Members of the Tallahassee community enjoying the homecoming parade together. (Khalil-Lullah Ballentine/FAMUAN)
A hundred years of Black History Month isn’t nearly enough to honor the equally weighed conquests and sacrifices African Americans made in the struggle for opportunity. Twenty-eight out of 365 days, we revel in our sonder as we reconnect to our roots that lay as deep as oaks.
We still reel from systematic oppression as we lick our brothers and sisters’ generational wounds inflicted upon us 400 years later. We comfort our older family members through violent visions of segregated bus seats; peaceful demonstrations interrupted by the pressurized hate disguised as a gentle, passive stream and progress destroyed through bombings, lynchings and brutalities.
Lesions from Levittown, Little Rock and the Lorraine Motel linger still as water.
We keep living.
Pain turns to poetry, dance, painting, rap verses, dance. Our wounds are sutured, stitched through our inherently radical self-expression and creativity.
As HBCU scholars, our education, purpose and curiosity are our ancestors’ wildest dreams and America’s worst nightmare.
Every word we write is a knife, every book we read is gasoline and every thought we have is a match thrown. The curls, kinks and coils hail like untouchable crowns on our heads in a regal display of defying gravity. When the world tells us to assimilate to a pin-straight standard, we pick out our hair in power.
I revel in gratitude for it all.
From every barber shop, hair salon, corner store, speakeasy, ma and pa restaurant, juke joint, doctoral practice, writing room, fire department, film set, atelier, court room and recording studio, 500 years of celebration are in order across the diaspora.
Continue celebrating, continue dancing and continue living.
And to the heroes and heroines of time,
Thank you.