Black History Month 2008

Black History Month '08 is coming to a close... This marks the 6th year that I have been working with the youth in my church and trying to engage them in Black History beginning with the African Diaspora to the present. They all seem extremely uninterested. One of the youth wore a Nefertiti pendent around her neck on Sunday and showed it to me as she explained that it was her African attire for our annual celebration. I asked her if she knew who Nefertiti was, she simply said no. As I began to tell her I could see the invisible eye lids cover her eyes. And that's the exact response I got for the entire month as we discussed the history, the movements, events and changes that have taken place. I swear someone should develop a Black history video game but then who would play it? I copied and printed a Black History quiz and distributed it one Sunday and the adults were coming to me complaining that they couldn't answer the children's questions. It was funny but then again it's not. There's a well-known quote which says "Those who do not learn from their past are doomed to repeat it." I would think that we would be more hip to our contributions to this country and the world at large just so we could tap into our inner power and realize that we are so great, so wonderful, so powerful a people that we don't have to settle or feel downtrodden... that even when our current circumstances seem bleak, we know from our history that even now, we shall overcome...

Famous African-American Quotations

"I belong to a group of people that God-omniscient, omnipresent God, God of all power-says, 'You're my children and you're the same as anyone else." ~Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

"There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity." ~Malcolm X

I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me. ~Muhammad Ali

Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can. ~Arthur Ashe

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. ~Martin Luther King

My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear? ~Paul Robeson

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. ~Booker T. Washington

Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land. ~Cornel West, Race Matters

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation. ~Billie Holiday

“God makes three requests of his children: Do the best you can, where you are, with what you have, now” ~African-American Proverb quote

"There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past." ~Ernest J. Gaines

"Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work."
~Booker T. Washington

"I like to tell the truth as I see it. That's why literature is so important. We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people. It's not a ladder we are climbing, it's literature we're producing, and there will always be someone to read it." ~Nikki Giovanni