And then there was the young lady yesterday who wrote down that at the age of 25 she wanted to be an assistant in a lab drawing blood. There is nothing wrong with that but it seemed like a limited dream for our afternoon game. When I asked her about her career choice she looked so down and so sad. She could not ever find a way to escape the reality of the life she was living to try to think in bigger terms. She told me she thought about being an orthopedic surgeon but . . .She shrugged,  her eyes dropped to that place where if you could look behind them you could see where the pain was coming from. “I don’t think, well, it’s just too much. I don’t think it’s for me.”

I have to say this hurt my heart. Of all the students that day she was the one with the best speaking voice, the one who asked the most questions. The one who didn’t seem to have any limitations when it came to doing the workshop. But she was stuck in a reality that had been forced on her. Where did that force come from, I wondered? She walked with slumped shoulders and when she thought no one was looking she had this veil of sadness that shaded her eyes. Perhaps she didn’t make good enough grades to get into college or medical school. Perhaps she had been told by her family that she should get a good safe job and that was it. She could have been the oldest of many and forced into getting a job to help support her siblings. She could have seen the reality of how hard it is to make it out of certain circumstances and decided to give up before her life started. But somewhere along the way she saw something in orthopedic surgery that called her. And then the call was dropped.

She had a lot of limitations and she was barely 16 years old.

Perhaps we are all victims of the limitations society puts on us until we discover how to bypass them. For me being told my book was not something to be published saddened me for years. I could not get past the powers of the publishing rejecting me but I had to accept it. Or did I? Now I feel a new power since I decided to self publish. I am the master of my fate.

But how do we make young people who only see life through their parents eyes, parents who are barely surviving, see beyond that horizon?

This isn’t a racial issue.  It is an economic one but it started off racial. For years people of color were only allowed to succeed so far. When we started fighting for equal rights whites fought back. There was no desire to share the wealth of this nation, and other nations, with descendants of slaves. In fact during World War II black newspapers pushed a double V for Victory campaign. Victory overseas from the aggressors we were fighting and Victory at home from the racism that was felt by people of color. Why fight for a nation that treats you like half a citizen? It was such a powerful campaign the J. Edgar Hoover tried to get Attorney General Biddle to declare many of the black newspaper national threats. He didn’t succeed. Campaigns to get better jobs for people of color helped change the face of the United States workforce. Today, though there are limitations, those who dream of making something of their lives by hard work in jobs once help only by whites and a handful of blacks can come true.

Unless someone tells you to limit your dreams.

For my generation it was get a safe job in education. Something that would not make waves in society. Something that always promised a mediocre income. For this generation the sky is the limit. A black man CAN be president of the United States. Just start there.

But it is in the homes and classrooms where young people are forced to box themselves in limitations forced on them by those they think care about them.

When the fake party was over and they sat before me with their sodas and cookies (I gave real refreshments ) I asked them what they had learned about being in social situations. The young woman with the limitations said nothing while the others bubbled with responses. Not wanting to single her out I made a suggestion to them all, the only thing I could think to say to make them step outside of their limitations. I told them they must think of the future as theirs and create their own businesses and companies. Working for themselves, I told them, would help them as well as their families get ahead.

Perhaps it will help her look at the limitations she has placed on her young life. Perhaps she will find a way to become that surgeon.

Sad to say, perhaps nothing will happen at all.

The news media accounts say that he was in a park and that a complaint was made. The cop that shot Dean is reported to be so distraught that he is under sedation and unable to give a statement some 3 days later. He hospitalized in the very same hospital that Dean died in 3 hours after he was fatally shot.

People are speculating that Dean was engaged some unsavory activity and that when the undercover” cop arrived something went awry. I don’t know why Dean was shot and murdered but what I do know is that Dean Gaymon was a loving family man. I do know that he doted on his mother and he loved his family. I do know that he not only cared about his children he also cared for his children and his sister’s children as well.

About 7 years ago Dean’s niece was a participant is a debutant cotillion sponsored by the church his dad was pastoring. I choreographed the Father/Daughter Waltz. Dean’s dad and niece were having quite a difficult time of it. Dean stepped in and in his gentle way took his father’s place, when he did, the arguments ceased, the waltz was learned and the cotillion’s Father/Daughter dance was a beautiful, elegant success.

Some mean and horrible accusations have been hurled by those who never knew Dean and by those who thought they did. He may not have been a perfect person, who is? Nonetheless, no matter why he was in that park in Newark or what he was or wasn’t doing there is, in my mind, no justification for him to have been shot down. There is nothing he could have been doing that would have warranted deadly force. He had no weapon so he couldn’t have posed a threat to the life of the office. If he became unruly and force was needed then why didn’t the officer maim him? He was no street thug, not that being so would have been justification for this murder.

There are those who ask, “Why this did happen, was it because he was an African American male? Was it because he said something that triggered some rage the cop? Was it a mistake in identity or just a blatten disregard for Human life?

There is so much violence and wanton killing in our society. Our children are killing each other, men and women kill others because they look differently or dress differently or worship differently. We kill people because of sexual preferences or because of or their racial or ethnic identity. We hate because we don’t understand and we don’t understand because we refuse to and we teach our children to do the same.

Four little children are now forever without their father, a wife has been widowed, left to raise her children alone, a mother’s heart is broken never to mend, a father seeks answers and justice as his family must now find a new normal because life as they knew it will never, ever be same again. There is someone missing, someone who will always be missing.

Tomorrow some other mother’s heart will also become broken, never to mend. Tomorrow some other children will cry for their daddy who will never return home. They may be in Newark, New Jersey or in Afghanistan. They may be in Brooklyn, New York or in Somalia. They may be in Compton, California or in Sudan or in Tulsa, Oklahoma or in Yemen. No matter where the shootings occur someone innocent will suffer the pain of death. Some mother will be racked with an indescribable pain at the loss of her child. Some father will seek justice and maybe even revenge. Some child will become fatherless or motherless or orphaned, and for what, to settle a score, to gain wealth and power to reclaim turf or to prove a point?

Dean’s family is one of faith. Their faith is in God. They believe that God makes no mistakes and that he will put on you no more than you can bear. It was by faith that I survived the death of my youngest child so I understand from where their strength comes. But, all the faith and all the strength doesn’t negate the senseless killing that goes on day after day after day, week after week after week and year after year after year.

I am saddened by the senseless shooting that murdered a father, a not so perfect man, soft and gentle DeFarra “Dean” Gaymon.

If you are not aware Simon the Cyrenian was the black man who carried the Cross for Jesus part of the way to his his Crucifixion. As an innocent grade school student unaware of race I thought what he did was honorable. He was a good Christian man that helped the son of God before he died. I was sure Simon went to heaven for the selfless deed because that’s how I was taught in Catholic school. You do the right thing and you are rewarded with heaven.

But doing the right thing should not make you feel inferior. What if the right thing has other people calling you Uncle Tom or slave? What if the right thing has nothing to do with the color of one’s skin but the pain of being human?

Lots of time black people trying to make it in this world get criticized for being too smart or trying to be white. And whites are chastised for being too sympathetic to the black cause. But there really is no cause- there is only humanity. If I see a white child running into the street I will go after the child so that it won’t die. There is a part of me that wonders why the mother is standing on the corner paying attention to her Gucci purse or talking on the cell phone. I might even think this is not something black mothers do. But thinking that and doing the right thing are two different things.

I have heard teens make fun of one another after doing the right thing. I have heard “I wouldn’t give my seat to that old m….f…I paid for mine let him stand.” That was a white boy talking to his friends when an old man got on the train and made his way to the middle of the car with his cane while a young black woman got up and gave him her seat.  I have seen a young black woman help an old white lady off the bus and the old woman didn’t even say thank you. Perhaps her feelings and fears were working overtime or she came from that generation that didn’t believe they had to say thank you to a person of color who helped them.

I have seen a lot of good that transcends race and I wish we could forget about it.

Black people know that there are some whites who use the ‘n’ word at home or with their friends the same way blacks talk about what they perceive as misdeeds in whites. It is human nature and it is cultural. But when people need help race, unkind words, and old hatreds should not stand in the way.

I will not put Cullen’s poem here. Look for it, share it with your friends. And in response to this post do not put it in your response. When others look up his works they may discover a little history that has been suppressed because of the color of his skin.

This is not about Countee Cullen. This is about forgetting about race when it is necessary. I will not let you die if it is within my power simply because your ancestors killed mine. My skin is black and I am proud to always do the right thing regardless of color.

The Emancipation Proclamation signed into law in by President Abraham Lincoln was a political maneuver. It listed the states that it would apply to while exempting several slave holding states. The proclamation did not include the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, or Delaware, all slave-holding states, because they did not declare secession from the Union. Tennessee having come back under Union control, Virginia was listed but, exemptions were specified for the 48 counties that were in the process of forming West Virginia. Also given specific exemption were New Orleans and thirteen parishes in Louisiana. So The Emancipation Proclamation it did not free all slaves. It was Lincoln’s attempt to hold the Union together and keep slavery from expanding. In addition, Lincoln was afraid of France and Brittan coming to the aide of the session Southern states which could cause the Union to loose the war. He believed that the proclamation made the War Between the States all about slavery so by signing it, he could ensure that Britain and France would not enter the war because citizens of Britain and France would not support a cause that supported slavery even though France once practiced brutal slavery in the Caribbean, the French First Republic voted for the abolition of slavery in all French colonies. Lincoln may have not be a fan of slavery but his motives were not about freeing men women and children from a brutal amoral institution that denigrated people, destroyed cultures and families and still affects this country today. No, Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union.

During World War I African Americans joined the military in an effort to be fully recognized as equal American citizens. And while Black soldiers served in segregated units they were also involved in protest against racial injustice at home and abroad. The NAACP fought against discrimination and segregation in the United States military during WWI and WWII.
During the Korean War, the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment, which served during the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II and the beginning of the Korean War, was disbanded as a political gesture to end segregation in the U.S. Army.  During the Vietnam War the highest proportion of blacks ever to serve in an American war were assigned to serve in the infantry. The percentage of black combat fatalities in Vietnam was 14.9 percent. Rather high don’t you think?
African American soldiers have willingly gone to war to “defend” this country and protect the freedoms or White America during and since the slave era. They did so mistakenly believing that they were proving their patriotism and winning freedoms they were denied at home simply because of the color of their skin. So please, Mr. Gray, please do not shout “Emancipation Proclamation” at me. I understand better that you what it meant then and what it means now.

Attitudes may be changing, true, but, the fact remains that discrimination and segregation part of this nation. Tiger Woods’ victories exposed the still segregated country clubs. The military has a few African American in the top command but not in proportion to the number serving in combat or in the kitchen. When an elected official can callously publicly used racial slurs to defame the president and political opponents have depicted President Obama with racially insulting caricatures then I worry about the morale of the American African children who dream of being President the United Sates of American one day.

So while you and others are concerned about the morale of our troops I’m concerned about the morale of the single mothers who can’t properly feed and clothe their children I’m concerned about the morale of families who are losing their homes to foreclosure and the teachers who are being laid off and the low level state and federal employees who are being forced to take unpaid furloughs. I’m concerned about the morale of the students and the people who just lost their unemployment benefits while high paid law makers with health insurance go on vacation. I’m concerned about the morale of the Americans who can not afford health insurance and for American women who are denied health insurance because they have a preexisting condition called being female.

