Black History Month

Welp, it was another Sunday and another snowstorm in the Princeton area.

This wasn't quite like last week, when about two feet of snow fell. This was more like five or six inches or so, and it was the fluffy kind, as opposed to the icy kind.

Still, it's enough already with the snow. And TigerBlog's weather app has more little snowflakes next to Tuesady, Thursday, Saturday and the following Tuesday. What that turns into, who knows, but hey, that's just a lot of winter.

That doesn't even include the fact that the temperatures are going to be plummeting all week. 

Oh, and you know what's really annoying? When you're shoveling the driveway and you get it all done, and then all of the sudden the plow comes down the street and the next thing you know there's a large snow bank between you and the road again.

Of course, it's February, so maybe it shouldn't be all that surprising. It's just that last winter featured no snow at all, and TigerBlog sort of liked it that way.

In addition to being the heart of snow season, apparently, February is also Black History Month. 

Princeton Athletics is in the middle of its celebration. There have been social media posts and recognitions of the contributions of Princeton's black athletes and coaches, and there are plenty more to come as the rest of February rolls along.

TB has contributed to the content with some feature stories. On the women's side, there are four pieces, one for each week of the month. 

The first of those ran last week. The subject was Jackie Jackson, who was a women's basketball player in the 1970s. Jackson was the first black woman to be a captain of a Princeton women's team, and TB is almost 100 percent sure that she was also the first black woman to win a varsity letter.

This week's story will be about Deborah Saint-Phard, the Olympic shot putter who was in the Class of 1987. Saint-Phard is a doctor in Colorado these days. 

TB sent her the piece he wrote to do some fact-checking, and she ended up reading it back to him while they were on the phone. At one point there's a quote from her in which TB added "she said while laughing." As she was reading it back to him, she started laughing again. 

It was a good affirmation that she had laughed the first time.

Saint-Phard is one of the women TB has spoken to during his research for the book he's writing about Princeton women's athletic history. He'd of course heard of her and knew a bit about her accomplishments, but he had never met her and knew nothing about her personally.

That's been one of the two best parts of the project. There's been the part about telling the stories, which has been awesome. And there's the part about meeting people who previously had just been names in record books, which has been equally awesome.

Saint-Phard has been one of his favorites. Her story is tremendous, with the way her family fled the Haitian dictatorship of Papa Doc Duvalier when she was a baby and then all of the travels she had along the way as a kid.

There was her career at Princeton and the special relationship she had with men's track and field coach Fred Samara, who coached her as well. There was the way she reconnected with her native country and ended up on the Haitian Olympic team for the 1988 Games.

There's even the story that made her laugh when she told it to TB the first time and when she read it back to him the second time. That's the story of how she became the Haitian flag bearer at the Opening Ceremonies.

You'll have to read it for yourself later this week.

Saint-Phard went to medical school while training for the Olympic Games and World Championships (she finished in the top 20 in both). She has gone on to be a champion for girls and women in athletics, focusing her care on sports medicine for females.

She's also become more acutely aware of issues related to race and equality, especially as they relate to health care, and even more so in a COVID world. Even something as simple as taking the vaccine was something that she wanted to do as publicly as possibly, in light of historical situations where black people were not able to trust the government's health care policies or where those policies were negatively impacting black people.

Building trust, she said, is incredibly important. 

She even wrote about it in an article that was published in Inside Higher Ed, which you can read HERE.

The article is entitled "At the Intersection of Burnout, COVID and Systemic Racism." 

It's a fascinating piece, written by a fascinating woman, physician and Princeton alum. Being able to tell her story, and all of the others has been an honor for TB.