There is a photograph that I hung in my son’s room.  It shows a Black man, clearly emancipated… not a slave, standing behind a mule.   In his right hand he is holding the plow; in his left he has a McGuffey Reader.  I wanted that picture in my son’s room because I wanted him to know viscerally, who he is and where he comes from.  I don’t know that the picture made all that much difference to Tom.  He would probably have preferred some busty woman in some lewd or obscene pose, but since I am grown and he wasn’t, so I won the first battle of the walls.
     The need to read and write is genetically deep.  Humans have drawn on cave walls, fashioned language from the animal and natural sounds surrounding us.  The need to communicate is basic to humans.  Education is still the key.
     I would not be so naïve as to say or think that without formal education people cannot survive or thrive.  Black people, especially, have done both.  When we were, as a group, forbidden to read and write, when our drums were taken from us, when our religious practices were forbidden, we couched our tales in the spirituals, saying, “Go down Moses” when Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad were ready to roll; we sang “Steal Away” when were going to run; we released our sorrow in “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen”; and we shouted our Good News in “I’ve got a crown up in the Heavens….ain’t that Good News.”  No history course can tell me the slaves didn’t leave a record.  They sang, “Deep River….my home is over Jordan.”   They told us, “You got to walk this lonesome valley.”  They told us, “Wade in the water….God’s gonna trouble the water.”  The slaves left a record; America just doesn’t like the fact that “everybody talking ‘bout Heaven ain’t going there.”
     I guess I just don’t understand why this generation is so lost.  The young people who are dropping out of school could not understand the fight of our people for literacy.  Could not understand that one of the main reasons you could get “sold south” was because you could read and write.  The young people today must never have sat and read the Constitution let alone the Federalist Papers, or they would surely know how essential the Black presence in the New World was.  It’s not just that Blacks supplied labor; we supplied the skills that made that labor necessary.  What did Europeans know about planting?  What did they know about iron and bronze?  Only what we taught them.  Who has pondered the illogicality of bringing women to the New World?  Slavery had existed and still does exist on earth.  No people in their right mind would bring a woman across the seas.  The Romans never thought to bring Greek women.  Look at slavery in the African continent.  You killed and enslaved the men.  The women you left behind.  Why?  Because once you bring the female, you cannot breed the Black out.  Look at the Moors in Spain, look at France, Germany, England.  Look at Switzerland today with its “Turkish” problem and at what was once West Germany for the same situation.  Why did they bring women to the America?  It’s a question needing an answer.
     But what has this got to do with you?  If you knew that Liberia was founded in 1822 to send free and emancipated Blacks there, what does it mean that some stayed because they wanted to and others stayed because they had to?  The solution was in the hands of the Americans.  Why didn’t they take?  How can anyone say the Civil War was not fought over slaves?  Of course it was.  Free labor cannot compete with slave labor.  But why would poor white boys fight for a system that does not benefit them?  Perhaps for the same reason Black men fought the Indians with the British, defeating the Black men who fought the Indians with the French.  How can you be a Black man and not understand the great job the Black preacher did in getting the slaves one day off?  I still hear people saying the preacher is nothing.  Where is their sense of history?  How would they like to be alive in 1750 or so, trying to convince a planter that on a pretty day, which just happens to be a Sunday, the slaves should be allowed to praise God?  What kind of network would we have had without the preacher?  What would have happened to our language if the preacher had not been allowed to study the Bible?  How would our story have been kept alive if we had not found a song in code?
     All I’m saying is this stuff today has nothing to do with us.  The drugs, the drive-by shootings, the pregnancies, the dropouts…these are not us.  We have come through the fires.  How can we now be tired?  Isn’t there an old song that says, “Walk together, children, don’t you get weary”?  And didn’t we sing that in Montgomery, Selma, and all over the South?  Why did we do that?  For a cup of coffee?  For the joy of voting for Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater?  We did it for the future.  Why now, young Black men, have you decided to live in the present?  What happened to the future visions of your grandfathers and great grandfathers?  Why now do you have to go to jail before you take time to commune with yourselves?  Why do you have to be on death row before you decide to read a book or study law or heroically save someone’s life?  Your generation talks a lot about “roles.”  What “role” will your play in life?  Try man.  Try responsible man.  Try forward-looking man.  Try man who learns something the easy way (college) instead of the hard way (prison).  Try doing the very difficult job of helping yourself and someone else by building something.  Try honoring the very best in yourself instead of the very worst.
     Am I picking on the men?  I hope not.  I hope that I am reminding you that you have a job to do today.  I hope I am reminding you that the people who produced you had little reason to dream; yet dream they did.  They dreamed that one day you would be judged by the content of your character.  They had no doubt that you would pass the test.  Something has got to turn around.
     Clearly the men are going to have to change.  Malcolm X was fond of saying, “Show me how a country treats its women, and I’ll show you the progress of that nation.”  We in Black America have turned that around: Show me how men treat each other, and I will show you the future of those people.
     Those of you, young African-American men, who are struggling in high school and college…you are our pioneers.  Don’t let people tell you it is “individualistic” to try to do something with your life.  Frederick Douglass was “individualistic” when he walked off that plantation in Maryland; David Walker was “individualistic” when he wrote his appeal; Marcus Garvey was “individualistic” when he got on that boat in Jamaica and came to America, and the people he organized were “individualistic” in their desire to make a better life.  A people can be oppressed, but it takes individuals to seek freedom.
     It is a wonderful thing to be young and Black today.  The world is in the process of redefining itself.  Those of your who will make a positive difference are those of you preparing yourself for the future.  Your sacrifice is worth it.  The slurs you take are worth it.  The racists with whom we live have nothing to do with us.  We are about our Father’s business.  We know there are many mansions in His house.  We are now looking for keys that open the doors.  Don’t get down on yourself.  Don’t let shortsighted people make you feel bad.  There is something out there that only the sensibility of African-Americans can understand.  “Don’t let nobody turn you ‘round.” Know who you are; then you’ll know where you are going.