I do feel for the families with loved ones engaged in these wars. I do feel for the young men and women fighting these wars. I have friends who have children serving. I have family members serving and they do so by choice. I don’t mean to be callous it is just how I see it.
When all, not some, of America’s freedoms are fully available to me and people like me then I can share your sentiments. When people like me no longer hear buzz statement like, “You have great job experience but we can’t hire you because you are over qualified” or until banks and lending institutions no longer discriminate against people like me trying to get a home loan at a decent rate. Or predatory lending no longer disproportionately affect people like me and people who want to work can find decent paying jobs then maybe I too can share your sentiments on troop morale. Until then, I’m sorry I just can’t.

Photos, nothing but photos. But strange ones the likes of which I had never seen. Black people hanging and burning and white people laughing. I knew these were not for my young eyes but I looked at every one before I closed the box and wondered would God punish me for seeing such evil. Years later when I heard Billy Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” the pictures came to mind as a young woman said to me that she was tired of talking about race. “A lot of the things they talk about probably didn’t even happen.” Had I not seen those photos I would not have been able to say lynchings were document. Documented so that down the line no one could say it didn’t happen.

There is a lot of denial in this world, and some take it as the truth. People have been known to say things didn’t happen because they didn’t see them or they didn’t know anyone who saw the events. They deny that these moments in history occurred and when they can’t find them in source they like or a source that is popular with them the wage a campaign to stop the spreading of vicious lies to degrade the perpetrators of the crimes.

 There are those tired of talking about race, the Holocaust, slavery, the mistreatment of Native Americans and the children abused by religious leaders in several different cultures and religions. Just because you are tired of hearing about does not mean it didn’t happen. It means people are trying to remind you of these atrocities so that history won’t repeat itself. People keep letters, pictures, diaries, photos, and even momentos of the bad times to share with their progeny and those who were not there. They write songs about it, like ‘Strange Fruit” and they pass stories on by word of mouth from generation to generation. Somewhere along the way these is hope that someone documents these events and writes them down. There is a hope that someone takes a picture and spreads it across the universe. There is a need to make those in denial see the reality. Just because you and yours weren’t there doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. There were other witnesses to history.

So I found a box of photos of lynchings under my parents’ bed.  For years I dreamed about them. They took root in my memory and when I drove through Smithfield, North Carolina, in 1971 they became even more realistic. Outside the town was a larger than life billboard with a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan on horseback painted on it. The sign read something to this effect: “Welcome to Smithfield, NC, Home of the Klan. Niggers, Jews and Catholics stay in your place.” This is not a direct quote from the sign but it was scary enough. The sign didn’t come down until the late 70′s but it was there. I saw it. And friends who had to travel through that area saw it every trip to and from college. There are still Klan signs around North Carolina encouraging people to join. There are photos and articles and. . . Well the whole point is things must be documented so that there is proof it happened. We must not become our past if we long for a brighter future.

The laughter was accompanied by snickers and “Boy, be quiet.”, “You don’t know anything,” and my favorite “Yea, you wish.”

The white teacher said about the noise: “Robert is right. A Negro did lay out the city of Washington, DC.”

The stunned classroom became silent as the teacher explained what their only black student was talking about. After class, my husband says several of the students came up to him and asked “Where did you learn about the capitol? I supposed it was hard for young whites in the South in the 60s to think that a young black man knew more about their nation than they did.

His reason was: “I read books other than the text books they give us. the text books don’t tell everything.”

Now had those students been gifted and as smart and wise as my husband they too would have read other books that told how in 1791 Benjamin Banneker, a black mathematician, astronomer, scientist and farmer was hired to help survey a Federal territory that turned out to be Washington, DC. Pierre L’Enfant was the designer of the capitol city but was later dismissed and took his plans with him. Banneker committed the plans to memory and thus the city was built.

There are two reasons this was not in the textbooks of the last century. One, Banneker was black and most achievements by blacks, such as the fact that at the age of 21 Banneker built the first wooden clock in America without having seen one (he borrowed a friend’s pocket watch to study the makings), were not allowed in text books. Second because of the color of his skin there were those who refused to believe that Banneker had the capacity to remember the plans. therefore little is know about this man and there is little praise for his achievement. In fact there is a L’Enfant Plaza in Washington , DC. but I know of nothing that salutes Banneker.

The point is not the lack of black history in text books it is the fact that a hand full of people have control over what is in text books and therefore what can be passed on in the classroom. But there is a way around that. There has always been. We must encourage students- and teachers- to think outside the box, i.e. the text book. Outside reading for all subjects should be required by parents who are too busy, it seems to pass along the history that they might know.

I learned most of my history from my mother and father because the books that were used even in southern catholic schools, did not have all the facts. In fact one of the only persons of color found in old history books texts was George Washington Carver. The books simply said he did things with peanuts. It was my parents, my grandparents and later outside reading that helped me learn more about his achievements in agriculture.

So while we complain that the Texas Board of Education controls what is in our text books for grade and high schools we can solve the problem of what is omitted by passing on history by word of mouth or by suggesting outside reading. A teacher can tell a kid to look something up on the Internet if he doesn’t understand or like what is said in the text. Surely that wouldn’t be cause for dismissal.

There is so much to learn out there and it is just wrong that certain groups don’t want people to know that the history of the Confederacy contained slavery or that one of the world’s greatest and also disturbed minds, Howard Hughes, invented a radical kind of bra. These and other items are left out of the text books for the United States schools.

Young people should go for the gold in learning and take it all in. Let the wasted minds be those who hide the truth. The solution to learning more is the freedom that one has to read outside the classroom be it book or online.

During the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt Attorney General Francis Biddle created a list to track down Nazi, Fascist and even Soviet controlled ‘subversive’ organizations. The original list consisted of 11 groups including the League of American Writers and the National Negro Congress.  The Attorney General’s list become known as the Biddle List. When Harry S. Truman was president he promulgated an Executive Order directing Attorney Generals to furnish the Loyalty Review Board with “the name of each foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group or combination of persons which the Attorney General, after appropriate investigation and determinations, designates as totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive. . .” (part of Executive Order 9835 from March 21,1947).

By 1948 the Biddle list had grown to  200 groups or more. These were organizations thought to threaten the freedom of American citizens by trying to shift the nation to Communism. The aforementioned writing groups probably consisted of people who wanted to create, to write. Perhaps those who lured them to the group were trying to convert them to Communism but at that time many people of color had no where to turn to discuss and practice their art. These subversive groups, not seen as subversive by a struggling actor or writer, were the only acceptance many had into the artistic world.

Some of the groups on the 1948 list do not seem that they should fall on any list such as the American Jewish Labor Council, George Washington Carver High School in New York City and the Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago.  The government feared infiltration so much that one persons association with the ‘wrong’ group caused everything he or she touched to be the wrong group.

On that 1948 list was the Committee for the Negro in the Arts. There isn’t much said about it but from different biographies it is noted that several black performers and writers joined groups affiliated with this so that they could have an association of like minded people. One actress who performed opposite the great Paul Robeson quite frequently help found a society of Negro actors. The purpose of the group was to associate with fellow actors and create more work. But the association with Robeson often got her black listed from certain projects.

In a country so phobic about being taken over by another dominant power one of the reasons so many people of color flocked to these groups was racism. Communism preached equality of the workers, I said preached not always practiced. In  any society in the world their is a hierarchy whether we want to admit it or not. But the groups that came out of the Committee for the Negro in the Arts were not political groups but groups of artists. The funding for N.I.A. dried up and four writers got together and continued to hold workshops in their apartments in Harlem. John O. Killens, John Henrick Clarke, Rosa Guy and Walter Christmas continued their writing classes and workshops and adopted a new name:  the Harlem Writers Guild. They never made the Biddle list. In fact the 1959 Biddle List was a fourth of the 1948 one.

It’s just a little piece of history but it is important to note that at one time to be an artist of color meant most of your resources were organizations that were considered subversive by the American government or against the American Dream. Then again if the American Dream was one of complete segregation anyone trying to make a change would have been considered guilty of being dis-loyal to this country.

Fortunately times have changed and most of us can still feel the power of the pen instead of the government when we create. But there will always be censors to the creative dream and process. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech, it has to do with government tolerance. It always has.

I had never sunbathed in my life or seen the need to. I was black and had been raised to walk in the sun without sunscreen, using an umbrella to shade me from the heat only on the hottest of days. But my sister freshmen and I decided that there was one way to get rid of those unwanted on our roof. I would start sunbathing with them and we would see what happened.

Less than ten minutes after I stripped to my lily white undies the crowd started to thin out. When I pulled back the platinum band of the diamond wristwatch my grandfather had given me four years earlier and said: “Oh look. I’m browner already,”  and a pale white friend said “You are so lucky” more girls left. They never returned and I never cared. I did this more for my dorm than myself, but I after doing it I understood race and color much better. I wasn’t supposed to have diamonds and I wasn’t supposed to sit in the sun.

Back then we didn’t know much about skin cancer but we knew a lot about racism. Being black was perceived as being ignorant and probably poor. Anything like jewels or a fancy car other than a Cadillac meant something most whites could not fathom: blacks could actually be equal. I often confessed to my friends both black and white that I didn’t understand how you could hate blacks but long for their skin color.  White girls hated to be pale in the summer when once their ancestors never ventured out of the shade if possible. These girls of the 70s dyed their hair very blond and wanted their skin to be very brown- as brown as mine. Perhaps they wanted to look exotic, perhaps they wanted to appear as if they had just come from some far away place on vacation instead of a classroom on the edge of Greensboro, North Carolina. They just didn’t want me to be part of the reality of the fantasy- I was born with the tan they longed for.

Over the years I have realized that I liked being in the water and the sun. People no longer look at me as an anomaly when I pile on SPF 30 to 70 and sit in the sun at the pool or on the beach for a few hours. Black people get skin cancer too and I don’t want to be one of them. What I want is an explanation of why it is good to be ‘colored’ three months out the year or if you vacation in the winter. Why is the color of your summer skin more important than the colors you fight against including in the melting pot of your nation?

Often I see women and men who have turned to leather from too much tanning. They have aged improperly but think they have captured youth with their darkened skin. Still they want to know why I am on the beach reading and not under an umbrella and why I would want to get a tan. A woman actually asked me once “Don’t you think you’re dark enough?” What a question to ask ME while she was trying to get four shades darker. My reply was a curt: “Do you think you area white enough?” And I continued to read my book but in great anger.

While it is stupid to sit in the sun and weather your skin for cosmetic reasons it is even dumber to decide that your desire to add color to your skin still makes and keeps you better than those born with the brown you want. You know the darkness will fade away as the fall turns into winter. You also know that people like me trying to get their golden summer hue on top of their already permanent tan will never be able to get back to basic white.

For the most part I have stopped sitting in the sun on the beaches without umbrellas. I get darker in the sun when I walk down the street so I wear sunscreen everyday- as we are now learning everyone should. Up on that roof in 1970 we used baby oil to cook ourselves darker. My friends got brown and I turned brownie chocolate brown. I haven’t heard from those women in years but I wonder how many of them have had bouts with skin cancer. Each sunny day I see people on the grass in the parks, their faces turned to the sun and I wonder when they get up to go home will their racial feelings change with their color.

