Reflections on Black
Black History Did Not Start with Slavery
As we move from celebrating the birth of Dr. King, to saturating our Social Networks with messages encouraging our friends and family to support Red Tails, with Black History month fast approaching, and our soon to be overzealous desire to exaggerate all things black approaches epic proportions as we pepper the internet with little known black history facts about historical greats such as WEB Dubois, Carter G. Woodson, Charles Drew, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), and Benjamin Banneker, occurrences like Black Wall Street, and places such as Kemet three thoughts come to my mind.
1.) Thank goodness no one has made a movie titled Black Tail.
2.) Even though we live in a racist society we have to resist the urge to allow our legacies to be defined by race. For one race is a human creation that should have never been used to differentiate people. Two, your race shouldn’t be treated as a handicap; such and such person is great considering her/his blackness and all that they had to overcome. The people we celebrate for Black History month are people that are great regardless of what race we (the humans) choose to classify them as. Let’s give them their due and quit short changing their accomplishments by calling them black greats. They are plain and simply GREAT…….
3.) Black History did not start with slavery!!!
Inspired by Ali (Haiku)
Once upon a time
Athletes did more than sell shoes
Do you hear me Mike?
More than a Boxer
Remembering Dr. King
You can not assassinate a spirit, you can only kill a man.
In my humble opinion, Dr. King could have lived to be 100 years old if he had restricted his fight to black people and civil rights. But no, he had to go off and start fighting against the unjust Vietnam war, against the American class based Caste system in which he demanded minimum income levels for all Americans, and for humanity as a whole. No Dr. King had to be killed because he began to talk about issues that threatened the wealth of the elite class and issues that might spark a revolution. Please understand Dr. King was born black, but he died a human being and a child of God that people of all races and cultures should embrace.
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