Saving Our Young Black Men
To save our younger Brothers, we believe that their minds can be rescued with our history, but not the stuff that’s passed out during Black history month. One of the ways to reach the minds of our younger Brothers is through showing them where they come from. We believe that young Black Men need to know their fathers, grandfathers, uncles, cousins and other male relatives. Their Black Men relatives. We need to begin by pulling together the photographs of all our male family members we can and identifying and documenting their lives as much as possible. This means gathering information in print and oral histories as well to go with the pictures. However, most of us don’t know much about our Black Men histories and you can’t teach what you don’t know. Many of us have little or no affection for our fathers and some of us don’t know our fathers at all.
However, there are plenty of other Black Men in our family trees and plenty of stories to go with them. Importantly, these stories are tied to the history of america. We need to know HOW we built this country, fought its wars, created cultures and more than carried our weight the last few hundred years. We need to know this not merely for ‘reparations’ from the government, but for ‘repairing’ our selves. Our Young Black Men will follow our lead if we demonstrate our ability to lead and one of the most important ways to do this is to give them the biggest missing pieces of themselves, their MAN histories. They need to understand that our Man ancestors who worked and fought and sacrificed for this country were not fools who were ripped off and chumped, (as many believe), but that they paid a price for us and all those who come after us. We (and our younger Brothers) don’t have to ‘ask’ for what’s due; we can simply collect our due, IF WE KNOW WHO OUR FATHERS WERE and WHO WE ARE. When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Monday, January 17th 2011 at 8:33PM
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