What’s a good experiment for that?

The best sweet potato pie I ever ate came from my mother’s kitchen.  Whenever there was a church function or school fair they asked her to bake some. Although I am a lover of all things chocolate I have a deep appreciation for the sweet potato. and what it meant to black southern belles. We had to learn to make pies and candied yams in order to attract the palates of future husbands. Sure making cookies and being able to fry chicken was nice. But a sweet potato pie was the way to a man’s heart.

My first effort at making one on my own was not what I expected. Two friends of the family my father and mother’s age were at the house when the pie came out of the oven. One of them said: “Smells like potato pie.” I remember the phrasing exactly because we only made pies from sweet potatoes. White potatoes were a source for something mashed, fried or the favorite summer dish potato salad that really isn’t a salad but a carb fest. Mama told them it was my first time making one and they asked could they sample it. I was too nervous to cut it so Mama served it to them with a glass of cold water. At the end of the tasting, and they ate every drop, they told me that I had not yet learned the balance of cinnamon and nutmeg although the pie was firm enough and fairly sweet. “Could use a taste more sugar” one of them said.

I could not believe the insult! Why did they get to judge my cooking? My mother explained it all as something very important to the black southern culture- the ability of any man to criticize any woman’s cooking and get away with it. Of course these days I would tell the guy to go bake one himself and he probably would. But back in the day when I was learning to cook it was usually a man’s palate that I was forced to please.

Real southerners with a taste for sweet potatoes will eat them baked, straight from the fire. I remember reading books where slaves escaped and lived for days on sweet potatoes they dug up. The fleshy orange potato  with the sweet texture grows in the United States about 150 days a year. It was such a sustenance for black people that they invented all sorts of dishes for it. From pies, to custards, to souffles to candied yams. Now yams grow in Caribbean countries 360 days a year. But candied yams are usually made from sweet potatoes. Well, at least they were in my house. Yams are a tuber while sweet potatoes are a root. Sweet potatoes are, well, sweeter.

My husband is from the deep south and loves sweet potatoes. When we moved north we tended to have sweet potato dishes only in the winter when the house was warm and the hint of cinnamon and nutmeg could fill the air. When he started his own business  dealing with foreign countries into the wee hours of the morning, he started throwing sweet potatoes in the oven for a snack. A healthy one I might add. I would be awaken at 3am dreaming of turkey and dressing (we don’t call it stuffing in the south) and memories of growing up in a world of fresh foods and flavorful smells. It took a while to get used to his desire for sweet potatoes but they reminded him of home and often called me to make a pie. These days I have gotten the formula correct.

Last night for the first time in many years I ate a sweet potato the way one eats a baked potato. Like I said I love chocolate and try to force all my dessert calories there. But the taste reminded me of days when chocolate for for special occasions and sweet potatoes were a staple on our table. Things have switched around in this modern age and I tend to have a little chocolate each day while sweet potatoes pop up every now and then. Perhaps it is the fact that I can travel the world and learn about different foods that I don’t spend more time with the recipes of my youth. I had my first bagel at 18, my first croissant at 20. The south I grew up in was limited to their own cuisine because we ate what grew there. Imported was not just from another country but from the north. We ate peaches all the time, collard greens, turnips and cabbage, black eyed peas because we didn’t grow black beans. And sweet potatoes.

They still hold a special place in my olfactory memory. It’s like being at home in Atlanta again every time I smell them. And when I taste them I wonder, fresh or as something else, is it sweet enough for the old men who felt they had the right to judge my cooking?

I didn’t start out wanting to write a novel. I was living outside Washington, DC at the time and was not getting into acting as much as I wanted so I decided to write a play about what happened those many years ago. At the time I was doing a lot of reading and research on African American History and learned the many  slaves had a way of gossiping by singing about what a person had done. Instead of spreading the word through the grapevine they literally put it on the banjo. Remember David Allen Grier on ‘In Living Color” many years back? He had a character that would talk about everything and everyone with his banjo or guitar. He would start each number by saying: “Wrote a song about it. Here’s how it goes.” Kind of the same principal.

So I entitled my play “Put Her on The Banjo”. It was about a young woman who tries to convince her father to save a convicted black man from execution by forcing a rich white woman who was with him at the time getting religious counseling to testify on his behalf. The white woman, of course, cannot do this not only because of her position but because she is a little crazy and no one would believe her.

It was a really awful play but I entered it into a contest anyway. My rejection letter came back faster than I sent it out. Decding writing drama was not my forte, for years I left it alone.

Then while visiting my father some time later I asked about the trial and he informed me that I had been mistaken all these years. There were two trials. One when I was an infant in the early 50s when the anti-lynching laws had just come into play. Historically black men accused of even looking at a white woman were usually hauled off in the middle of the night and executed by lynching. Their bodies beaten, hung and then torched. Sometimes their families along with them. I knew this part of American History because at the age of 8, while looking for my Christmas presents, I came across a box with photos of lynchings that had been sent to my father over the years. I am surprised that I didn’t throw up on the floor of my parents bedroom. Somehow I looked at every one and the knowledge of how black people could be killed without a thought stayed with me for many years.

In the first trial my father explained that the man accused of raping the white woman got off. I don’t remember how but it was considered an embarrassment for the white community and a failure for the District Attorney. The second trial took place years later and many believe that the man who was  executed was convicted because the first one wasn’t. Things were not done completely legal of course and there was no way to save him. My father loaned me his scrapbooks of the last trial since I wanted to write about it. For months I studied them and made notes. Often I asked him questions. Then I started writing a novel called “Sweet Auburn Avenue”, the name of the street where my father worked at the Atlanta Daily World. The name of the street that has a great deal of black Atlanta history including Dr. King’s Ebeneezer Baptist Church.

It was a time of high gentrification in Atlanta and everything was Sweet Auburn. When I told my father my title he balked saying, “Use something else.” Of course I was stubborn and angry. How dare he tell me I couldn’t call my novel what I wanted? I had come up with an double-spaced 800 page novel that had a lot of history and a need of serious editing. But of course I didn’t think it needed a name change. When I went down home for a visit I saw what he was talking about and decided to take the focus of the novel off of the well known street and put it on one of the characters. I didn’t know which one, the father who was a journalist or the daughter who wanted to be like him. I put it aside for a while.

I  had decided to rework the novel and make my main character a 14 year old girl who quotes poetry. Then I read a poem in “The Book of American Negro Poetry”. The original copyright was 1922 by James Weldon Johnson who wrote The Negro National Anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” I had read some of the poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. These poems my father had committed to memory for his first love of writing was poetry. He and my mother actually met in a poetry club. The book was my resource for all my forgotten poetry.

Then one day I found the most interesting poem by a writer I had never heard of. Leslie Pinkney Hill wrote “So Quietly” based on the lynching of a Negro man in Smithville, Ga in 1919. He found the information in a news item in The New York Times. The last line was “Stern truth will never write, “By hands unknown.”

I had an idea for a title and an idea to make a point about African American history that goes untold.  In studying the anti-lynching laws and what they meant to fearful black people nation wide I realized that a trial by jury, even when not a jury of one’s peers, would mean a conviction leading to a death under the law. It would be the beginning of an era of “No Death by Unknown Hands.” Thus the story evolved.

Tim Roux is publishing it on Night Reading. It is no longer an 800 page manuscript but a well edited well cut down story that I have to say I enjoyed re-writing. I have kept several things in it that originated in the poorly written play including the journalist father coming in drunk after the execution. But this time the daughter who wants to be a journalist is 14 and on the verge of becoming a woman. She is not hiding in her bunk bed crying and wondering why daddy is acting that way. Willie Jenkins forces herself into the world of adults to see what she can do to help.

When I read it now I understand why it took so many years to get it together. A few years before my father died I asked him about the execution and he told me another thing he had never volunteered (but then again I never asked). He never saw the execution. Because of his skin color and his reputation as a writer the white cops and jailers refused to let him view the execution. It changed the ending of my novel a great deal. It also made me realize that there are many people of all ethnicities that have history to tell but are never asked about it. All my father’s articles and scrapbooks never accounted for this one human element- how he actually felt during the time and what he did to survive when the whites were closely watching him- and our family- as he tried to save a man from legal lynching.

This novel is a tribute to all those who have stories to tell but never get heard. This book is for those who prayed for “No Death by Unknown Hands.”

It happens more frequently than one thinks. And it happens so quickly you might not know it. While dressed in a suit I went into a famous store in this city and looked around for a present for my mother. It was a work day  and I had just come from a meeting so sales people were falling all over themselves to help me. That weekend I returned the store was not crowded with shoppers and I was dressed in a leather jacket and some jeans. No one came to wait on me and one salesperson actually looked me up and down like I was a beggar when I asked for some assistance. The other women were dressed like me, casually in jeans and slacks but they were all white. I even had on boots, no sneakers. But I was not a person that was expected to buy. At over 50 I was profiled because of my color. Even when others didn’t buy they had help while the only person watching me was the security guard at the door. I made sure to purchase what I wanted but I found that manager to help me. Thus the commission for what I was getting went to none of the idiotic sales people. When she asked who helped me I replied: “No one.” She turned bright red at the prospect of the store losing a sale because of race. Maybe she should have taught her staff that all money in this country is the same color.

While many people complain about the law that Arizona is trying to enforce they don’t take into consideration the laws the state is breaking. If I am not under suspicion of doing anything other than walking while being Latino why should you treat me with disdain? How does an immigrant look, really? Because this is not targeting immigrants from Poland, or France or Italy, or even Africa. What ever happened to being treated as equal? We know it is still a myth, yet there are those of us who would die to see it become true.

My husband and I were given an option once of a discounted weekend at a resort at the Jersey Shore if we listened to a sales pitch. We booked the rooms well in advance and paid the small fee. On the day of arrival we were sent to an older part of the resort in a building that looked like it was on its last leg. Our suite of promise was to have two bedrooms and a kitchen. The room they were trying to force us in was not big enough for two and they had added fold out beds. The woman at the desk just knew because we were black that we were going to use every profane statement we could think of to get what we thought was ours. Even after showing the receipt for the room with all the amenities they still didn’t understand why I thought I should get this exclusive room. Quietly I told them: “Why can’t I get what I was promised?”

I said no more. I sat in the chair at the reception desk while they apologized and got us the room we were promised. I could tell they had profiled us and were sure sure that they would be able to remove us because of our behavior. But their own ability to see that just thinking a person is going to act one way ended up making it clear that maybe not every person of color is going to be angry. Just like not every white person is going to be right or rich.

Somebody is always watching us no matter what we do. They are waiting for us to make a move classic to the profile their minds have established. To step out of that mindset is a daring feat in a world ripe with prejudice. Say a friend is from a certain country and you will get a response like “Well, I hope he’s not a terrorist.” Tell an acquaintance that someone white moved into your Harlem neighborhood and watch them snap with disgust at how the white people are always trying to take over. Say your neighbor is Mexican and they may call them drunks or wife beaters. We watch and we profile. The bottom line is we shouldn’t.

