Renew Your Mind!

My love for books! Oh how it has opened the door to a world I never knew existed! Sure, most of us were taught in school (mostly during the month of February), about the staple black history heroes and sheroes such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Fredrick Douglas, Harriet Tubman and the like. And though their mark on history is brave, bold, beautiful and praise worthy, there were so many other warriors that I wished I’d known about as a young black girl, whose only frame of reference was that of slavery and the incessant plight to be delivered from it. What if queens like Makeda, The Queen of Sheba, or Nefertiti and Cleopatra, Queens of Egypt, (who did not resemble Elizabeth Taylor), or Ranvalona, Queen of Madagascar, or Queen Nandi, mother of Shaka Zulu were household names? Would those beautiful images have made me proud of my Queendom? Or what if we were taught about the courage it took for Fannie Lou Hamer to walk away from the only life she knew on a Mississippi share cropping plantation to fight for freedom because she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Would I have wielded my sword of the spirit more victoriously? If I had known about the beautiful Queen by the name of Ida B. Wells, a writer and freedom fighter from my own home state of Tennessee, who used her gift of writing to shed light on the atrocities of black men being unjustly lynched in the south.. Would I have remained silent in such a time as this? Lerone Bennett Jr. said it best, “An educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor.” The educational system, no doubt is an oppressor, as I was never taught that there was a Black Wall Street or a Rosewood. I never knew that before the Central Park 5, there was the Devil’s punch bowl or the Scottsboro boys or the Groveland Four!

Our girls Must know the names of Mary McCleod Bethune and Mary Church Terrell. Ava Overton and Alice Dunbar. They must know that the “angry black woman” identity is one that was thrust upon them through no fault of their own and one that is deeply imbedded within their subconscious,passed down from the pain and suffering of their mothers and their grandmothers and their mothers before them. The ones who witnessed the brutality of slavery and reconstruction and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement and the new Jim Crow through mass incarceration.. They must know that the unexplainable anger that occasionally rears its ugly head, comes from the unhealed wounds of their foremothers having had to witness their babies die from starvation while they breastfed the oppressors child or from witnessing their little ones used as alligator bait, or having had to experience the excruciating pain of an evil doctor who thought them less human and thus, used them as guinea pigs to perform gynecological surgeries without anesthesia!

The anger still exist because in 2020, a new generation of mothers are witnessing their sons and daughters being gunned down by trigger happy policeman, or trigger happy wanna be policemen or gang bangers from their very own neighborhoods. That pain and anger doesn’t just disappear! It’s covered up, it festers and metesticises from one generation to the next, and it is not until an averting of the identity crisis takes place and a return back to the laws statutes and commands of the Most High ensues, that one can truly heal. And it is for THAT reason that I choose to grow in wisdom and knowledge and understanding and not to remain silent! I choose to walk in my true identity so that my legacy will be that of a revolutionary and not an oppressor!