Sinng, Celebrate! (Sing sing celebrate!)
During the LilScrybe days, I could recite most of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s biography from memory (I also knew most of Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X’s stories, but today is about Dr. King). Even at that early age, I realized the importance of his sacrifices, risks and resistance to violence. I was barely into my big girl britches when his birthday became a holiday, and as such, I was raised during a time when the echo of the Civil Rights movement still rang out through the ‘hood, not just in rap rhetoric or twitter streams, but in the way families instilled values of education, appreciated our right to vote… (etc. etc.).
Now that the POTUS is a man of African Descent, and there are probably more wealthy and upper middle class Black Americans than there have ever been, many of us feel the dream has been realized. (I mean, look at all the Black folks we have on TV and in movies now, right?) However, There are many parts of Dr. King’s dream and of the Civil Rights movement that we’ve let slip. We enjoy the wealth, the comfort, and freedom but we seem to have lost a lot of the togetherness, collective work and willingness to sacrifice for the greater good. This weekend, my Facebook and twitter timelines were filled with quotes and of individual reflections of those quotes, and that’s awesome. Still, as we share quotes from Dr. King’s speeches, enjoy a day away from our offices I hope that we can all take a few moments to consider how we can revive our communities, re-energize our youth toward positivity and reshape some of the new and negative images of what it means to be an African American.
I’m not going to pretend I’ve been in the trenches or that I don’t enjoy luxuries. However, now, I’m asking… how can I help? How can we all help? And while you ponder that… remember these?