If you are profiled for any reason you should report it. Too many people sit back and take it and grow weary hoping someone else will take up the cause for them. It is up to every individual to fight for what they think is right and to stop the madness of profiling. You have to show the world what you are made of because it probably won’t ask you.

It is not lewd behavior. It is the dance of the tribe of the young these days. But in looking back at the history of racism dances that require women and often men to move to something other than a waltz have been looked upon as nasty. While Dick Clark was trying to integrate American Bandstand whites in the North and South were calling the dancing that young ‘colored’ people did disgusting. In fact, they said it was jungle dancing to jungle music and was uncultured. Of course that is not altogether true or false. It was not part of the white culture but it was part of the black culture. It was part of a history that many wanted suppressed.

Saying that this dance is partly seductive is also not wrong. All dance has a bit of seduction in it otherwise who would want to watch or participate. I have been to a few Carribbean countries where young children mimic their parents in dances move provocative than this. They move their bodies in such fashion as to embarrass those with overzealous Puritanical backgrounds. But they are doing the movements of their ancestors. That so called jungle dancing is a pure part of African culture. Bodies move to tell stories that words cannot. And for slaves that only had the drums for a while this was a way to carry on their history, to pass it down from generation to generation. from body to body. There were dances to lure mates and dances to celebrate the harvest. There are and were dances for everything. I am not saying that Beyonce’s popular song or video will be around in the next thousand years or so. I am saying that the dance is nasty only when we think of what we know now in this century.

In the United States we now have Amber Alerts when children go missing. We also have sexual predators that use the Internet to get what they want or to look at the pictures that they want to satisfy some awful behavior that people didn’t talk about hundreds of years ago. We can post pictures of these perverts on websites and send out pictures of them to the neighborhood. they can even be found guilty of their crimes against children. Years ago women wouldn’t report rapes for fear of how others would act around them. Children assaulted by priests sent to care for them did not start protesting until recently. Modern conveniences have made it easier to be a predator and to be captured. That does not mean that children should stop dancing because someone might, MIGHT, look at their picture and get the wrong idea. Ancient Romans and Greeks all got the ‘wrong’ idea. In the courts of medieval Italy and France they got the wrong ideas. Children were mistreated and often died of their injuries.

That does not mean their singing or dancing or being painted in gold as one little boy had done in the court of the Medicis (he died from the paint seeping into his skin) should be stopped. They are not the crazy ones. They are the ones that need to be protected.

Protection does not come from cancelling their creativity, however. The parents of the young girls in question say they were just in a dance competition. People have complained about the skimpy costumes. Most of the other dancers probably had the same type of outfit. If we are going to stop children from these kind of events because they might became victims of sexual nutcases we need to stop children’s beauty contests, and baby contests. We need to take commercials with children off the air, we don’t need to let children act at all. In fact the only way to protect them against everything in the world is not to have them. And we know that doesn’t work.

No I wouldn’t want my four year old granddaughter dancing to Beyonce’s song. She is not a very goo dancer yet. But if she was in a group I would hope her parents would tailor the costumes to be more childlike and to let her have fun instead of making her think she had to win all the time. But the predators don’t need that video or that song to do their damage. Some of the creeps just stand at a bus stop and smell the essence of a child before getting their jollies. We can’t stop them with hiding a few things that children enjoy for the pleasure or the history or the culture of it like dancing.

Remember this song lyric from “Oklahoma”: “Everything’s up to date in Kansas City. They’ve gone about as fer as they can go.” Well, we really haven’t. More and more technical stuff comes to light each day. The problem is the more we create in this world the more we know and learn about the strange behavior of others. and the more frightened we become.

So many things have played into this controversy that it will be talked about for a while. All I have to say is let the children dance but watch those watching them. That’s all we can do.

The first song I ever sang for an audtion was ‘Stormy Weather”. I heard Lena Horne sing it in a movie and tried to immitate her in every way possible. Those were the days of high glamour even for a singer who was the first black performer to be signed to a long term contract by a major movie studio. There was this way of standing and this way of looking up with longing and determination in your eyes that came with admiring Ms. Horne. Of course there was the elegance of the right make-up and the right gown. Years later when Motown shot its female groups to stardom they too were icons of elegance in their gowns and dresses, their hair coiffed just right. It was not so much an imitation of being white as it was a way to say that black women can be elegant and beautiful. Beauty isn’t always about the color of one’s skin.

But for performers like Lena Horne it was always about skin color. The studios wanted her to be whiter or to look like a Latina and she didn’t go along with either one. She had a show on Broadway about her life with lots of backup dancers, none of them as beautiful as she was. One of the things I remember about the show was her talking about all the Hollywood studio heads. She called them “mo-gulls” instead of moguls. While all the blogs and papers are reporting that Max Factor made a makeup called “Egyptian” for Ms. Horne to hear her tell it on Broadway was a bit different. She thought she was up for the part of Julie, a Mulatto kicked out of the show and off the boat in Jerome Kern’s “Showboat.” Turns out Max Factor just wanted to copy her skin color so they could darken up Ava Gardner who ended up getting the role. Gardner couldn’t even sing, and Horne was no longer under contract to that studio. In her show she called it “Light Egyptian” and I remembered it from my college theatre days as the only theatre makeup for blacks. Too light for me but all we had when I played a French flower girl my freshman year in “Madwoman of Chaillot”. I looked so pale Kaye went back to our room and got some of her foundation and came to fix me up at intermission. I returned to the stage looking like I had been on the Riviera and had gotten a tan but I was the right color.

Years later I thought about Lena Horne as I got ready to perform a Cabaret act.  My partner, my voice teacher Jack Waddell, was a few years older and a beleiver of dressing to impress. When we walked onstage dressed to the nines- he in a tux, me in a form fitting gown- we got raves from the audience made up of many different age groups. They were not cheering our voices yet but admiring the old school elegance of performers before it became fashionable to have pants hanging below the butt, corsets on top of one’s clothes and dresses so short nothing was left to the imagination. We did not long to live in the day when your skin color made you enter through the back or be unable to dine in the places you performed. Looking good  was just one of those things that helped you feel you were living out the dream.

There will always be the Lena Horne smile. The last time I saw a photo of her she still had it. One of those smiles that shows you nothing can get you down. I want to go out with that same look and I probably will since my mom has it and I am a copy of her. At 86 her smile still lights up a room. She was never an entertainer but she did admire Lena Horne. I guess all the great beauties have to stick together, right mom?

Then there was Evelyn Cunningham who died at the age of 94 and worked for for than 20 years for The Pittsburgh Courier.

I did not know about Ms. Cunningham until I started to do research for my book. The novel was getting longer than life, and that’s fine because you can always cut things, and I didn’t want to add anything else. I wondered why my father never mentioned her to me. He told me he thought I knew about her since I always wanted to work in that field.  Perhaps it slipped his mind to mention her to me as he went through the daily grind of reporting before he became an editor. He may have thought the newspaper life was not something he wanted for his daughter. If I was going to have a job he thought it should be safe. Like teaching. He and I never agreed on that and even when I became an actor in NYU’s Creative Arts Team educational theatre program, he told people I was a teacher at the University.

That was probably the kind of obstacle Evelyn Cunningham faced as she covered school desegregation, segregation and lynchings, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. But she hung in there. In a 1998 interview with the New York Times she said each of her husbands tried to “diminish my independence and  my work.” She was married four times and had no children, like so many other women of her era who wanted to fulfill their dreams of career.

When I was in my teens I found out about a new teen magazine being started in Atlanta. They asked for reporters from all the city high schools, even the black ones, and I applied. Because my only writing samples were book reports and poems that I had written I used my father’s name when I turned in my sample. It was exciting the hear that the editors of this new periodical knew of my father’s work and thought it a brilliant idea to have the daughter of an award winning journalist carry on his legacy. Made my dad proud too although he was still pushing the be a teacher envelope.  I didn’t see the problem with wanting to be a writer for a paper and being a women, but there weren’t that many people to encourage me. By the time I started college and decided to major in journalism- sort of because I also wanted to major in art, drama and music- I was allowed to write music reviews for his paper. I was not paid but no one said I couldn’t write. Maybe because I was his daughter and maybe because I did a good job.

But like Ms. Cunningham I wanted to write. And I wanted to be appreciated for my writing. I didn’t want to do fluff or be an on the air journalist that did the weather or reported on bake sales and dog shows. I watched the young women journalists my father mentored go through these gyrations. I decided to major in drama where I knew what obstacles to face.

Today I write mostly fiction when I am not writing here. I love writing and probably would not have liked the confines given a female writer early in the 70s. The world was changing and there was a lot to fight for at that time- freedom wise. I didn’t know that there was Evelyn Cunningham doing one battle in journalism for us. There are women reporters everywhere these days and I look to them to mentor the young ladies coming along who want to write and do the hard news like Ms. Cunningham who was known as the ‘lynching editor’  because of her reporting on those activities in the South.  If I had only known about her. . .

If memory serves me correctly this was the only novel by the author Harper Lee.  It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. Over the years I have learned that the little boy who comes to visit his aunt in the novel (Dill) was based on Lee’s  friend Truman Capote. They went to school together until his family moved to New York when they were in the third grade. Capote did some edits on Lee’s book and when it became famous he resented her, never dispelling the rumors that he had contributed to the writing. They remained friends, however,  and she accompanied him when he researched “In Cold Blood.” Lee’s father was a lawyer like Atticus Finch, who unsuccessfully defended two black men for the murder of a white store owner. A lot was changing in the South when Lee wrote her novel and it had a great moral impact. However I did not read it until after I saw the movie. I lived in the changing south and most people did not want to discuss the suggestion of racial equality and tolerance that came from the novel. After reading and re-reading it I always come back to the theme of doing the right thing as Atticus Finch wanted to do.

When Harper Lee was working on her manuscript she called it “Atticus” and I would have no problem with that. When you read or watch Atticus Finch take his children through life and give them lessons that others are not getting you understand how he could be a hero to anyone. He was not just doing his job defending a black man of a crime he didn’t commit. He was doing his job as a man tired of the mistreatment of others for the sake of racial pride. Things aren’t said as in protests or sit-ins. Things are just done in the face of adversity, in the face of lynch mobs, in the face of all that was deemed only by a racist society.

Did the children learn their lesson before the black minister told Scout to “stand up, your father is passing” as Atticus Finch left the courthouse after losing the case? It is evident that things were starting to set in with them, especially Scout. When Finch set outside the jail protecting his client from a lynch mob, his children came to his defense. As children. They embarrassed the men threatening their father who had been his clients and had paid for his services with the fruits of their farm labor instead of cash. Atticus Finch had been good to them so they didn’t expect him to be good to the black people as well. The children  dangerously walking into the middle of the crown were setting a precedent for the future. Youth leading the way to civil rights. There was several young whites who worked in SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) with young blacks to attain racial freedom for all. They didn’t just learn about equality over night. Some of them lived with the likes of the quiet but wise and tolerant  Atticus Finch.

