since
this is not at home, I am pleased to accept it. It’s not only a honor
for me, but also it’s a honor for the Liberian people.”
Sirleaf Lane or Liberia Street
was part of the Schumann plantation in the early 1800s. Dr. Friedrich
Schumann freed his slaves in 1836, and they traveled to Liberia, where
many freed blacks from the U.S. settled. Most of Happy Hill’s first
settlers were former slaves who had lived or worked in the Moravian town
of Salem.
In 1872, the freed slaves bought
plots of land in the community that became known as “Liberia” and “Happy
Hill.” By the 1920s, it was known mostly as Happy Hill.
James Hunder Sr., the president
of Liberian Organization of the Piedmont, told the crowd that the naming
of Liberia Street for Sirleaf was an historic moment.
“We gather here and stand on the broad shoulders of former slaves and former slavemasters,” Hunder said.
He then announced a proposal to
build a dormitory in Happy Hill for students from Liberia who would
attend local universities and colleges. The project is his
organization’s way to help educate Liberian students who would return to
their country and help rebuild it.
Rence Callahan, a partner with
Walter, Robbs, Callahan and Pierce, a local architectural firm, said the
project would be a 20-bed, two-story house with office space. There is
no timetable for construction, and the Liberian Organization of the
Piedmont would lead efforts to pay for it, Callahan said.
The project would cost between $1.75 million to $2 million, he said.
Liberia suffered from a 14-year
civil war followed by the Ebola epidemic in 2014, Hunder said. The West
African country’s population is about 4.5 million people.
More than 250,000 died in the
Liberian civil war that ended in 2003. A decade later, Liberia was
ravaged by the Ebola epidemic that left more than 4,800 people dead.
Sirleaf has been credited with
helping rebuild her country and maintaining peace after the war, Joines
said. Her second term as president ends in January 2018.
In her remarks, Sirleaf thanked
Hunder and the Liberian Organization of the Piedmont for their efforts
to help Liberian students.
After the ceremony, Sirleaf
talked briefly about the possibility of Hillary Clinton being elected in
November as the first female president of the United States.
“We look forward to working with female heads of state all over the world, including in the U.S.,” Sirleaf said.
Apostle Edith Jones, the
president of the Ecclestiastes Deliverance Center on Alexander Street,
said she welcomed Sirleaf’s visit to the Happy Hill neighborhood.
“We are very excited to see such a
beautiful woman who has done so much for her country,” said Jones, the
vice president of the Happy Hill Neighborhood Association. “It was a
beautiful experience.”
jhinton@wsjournal.com (336) 727-7299 @jhintonWSJ
Posted in
Local News,
Politics,
Diplomacy
on
Sunday, September 25, 2016 12:45 pm.
More videos:
Poll
Winston-Salem Journal, Winston-Salem, NC © 2016 BH Media Group, Inc. Powered by BLOX Content Management System from TownNews.com. [Terms of Use | Privacy Policy]
Comments
Post a Comment