The theme song of “To Kill a Mockingbird” is very haunting and perhaps I heard it before I knew of the book or the movie. My father would get records in the mail at the newspaper where he was city editor and bring them home. In the 60′s record companies put out discs with movies them songs and I loved to listen to them. I can still hear this theme whenever I think of the book. Quiet and settled, like Atticus Finch. I think about Gregory Peck who played the part in the movie when I hear the song. I think of a quiet man standing up for what is right so that his children will carry it into the future.

So as I finish editing my novel “No Death by Unknown Hands” I think about standing up for what is right. Only in my novel the characters are dealing with the racism in the south right after the anti lynching laws. The story is told by a 14 year old girl who wants to be a journalist like her father and who can’t understand why he cannot help save a black man being falsely tried for the rape of a white woman.  Her father is a hero to her even though she knows what the outcome of the trial will be. He tries as far as his racial standing will let him to help the accused and his family but he knows things that cannot be done even as the teen goes against his wishes and his words. The hope of the race is that there are no more deaths by unknown hands, those hands that come under sheets in the night to take away innocent black people and lynch them. There is hope that  when she becomes a journalist like her father she will be able to report the truth that sets her free when in her present the truth could cause more harm than good.

Harper Lee said once: “Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they’re quite different from people who must write.” She tried to write a second novel but stopped in the 90s. Perhaps the feeling that she must write overwhelmed her. It doesn’t matter to me. She created Atticus Finch to give people lots to think and write about. Maybe she fulfilled her need.

What a lovely, personal gift, I thought. Then something else came to mind. My mother didn’t do things like this when we were little. My mother never let her star shine while my father was alive. It was the way of her generation.

At almost 85 my mother is still an artist. Or maybe I should say she has become more artistic than she ever was. My father was an award winning journalist, a published poet and a popular painter. When I was growing up my mother was my mother: an accountant, great cook and beautiful. My father got all the praises, even for his choice for a wife. More than once I heard people praise my mother’s beauty to him. No one ever said more than our house was comfortable and welcoming and the children were well mannered and lovely to my mother. I never saw any resentment in her eyes. What I did see was pride that my father was so good at what he did. This was her well known husband that people called with questions about Atlanta’s history or the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s  that I started noticing little rumbles of  something I can only describe as my mother being disgusted with the facade she had to wear for her generation. She longed for her 15 minutes and she didn’t want it to be because of my dad. She had done things herself. My generation of women did not hide behind their men, we were proud to show our own and my mother was watching.

I don’t know if she volunteered the information of if I asked but somehow I learned that my mother met my father at a poetry club in college. She didn’t stop writing, in fact she wrote a poem that was sent to Carl Sandburg who praised her for it. What she did was start promoting her husband-to-be. It was the way of her generation. Langston Hughes was coming to speak at their college and my mother sent him some of my father’s poems in advance. She didn’t tell my dad this until the day Hughes was to arrive. The great poet said, upon meeting my father, that his work was nice and that was it. My father was angry that Hughes never made an attempt to help him or anyone else at the school since someone had helped put Hughes on the poetic map. But my mother didn’t care, my father was going to be famous and she was his biggest fan.

The moment my father retired from the newspaper was the moment my mother decided to start being more creative. She had always done little things that we thought interesting around the house that made it beautiful but with dad retiring she decided that she was ready to let her star shine. She started a business where she created things like gift baskets and boxes, book marks with sayings and, believe it or not (and this was a big, big seller in the South) prayer rocks. She didn’t charge market rates and she was constantly busy, the house overflowing with things she needed to work. When my dad got sick she stopped to dedicate herself to his care full time. Then after he died she started her work again. Creating corsages out of dollars, making money trees for graduation presents, making diaper cakes for baby showers. And now my gift cards.

Had my mother lived in my generation she would have had a little storefront and a profitable online business that swept the country. Her ideas would have made it to catalogs and magazines. Imagine how much she could have made at conventions from her prayer rocks.

But that was not how life was supposed to be for her. She must have seen change coming because she made sure that each of her daughters knew how to be self sufficiant. You could marry for love and to make a good relationship but it had to be with someone who accepted that you had as much to offer as they did. My sisters and I always had jobs and always did what we wanted as far as work and career was concerned. It was the lesson we learned from my mother’s generation. A lesson called what not to do or be.

As far as I am concerned my mother is a Superwoman. She was dedicated to her husband and children but not to hold on to them. She wanted all four of us to have lives of our earn and not depend on someone else to be happy. She watched women her age suffer and waste away not knowing what to do when their man died. But she also has friends in their 80s who led full lives and are busy as ever. The one thing they got from years of waiting on and standing behind men was the strength to do a lot of things at one time. Not so much multi tasking as just being a woman.

The gift from my mother is so beautiful, but not as beautiful as all her life lessons and talent she gave me. My father did confess that my mother was quite talented when I was a little girl and snuck and showed me a poem she wrote to me before I, her first child, was born. He acted as if she would be embarrassed for me to know that she possessed such talent. But years later he had a picture of three year old me and my mom framed with the poem attached. It is in the center of the wall in the den, the most important place of honor. I think perhaps my father knew that my mother was letting him shine when she could. However I know that even with him gone from this firmament they made the brightest star in the heaven because they had each other.

That’s a lesson I loved learning.

I am not a major history buff but I know a little something about the south and its desire to always rise again. I also remember learning about the Civil War, brother against brother and the Emancipation Proclamation. Some states still fly the Confederate flag to the dismay of the descendants of slaves. It is a reminder of all our ancestors went through before they were treated like real human beings and allowed to be free. Perhaps we all should learn and know the history of the Confederacy and what led to the Civil War. But all the facts must be in place. Although the War Between the States  was fought for many different reasons part of it was fought so that the agrarian society of the south could keep its free labor. The facts behind this history should be taught to all students in the United States.

Maybe Virginia is going the same direction as Texas in deciding what should and should not be in history books. The omission of slavery cannot easily be explained when comparing Virginia’s history of the Confederacy to the history of the United States. How confused students would be to look at the Emancipation Proclamation. They would wonder what it was for since no one in Virginia ever told them about such a thing as slavery. Would they believe that all those black people working in the cotton fields and in the plantations in their history books were just cheap labor? Or would they be taught that even after years of service to a particular family of wealth, black people were so devoted they did not want to rise above their poverty and move on to a better life? Would they be taught that blacks were so inferior they had no desire to learn how to read (which was against the law), own property or keep their families together instead of having them shipped off to various plantations?

Slavery is not a nice part of United States history, but it is a part. If every state decides to delete certain parts  of history because it might be offenseive they might as well secede from the Union. But isn’t that how this got started anyway?

I do not know of a culture that doesn’t celebrate with food. Every holiday circulars from grocery stores show up with ads on what to buy. With Easter and Passover around the corner we are overwhelmed with ads for Kosher foods and hams, marshmallow bunny and chicks, and egg shaped chocolate candies. But besides the celebrations for holidays I also know that in most cultures food is used as a way to placate families in loss as well as poverty. A visit to the home of someone without a lot will be greeted by the only hospitality they know- setting the table and offering you something to eat or drink. It is the way of most of the world. But the food that is being offered is not always good for you.

As the have-nots have less they try to bring happiness with more food. Take the descendants of slaves in the United States. “Soul Food” can be considered the main cause of obesity in blacks. Food that nourishes a spirit is good, I will not deny it. Fried chicken, fried fish, pork chops, collard greens cooked in pork or even (modern recipes) turkey necks, macaroni and cheese, and buttery corn bread have gotten many a black family through hard times. Now in moderation these foods are not bad for you. But I said moderation. Sometimes many of these items are the only foods a family can relate to on a weekly basis. Soul Food brings joy to families that cannot get a new house, a new car or new wardrobes. They pride themselves on a mother’s cooking and the smells that make them smile. They also know that many of these foods were remnants of the slave owner’s table and thus considered slave food. As part of our heritage it is acceptable until it becomes something that is eaten everyday. Not only is this food high in fat but it is also high in sodium, a leading cause of hypertension in people of color.

The question arises, then, how do you change the habits of people whose only joy in life may be living to eat?

You suggest giving them a diet plan and food options to replace the popular foods they love. But there are two things to deal with on that level. One is affordability. The other is what joy will replace the joy of food?

My husband and I talked about this a lot a few days ago after he viewed a news report about a 300 pound 12 year old boy whose father let him eat what he wanted.  Dr. Sanjay Gupta then took the bou and did a body scan showing him that he had the insides of s 56 year old man. In shock the boy decided he didn’t want to be that person anymore and changed his eating habits. When they showed him a month later having lost 20 pounds and happy with what he was doing, he was sitting next to his silent father. The man seemed angry that the only joy he had ever been allowed to give his child was taken away. He had nothing else to offer, probably not even support.

At times like these families who find their overweight loved ones on diets sabotage them with kindness. I have heard “You are getting too thin” said to someone who went from 300 pounds to 250 pounds. I have seen mothers give extra cookies to the child that doesn’t want to be overweight. I have seen fathers buy chips for a child’s breakfast just after he said all he wanted was some fruit.

How do we change this way of thinking? It has been around for ages. Some people say those on Welfare and Food Stamps have the option to buy good, healthy foods with what they are given but it isn’t just about the money. It is about the culture of poverty. Giving chocolate candy is seen as more successful as giving apples or dried fruit. And until someone comes up with a way to help cultures understand that the need for the reward of food can be replaced by the reward of a hug, or a high 5 or a walk together in the park we are always going to have this problem.

Does anyone have an idea or a solution because that is what is needed to help those in poverty get past the food that brings them joy and weight.

Back in the early 1990s these competitions began to gain attention off campuses, and became large, money making sponsored events. Step has become so popular off campus that even church groups begun to formed liturgical step teams. In February of this year, Zeta Tau Alpha from the University of Arkansas, an all Caucasian sorority, entered in the Sprite Step Off National Step Competition in Atlanta and won. They won the $100,000 grand prize and Black folk are up in arms. Some say, “Oh no they didn’t”. Others say they should have never been allowed to enter the competition in the first place or they were good but, not that good (youtube has the competition online). There are those that feel that this is a “Black thang” and it is off limits to anyone else, while still others ask, “What’s the problem”?

The problem is that stepping is a cultural thing. To many, Zeta Tau Alpha entering this competition is like Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) dressing in traditional Irish garb and showing up to compete in an Irish ”step” dancing competition. There is no doubt in my mind that like the girls from Zeta Tau Alpha were, the AKAs would booed and possibly even worst.

Remember Riverdance back in the 90’s? Everyone was enthralled with the rapid high steppin rhythmic Irish dancing. Tariq Winston, a young African American tap dancer/choreographer who understudied and untimely stared in the Tap Dance Kid on Broadway back in the 80’s, developed a number with Colin Dunne called “Trading Taps” which was featured in Riverdance (you can see these performances on youtube). The difference here is that Tariq maintained his cultural “Black” tap dancing style and Colin his cultural Irish dancing style and, they didn’t compete, they didn’t compare, they complemented. They showed the similarities and the common elements in the two dance styles and it worked. It was a meeting not a melding or a take over. Their collaboration didn’t diminish either style nor did it nullify either style. What these two did was celebrate each other with respect.

So is step a cultural thing? One could question whether there should even be African American “Greek” fraternities and sororities after all, they are using Greek letters to identify themselves. Why don’t they use Swahili, Nubian or Egyptian letters? This question too has been long debated within the Black community.

Several cultures have a form of step dance but to the African American community, to the traditionally Black frats and sororities, stepping is belongs to them. It is cultural and it is a matter of pride. For others to invade this territory is tantamount to the theft of Jazz, Rock N Roll and Rap. A long held opinion has been that Europeans always taken what belongs to other cultures and clam it as their own. These art forms in music and dance are markers, they tell the story of a particular peoples struggle for their identity, acceptance, recognition and respect. These art forms (Jazz, Rap, R & B formerly Rock ‘n Roll,tap dance and step) are prized possessions that say we are creative, we are innovative, we are unique.

I understand the upset. I’m not sure I condone all the arguments. The grand prize winners in the 2010 Sprite competition may well have deserved to win. Maybe they are just that good. But sometimes we need to sit back and enjoy what someone else does. Sometimes we need to let others hold claim to what has always been theirs. We can appreciate it but we don’t need to claim it too. I like belly dancing, Irish dance and flamingo dancing but I know to whom these art forms belong. I appreciate them but I won’t claim them and I shouldn’t.

Grambling State University is know world wide because its famous marching band. Without question they reign supreme for their precision, musical talent and stimulating dance routines. The Black college/university campus marching bands are also in fierce but healthy competition and, there are some things you just don’t mess with.

Then the girls decided to kiss each other on the lips and the mothers, high heels clicking across the tiled floor of the department store, rushed to pull them apart. They did not say ‘don’t do that’. They just smiled at their little daughters and took them a safe distance from each other. Enough was said by that action in 1962 Georgia. Holding the little ones’ hands and keeping them apart they were teaching the children prejudice.

We are not born with hate. It is something that has to be taught. I think it was best put in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical set during World War II called “South Pacific”. When Nellie Forbush decides she can’t marry the Frenchman because his first wife was a native and he has two half Polynesian children she confronts the young Lieutenant who has fallen in love with the native Bloody Mary’s daughter. They are both confused as to the feelings they have but they know they can’t go back to the United States with these people of color on their arms. He sings these provocative following lines:

You’ve got to be taught

Before it’s too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people

Your parents hate,

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

While this show was on Broadway, black soldiers were coming back from serving this country and meeting prejudice in getting jobs and housing. It was never a hit song from the show like “There is Nothing like a Dame” and “Some Enchanted Evening”. Musicals were supposed to be uplifting and fun, not teach social issues so most people paid no attention to “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught”. Having decided I was going to be a musical theatre actress I knew every score of every musical that came to Broadway before I graduated high school. I was in my 30s before I listened with an open mind and open ears to the truth this song preached and I used it to explain racism to lots of adults.

Once will doing children’s theatre in a suburb north of Atlanta, Samuel L. Jackson and I were confronted with an example of this prejudice. We were doing a play with the Academy Theatre that toured schools around the city. We went out to get lunch leaving the other two actors at the school after the first of two performances. It was recess and the steps of the front of the school were crowded with children going out to the playground. We had seen two black teachers and no black students but this was nothing new in the schools where we entertained. A second grader coming down the steps smiled at us with big brown eyes and we smiled back until he said: “Hey ni*****, how y’all doing?”

It was not a racial slur to him. It was obvious that the child had been taught this is how you greet black people. He actually thought he was welcoming us to the school. He thought he was being friendly. When our smiles faded and the teacher standing near him turned beet red from the embarrassment she felt- not for us put for her school she later mentioned- he looked confused. She pulled him aside to talk to him, telling him what he said was wrong. I am sure the child went home and heard it again and decided it wasn’t wrong if mama and daddy said it. That’s what he had been taught.

It took an apology from the principal to convince us to do the show that afternoon. In a cast of four actors, 3 were black and not feeling the love that we usually got from kids getting out of science or math class for an hour. For the first time in the two months that we had been doing the show we realized that an integrated cast meant nothing to students who were being fine tuned to became a little less prejudiced than the white knights of the KKK. In the end we decided not to be prejudiced against the children of prejudiced parents. No child was going to stand up and shout the ‘n’ word and tell us to get out. Perhaps our working with them and our clarity on the issues we were presenting would let them see a different way to relate to people.

Everyone passes their prejudices on to their children. It shouldn’t happen. Once we become adults it is up to us to step back and recognize that we don’t necessarily have our parents’ same hatreds and fears. If I felt that way then I could never be friends with any white person because of the history of slavery or any German person because of my father’s service in the war. The list of hate is something that does not move forward. It is taken from the past. We examine everyday why we want something, why we like something. We need to start examining why we hate things. Is it justified just because it was a learned behavior or did something trigger the loathing we feel? We have to stop teaching our children to hate and we’ve got to teach ourselves to hate because it is policy, because it is normal and because our parents did. It is a continuing cycle that holds whole nations back. We’ve got to be taught to deal with everyone. That’s we need to be carefully taught.

Most African Americans my age (late 50s) had to struggle to discover the history of their own families. Many of us could only trace our families back as far as the grandparents we could see. Sometimes, because of lack of jobs in this country for free black men, that meant we had no idea of our paternal ancestors. Jobs were offered to black women while black men got kicked to the curb, sometimes literally. Women were often in charge of a family by the force of a careless and unfeeling white society. Where slave families had been sold off to various plantations in the past, free black men we treated with disdain and often left in sadness and embarrassment the families they could not support.

Nobody wanted to talk about this ‘past’ when I was little. No one wanted to talk about the other side of the equation either, that is the white forefathers who raped the helpless slave women and sired children that were damned by two races. They were not the right color to be white and were taught they were too good to be black. To make life easier for themselves and their progeny some ‘passed’ for white but down the line the legal system said they were Negroes even if they had as little as 1/32 black blood in them. It was a no win situation for any person of color.

Once we escaped the abomination of slavery we chained ourselves against a brutal ancestry. The education system taught pride in country as well as pride in only one race- the white one. The textbooks slipped in small bits of history such as George Washington Carver and at times Harriet Tubman. It was a fight to get out of the negative image being Negroid created. We were taught there were certain jobs we would never have, certain goals we would never achieve. Strong black bodies were good for hard labor and sports. Those that tried to succeed otherwise had uphill battles that included racism, sexism and a deep feeling that whites were privileged and who was this Negro who thought he had any rights in this country. The song “We Shall Overcome” was not just about overcoming the barriers of being a color that would never totally melt into the pot, it was about overcoming the doubt that we were as good as the rest of the world.

We had faith. Faith in ourselves and faith in a God forced on us from the moment we stepped off the slave ship. The bible played an important part in our recovery from self hate. However back in the day we never though to compare our journey in slavery to the one that was part of the history of the Jews. We had no Moses although we had those fighting for our rights. They could lead us out of slavery but they could not lead us to freedom. I remember hearing Nina Simone singing “I wish I knew how it would feel to be Free.” The next line was most important to the change that was about to come. It went “I wish I could break all the chains holding me.” 

Slavery to so many things was our problem. We wanted equality but it was something hard to achieve when you didn’t know your history and were told no matter what that history was it was going to be bad. We sang, we worked and we prayed. We began to overcome.

You didn’t want to be called ‘black’ because black is associated with the Devil, with evil, with all things bad. Colored and Negro were slave determinations. So we went to the darkest shade of our rainbow of colors to work on our freedom. Some of my elders feared being called black more than the N word, which still brings anger into the community. Then James Brown gave us a mantra: “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.” We started looking at ourselves in a different way. We weren’t just descendants of slaves, we were powerful important human beings who had built a country and fought in its wars. We started looking back to see who had created us and found ancestors to love and hate, in both races. Most whites have only one race they can call their own, but most black people in this country can go back through generations to show they are black and white. Why should the government census restrict you to one race? Every African American I know is multi racial. They have the blood of many ancestors running through their veins. Of course there are those that say pure blood is better so that they can make those of mixed heritage feel inferior. But when we learned to say we were black and proud we had to learn to say we were proud of our mixed heritage and those of that pure black were lacking in the spirit of this country. The freedom to be all people.

I am the descendant of a Negro blacksmith, a black train conductor, a white man who signed the Declaration of Independence, a woman of color who created and sold hand made flowers back in the 30s, a dark skinned female minister who traveled the dust bowl, a Trinidadian musician who traveled the world, a Blackfoot woman who was raped by a redneck Alabama farmer, and most recently an accountant/poet/craftswoman and journalist/writer/artist. I am African American. I did not melt into the pot. The pot melted in me.

And of that I am proud

After the election the President would have to have increased protection because a lot of the country would simply not accept a black man as President. The election might be contested or they might even say he wasn’t a citizen and not eligible to be President. Gun sales would skyrocket in the South and the threat level against him would probably go up four hundred percent. A whole new campaign would immediately be launched to slowly destroy his credibility. Far right commentators would make it their job to bring him down. In effect, the election campaign against him would continue.

Now the African American President would have to come in on a progressive agenda. So his mandate would be massive change. Let’s even give him a majority in Congress. Undoubtedly the first black President would be a Democrat. Now even if the Democrats hold a majority a caucus of Republicans would form up against him and threaten to filibuster his agenda. There would be a movement by the opposition to destroy him by thwarting every attempt to bring change. A sort of party of NO might form up led by Southern Republicans. In effect their goal would be to neutralize the President and make him a one termer.

Large segments of the American population would not accept him as President and a grass roots party might form up against the government. This might resemble the sort of thing we saw in the South in the sixties during integration. This party would undoubtedly be white based, anti-government, anti urban, anti cultural elite, ultra right, super nationalistic. Demonstrations in Washington might occur with an ugly racial undertone that would call for radical change maybe even revolution. It would be a party composed of people from rural America, disgruntled Americans, Independents disappointed in the Presidents ability to bring any change, and would attempt to sweep into power on a take our government back platform. Obviously they would be taking it back from the African Americans.

Gridlock would occur in government with the Republicans blocking legislation and literally nothing would be accomplished. The President would lose support from the people who elected him with the constant smear campaign and with sinking poll numbers he would lose his mandate to govern. The government would be held hostage by the new far right splinter group (with some crazy name hearkening back to revolution era patriots)threatening to unseat Republicans who work with the President. The Republicans and the splinter group would eventually join forces and take advantage of a populist surge to get rid of the President and his party. The majority in congress would be lost in midterm elections because nothing is being accomplished and essentially the African American President would be a lame duck waiting for slaughter in the next election.

This obviously isn’t going to happen or a long time in this country. But you never know, maybe one day.

William Hazelgrove writes in Ernest Hemingway’s attic. His latest book is Rocket Man

They claimed the children were orphans, but they had no documentation stating that. When the children were taken from these people some of them said they had parents, one girl even said she thought her mother had arranged a vacation for her and that’s why she went. They claim the children were brought to them by a local minister. She supposed that they would be adopted in the States. Those found with the children claimed they were going to raise them as their own in some area in the Dominican Republic. Whether their intentions were noble or not Haiti stepped up to the plate and arrested them for what the fragile government expected to happen all along: the trafficking and selling of children.

Even before this incident the news media posted stories of children rescued from slavery in Haiti. They have missing parents, no one to look after them so when an offer of kindness comes from one of the strangers who claims he or she is there to help they accept. Within hours of being fed and bathed some of these children were taken to places to work as maids and laborers. Sixty four were rescued last week. How many will never be rescued?

This happens all over the world whenever there is a disaster. People sell people to make money. They do not care about the aftermath, whether they become sex slaves, soldiers or workers. It is all about money. Those still working to bring Haiti back to its feet, even though it was always an unsteady place, are sending a message to the world. Our children are ours and they stay or go with our permission. The government has not dissolved into the kind of anarchy that allows people to turn their heads when wrong is done. Haiti may be asking for help but it is showing a strength that is unexpected by some. The nation that has had more trouble than most can build on the future. They will not allow the world to feed on its young.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. What gives someone the right to decide they are smarter than an entire nation that has survived all these years without them? Although I am sure there are some good ones I have never been a big fan of missionaries. They come to save your soul, to save you from your sinful ways. They trade God for food and shelter, promising those starving redemption if they give up the life they have known and follow their teachings. In some places they build schools and give the students uniforms to wear instead of rags. They serve them hot meals, lessons in cultures other than theirs and they force feed them a god not of their fathers. Starving people will accept any teaching to fill their bellies. Many believe that those in Haiti accepted the devil.

But starving or not the country of Haiti will not stand for the kidnapping of children. Some say they should be grateful that these Americans, these wonderful kind Americans, were going to take these children off of their hands. Did the wonderful kind Americans think just because they came from a country that seems to have anything they could invade a country that had little? What was wrong with following the proper channels, getting the right permissions? Claiming you have permission from God to do his work can get you killed or jailed in any country in the world. Your god may not be their god. And in someone else’s land, his god is king.

I am sure some great religious group will weigh in on those 10 Baptists in jail in Haiti and try to force their freedom before a trial. I am sure some will say that the children were considered fair game because they are black. And I am certain that there are missionaries right now who will not go to Haiti because they can’t force their ideas down the throat of a very strong and powerful people. Powerful enough to stand ravages of time and Mother Nature. Haiti has been threw a great deal and seems to suffer over and over for freeing herself from the tyranny of the French before being completely colonized. But they are right to pull the jackets of any country or individual that wants to force them to turn their head to the slavery of their people. Unfortunately they will never be able to find all the stolen children but it is good that they are looking. It is good that they care. It is good that they will not let their children be taken by disciples of gods or devils. Those children lost will probably stand the test of time. After all they are Haitian.

Against the background of incarceration and hierarchical prison ethics, he paints a picture of a country still at war with a major portion of its citizens. The conflict with Biafra is a constant strand running through the novel and displays the underlying tribal nature of the Dark Continent, showing, with subtle insights, why prejudice is both harmful and pointless, wherever it may manifest itself.

Kachi paints his characters as real people undergoing real events. The details of daily life, education and the prison system in Nigeria suggest he has experienced all three; if not, his research methods are extraordinary. He also raises questions about the nature and value of religious faith, perhaps hinting that it is of greater value to the desperate and ignorant than to the hopeful and educated.

The love story that develops along the way will satisfy romantics without antagonising pragmatists who read this very well written novel. And the themes of the true value of friendship and loyalty are carried well by the developing relationship between Zuba and Ike as they battle their way through the maze of contradictory evidence responsible for their incarceration.

The dreadful Mr and Mrs Egbetuyi wreak vengeance for a situation entirely of their own making, blaming Zuba and refusing to accept any responsibility for the circumstances in which they have placed themselves. Their utter selfishness and lack of concern for the ruination they visit on an honest man is a potent statement on the modern trend in which winning at all costs is becoming an acceptable aim. This is a novel I happily recommend.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shadow-Smile-Kachi-Ozumba/dp/1846880890/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265053932&sr=1-1

I am not going to list the contributions Black people have made to the world and to society. That’s part of the problem. I shouldn’t have to tell anyone anything anymore about Black History. I don’t say that just because we have an Afro American President or because we have a holiday for an Afro American hero. I say that because of what I see every day on the trains, buses and streets. I see people who don’t know about my history. They don’t know about their own history most of the time but it is exposed more often than mine. 

When I  worked with white students in the past they would ask what was the importance of pushing to have black history. When I told them to find something in their text books, their English books, their science books they always pointed out the same things: Martin Luther King, Jr, and George Washington Carver. They could find no black writers of importance in their English texts. Asking them and several black students outside of the books who was Toni Morrison, Alexander Dumas and Langston Hughes they drew a blank. When I asked them had they ever heard of Dr. Charles Drew they asked was he a rapper. I decided not to be insulted by their ignorance. Movie stars and celebrities of color everyone knows. They don’t know the people that made history.

Even I didn’t know a lot of black history until I was an adult and researched events and got information from other children of color seeking answers. Why should we have to dig through history when it should be available alongside other history? We were taught about the slave rebellion in ancient Rome that ended with the deaths of thousand of slaves but we are not taught about the successful slave revolt in Haiti. True, the Internet has a lot for the asking but you have to know what questions to ask.  You have to want to know more about history than current events and ancient text books.

Maybe the questions should not be asked by those who don’t know these things but by those who know the history.  When you stop for a red light you could ask your passengers:  “Did you know the traffic signal was invented by a black man?” Or if you are giving blood you could ask the perky volunteer does she know that the first director of the American Red Cross blood bank was a black man. And it would be great if while shopping for furniture your alerted the salesperson to the fact that the first black woman to ever be issued a patent got it for a folding cabinet bed or the predecessor to the sofa bed. These bits of history have nothing to do with being part of the Talented Tenth (look it up). All of us have a responsibility to pass on the knowledge with have to others.

Until more people feel comfortable sharing and teaching history like this we are going to need Black History Month to focus on getting the info out there. If we are not careful in 20 years there will be people who will not be able to name the first black president of the United States.

Dark skin is still a reminder of a slave past and of African ancestry. While Black is beautiful it is still in question in the eyes of most whites. Assimilation is not just a matter of education and dialect. When it comes to jobs it is still a matter of the color of one’s skin. This is unfortunate in a country that prides itself on being open to all. Prejudice comes in many forms but when you are black you cannot melt into the pot that is America. You can change the dye pool by integrating the situation but even with interracial marriages on the rise many people in the country are not ready for that.

I always taught my children to be proud of their beautiful skin color. When a friend of mine asked my youngest daughter to be in a national story on crafts with pictures 16 years ago I was glad. I was hoping that this would be a mixture of children of the black race of all colors. During my childhood my skin color was too dark to be considered pretty and I was told this by a few adults outside my family. Inside the community that was home and extended family I was considered a chocolate drop and taught that was a good thing. I wanted better treatment in the world for my daughter who is a few shades darker than me.

They took lots of photos of my dimpled child and she happily brought home a few copies. A month later we went to the newsstand eager to get a copy of the magazine. Sadly I discovered that with the exception of her hands she had been removed completely from the layout. The other children, all light skin blacks, Latinos and white had their faces prominently featured. My beautiful daughter ended up on the cutting floor.

I tried to hide the magazine story from her but she saw it and immediately cried: “I was too ugly for them to put me in the magazine, mama?” I was more heartbroken that she was as I tried to comfort her and tell her she was not. How do you explain that beauty is not just in the eyes of the beholder but in the color the beholder calls beautiful to a six year old who has been passed over because she was born the color of rich chocolate and not the color of butternut squash? The years that it took to teach her that she was beautiful were undone in one day by media that caters to the belief that lighter is better.

While on vacation once in a Caribbean country I noticed that all of the front desk jobs were held by light skinned blacks and jobs such as cooks, porters and maids by those with darker skin. Shop girls were light skinned as well as waiters in the better restaurants. It was not done because these people of a lighter brown hue were more qualified. It was done so as not to offend the tourists who still voice prejudice when it comes to those that serve them. This statement came from a friend of Caribbean descent who came to this country to get a job she was ‘not qualified’ for in her own country because of her color.

In this country looks are important in more ways than color but often color weighs in. Take some of the black family shows of the last decade. The children were often lighter than the parents, who were by the time they got the gig famous actors. In fact one show changed one of the daughters during the first season from a dark skinned girl with thick kinky hair to a light skinned girl with long wavy hair. And there are the commercials where all the little black girls look like the products of integrated marriages with their light skin and curly locks. Most little African American girls look more like the Obama children, not dolls with light brown skin painted over white features.

Republicans are making a noise about Reid’s statement because they believe Democrats are creating a double standard for talking about race within their party. Reid’s statement doesn’t mean he is any more racist than the next senator. It means he is more racially aware of the prejudices of this country. And while those prejudices are still unacceptable the words are true and the truth hurts. Would it have meant something different had a Republican made the statement? Maybe to the media in this country since they are the ones that usually keep the furors afloat. But to the African Americans who know what it means to deal with skin color it would be just another statement about race that wasn’t really about race. It would be about politics. And, unfortunately because it is something we need to discuss in this nation, not the politics of race.

My observation is not meant to be racist. It is just an observation from someone who has lived in Harlem for over 25 years and has seen the changes brought on by integration and gentrification. Ten or more years ago several young women of color, mostly African- American, were found raped and dead in Harlem. To use a familiar southern colloquialism that shows how word of mouth travels, I heard it through the grapevine, not the Times, Post or Daily News. Perhaps it was because these young women all had a history of drug abuse that their rapes and deaths were swept under a rug and never publicized. Perhaps because they were not considered women to be raped but rather women that sold their services to anyone who could lure them with a crack pipe or the money to fill one that no one of importance cared about them. They were drug addicted whores who ended up dead. End of story for the police but not for those in the community who feared for the women who lived there. Rape victims turned to their families who often carried out punishment on the alleged rapists with the aid of angry and often violent friends. The police didn’t care about that either. It was just more ‘black on black’ crime.

So here’s a thought: had the police ever shown true interest in the attacks on women of color in Harlem would there be a need for vigilantes in the hood? For years some assigned to Harlem police houses spent their time collecting ‘protection money’ from local establishments or assisting in lucrative drug operations. Yes, I heard this through the grapevine and on occasion I saw it too. When the population started to change color the police started to change their attitudes. It wasn’t that African and Latino Americans had never protested the way they were treated before, there was lots of that. It was the fact that people with connections to more money and more political attachments were demanding better treatment and services when they moved to Harlem. For years I suggested that my local store carry something other then iceberg lettuce which has no nutritional value. I was not alone in making the request but the owners never brought in anything else. As the population of whites grew the selection of leafy green vegetables grew as well. Five years ago the head of the chain of stores that popped up in Harlem had no idea what arugula was. Now they carry two types. When I asked him why they have it now, he told me people asked for it. When I reminded him I asked for it long ago he turned red and changed the subject.

 These observations about what is happening in Harlem has nothing to do with the fact that I think all areas should be integrated. Our neighbor is racially and economically mixed as I believe it should be. We even have a homeless shelter on the block which we all supported this past holiday by giving coats and toys to the residents. It was a mixture of races and cultures that did this, not some whites or blacks or Latinos but a group of people working together for the betterment of the area.

However the rapes are no longer only reported through the grapevine, they make it to all the news media. The rapes last summer could have been called hate crimes because 3 of the 4 victims were white. The fourth was Asian. The latest series of rapes is questionable in a different way. The woman raped on New Year’s Day picked out of a set of photos her attacker, a man who had been accused of raping a seventeen year old in October on the same rooftop but he was out and on the street because the charges were dropped. Instead he pled guilty to stealing the girl’s cell phone.

What is wrong with this picture? If the girl was seventeen and they had sex isn’t it considered statutory rape at the least? If he said he stole her cell phone isn’t that admitting that he was with her? Why do I have a feeling that we didn’t hear about this 17 year old girl being raped in October because she is a minority? Why do I feel that the women of color in Harlem are still considered second class citizens when it comes to police protection? Remembering the wilding in Central Park years ago during the Puerto Rican Day parade? The cops stood by as women were sexually harassed. The majority of the women attacked were not white and therefore must have been asking for it. Right?

Someone once wrote there is no place safe on earth to be a woman and I have to admit they may be right. If something happens to me I have been raised to go to the police. But even in Atlanta where I grew up with my godfather as the assistant chief of police I would probably have been told not to bring a rape to light. It is a crime against women but it is often turned into something women ask for. And if you are a minority you asked for rape by your very existence.

I follow these subtle anomalies of change of racial prejudice because I know that we are still struggling to change things. But this is not just about race it is about women and I wait for the day when I don’t feel I have to be on guard for the well being of women of color or women period. The question is how long will I have to wait?

Most people do no know the significance of the hours of Night Watch. Even those who have for years sat in church from 7pm to 10 or 11pm on New Year’s Eve wishing they could be at some party instead of listening to another long sermon don’t know the true meaning. Night Watch stems from the waiting the slaves and abolitionists did the night before Abraham Lincoln signed the promised Emancipation Proclamation. It was new Year’s Eve and all hopes were on the president signing the freedom of slaves into law. They were gathered together wherever the could until word came on New Year’s Day. Since that time most churches in the African American communities hold Night Watch. The church, be it Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran or Episcopalian has always been one of the strong roots of the African American community. Over the years most people just got used to the New Year’s Ever tradition and forgot the true meaning- the history of freedom for United States Slaves.

I know less about it then I would like to but I have friends who have grown up with the tradition. Last year’s Night Watch had a special significance since it was the one before the inauguration of the nation’s first African American president. There was a lot to be thankful for in that vein because many could feel the country moving forward even though racism is far from ending. A friend close to my heart tells me that even in her youth when she was partying til dawn she would find a quiet place before midnight and say a prayer of thanks for all she has. Another friend tries not to attend any events until after 11pm. That’s when her church and her family stopped their night watch. She says she feels safe sitting with the ancestors remembering what they went through and thanking them for what we have now.

Tonight I have a house full of young people preparing to go to a party. They are at this moment sitting at the dining room table discussing traditions as they eat take out. They are from several different cultures which makes me happy and proud. Perhaps it makes the ancestors smile as well. There was a time when the only way blacks and whites shared a meal was if the blacks were serving it. Blacks got the leftovers but they made do. Tomorrow many will have black eyed peas to usher in luck in the new year but they will had a piece of pork to the dish, the kind of animal by product thrown to the slaves. Some ancestral food in any culture can cause problems like stomach ailments or, in the case of black people, hypertension. But we still will must remember and thank those that came before us by living the best life possible.

Happy New Year everyone

My first doll was from New Orleans. In the winter of 1952 my mother and father actually found and ordered a black doll for the first child for Christmas. She was almost as tall as I was and had glowing brown skin that was close in color to mine. In the years that followed I didn’t always get a black doll and not because we didn’t think black was beautiful. It was because they were hard to find as well as expensive for a couple with three daughters. One Christmas I got a Shirley Temple doll, bright and blonde with thick baby doll curls. My mother would fix my hair like that and I would say “I look like Shirley Temple.”

She would instantly correct me. “Your hair looks like Shirley Temple. You’re a pretty little brown girl.”

No one ever told me I was ugly but they didn’t say I was beautiful either because having dark skin was considered a sign of inferiority that dated back to slavery. I was lucky I didn’t know it but there were times when I felt it. White was always right and close to white, or being light skinned African American, was supposed to be the next best thing.

Before Michael Jackson changed his appearance there was a wide variety of creams and concoctions to lighten one’s skin on the market. Those go back more generations than I can count. During slavery time the light skinned blacks were given the ‘prestigious jobs’ if you can call any form of slavery being prestigious. They worked in the master’s house and helped raise his children. Often the women became unwilling mothers of the master’s children. It is a shameful part of American history but it speaks to some of the problems that we face today. In this country it was good to be white.

Although we were taught that it was better to be light, as time progressed it was not always felt that way in the African American community. Prejudice rolls many ways and often light skinned brothers and sisters were considered traitors by birth to the race. Before black was beautiful they were looked on as not really black. My father was light, my mother was dark and no where did this tradition of prejudice reign in our family. My father had felt some disfavor from the darker soldiers in World War II, my mother told of problems getting positions because of the color of her skin. I remember being of the darker skinned girls not allowed on the court of the beauty pageant at my kindergarten and having my great aunt who was light enough to pass for white explain to me that it was because people weren’t ready to accept brown as beautiful.

Were their idols for me when I was growing up that were my color? There was Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge and many more that filled the pages of Ebony and Jet magazines. My idol above all others was my mother. I thought she was the most beautiful, elegant woman in the world and wanted to look like her when I grew up. She had a winning smile, a good spirit, and a gorgeous figure. And she was as chocolate as me.

I imitated her in many ways when I was little and I still admire her as the 84 year old matriarch of our family. To me she was always black and beautiful.

So when I look at Michelle Obama I see an elegant beautiful woman like my mother, like I try to be. As a little girl, the daughter of a newspaper editor I got to see and collect black and white pictures of ‘colored’ movie stars and performers. They always looked so amazingly grand. They did not look like many of them said they felt, oppressed and belittled. They too had to ride the back of the bus, they could not stay in the same hotels with the whites and they had to enter through the kitchen to perform. And yet I have always admired their pose and grace because that is what is needed to show your detractors that you are more than they could ever imagine.

Mrs. Obama is an advocate for education. She speaks out to African American kids who think that being book smart and making your own way in the United States is a white thing. She embodies cultural pride the same way the hard working, put upon stars of old did. The same way my mother still turns heads when she slowly walks into a room and makes everyone around her feel comfortable.

Over the years there have been studies on beauty with African American kids. They show them two dolls, one white and one black and ask them which one is pretty. To this day many of the children still pick the white doll. Maybe someone will make a doll that looks like the First Lady and use it as an example of beauty. Still, it is great to see how far we as a nation have come when we talk about beauty. Michelle Obama is a representative of that in every way. And that makes this little black girl from Georgia proud.

Harlem was considered the worse place to live in New York in the early 1970’s. The movies about the area featured buildings that were mere shells, people without jobs or a future and white on black cruelty that often ended in black on black violence. It was not a place to visit at night I was told by those who put together the tours and trips for the college. Yet that was the only time I got to go to Harlem for the days were full with visits to safe havens like NYC museums and plays. One evening after a lecture a few of us were invited uptown to an artist’s Harlem apartment where she served us tea and cookies in a most opulent setting. This place looked nothing like the streets and buildings below. There was a doorman, and a marble foyer and a working elevator with glass walls. Besides discussing her art we talked about black culture and history, about the changes taking place in the area. Aware that we were tourists in a foreign environment even though our skin color matched that of those controlling the streets, she sent us packing before 10 pm. The four of us would have preferred to take a cab but back then few taxis ventured north of 110^th Street. So we stood huddled together on the subway platform deciding to board the first train that arrived after a drunk rolled passed us asking for change and a couple got to fighting so loudly I was sure the police would come. We got back to our hotel safe and sound and boldly decided that we should go back into the belly of the beast another night for a party the artist’s daughter invited us to. Unfortunately that night we got so lost we almost didn’t find out way back to the subway station. We encountered friendly people who gave us instructions. A long black car stopped and the driver asked us if we needed a lift. We turned him down thinking something dangerous was on his mind only to learn later that he wasn’t being fresh but trying to make a living as a gypsy cab driver.

Over the years I learned to enjoy Harlem more as I visited then moved here. It changed but not overnight. Houses people paid a pittance for almost 25 to 30 years ago because nobody wanted to live in them or to care for them are now worth millions. The majority of the population is Latino but every ethnicity lives here. When we first moved into the neighborhood we had to leave town in order to buy good quality meats. Produce was plentiful and fresh at the local green grocers, all Korean owned. There was a fish market owned by a Greek guy who lived two hours away on Long Island. And the only neighborhood butchers were Jewish and of course closed on all Jewish holidays. You learned to put up with the inconveniences because you wanted to live in New York and Harlem was affordable back then. You shopped on 125^th St. or you went downtown. You rode the trains day and night without worrying about the drunks or derelicts. You learned where to stand safely on the platform and where to walk to get home safe. It was an urban area that allowed you the privilege of the whole of New York and that’s why I moved here.

Then came massive gentrification and with it the greed of those who bought real estate that they could now pass on for amazing prices. Homes that no one wanted before sold for phenomenal rates, people started charging full market prices for apartments (something that had never been done before in Harlem) and got them. And the rents for stores and businesses on the main thoroughfares shot up to a price that most of the shopkeepers could not pay. The fish market owner retired early, the butchers closed and all the green grocers disappeared. Grocery stores that never wanted to service Harlem before popped up. There was a time when they only carried white bread but now they have bagels and lox, Jamaica and Dominican canned goods and everything one needs for the insertion of other cultures into what was once considered an all black neighborhood.

There are few black businesses outside of the hair saloons and barbershops. Copeland’s closed a few years back and the restaurants that have opened are mostly owned by people who live downtown. The few that are in the area that are black and Latin owned survive by the skin of their teeth. There was a time when all the neighborhood eateries were closed on Mondays but now in order to maintain a steady clientele the places are open 7 days a week.

There is a lot of speculation outside Harlem why it became the place to live and own but being here and observing the changes I can tell you that it is still the last affordable place to live in Manhattan. College students from nearby Columbia, which literally is in Harlem, find it cheaper to live nearby in brownstones and apartment buildings where the rent is still cheaper than the tony downtown addresses. Lots of business people find the area not only affordable but easy access to work by subway and even easier to the airport than going through mid-town traffic. There are affordable places to be entertained and there is a rich history of art and music in the area.

But one thing those moving into Harlem must be aware of is this: there is still a great amount of poverty. If you live in Harlem you must accept that there are still gangs, number runners, drug addicts, and drug sellers. The street corner men are still telling their version of the history of the neighborhood, the homeless of all cultures still prowl the streets looking for food and often shelter because Harlem has always been the friendliest of New York areas. It accepts the tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to be free because the blacks that settled here only wanted the freedom that the constitution promised them that the south would not allow.

Living in Harlem does not mean you step over these people and ignore them. It means you live with them. You see them daily and often you give them a nod, not of approval but of awareness. You want them to be aware that you belong.

I no longer get lost in Harlem but I know it’s a big place and I am aware of my surroundings. Gentrification may have made it a popular place to live but it is still a neighborhood in transition. It is still the area across 110^th Street that brings fear to some but now it brings wealth to others.