29 days

Its been a long time coming...

Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation. A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.
--Barack Obama, 2004 DNC keynote address

Cornel West speaks of a love ethic which has kept black folk in this country not just alive but has enabled us to retain our hope in the unseen. And thats what I celebrate during Black History Month: that while living and struggling in the hell that was American slavery (and yes, you betta believe I'm including what went down in the Black Atlantic of the Caribbean and Latin America), the purgatory of Jim (and Jane ) Crow, and dealing with racial terrorism of all kinds from all fronts, our freedom never rested on governmental definitions. Rather, our forefathers and mothers knew that true freedom lie in how they viewed themselves in the eyes of the God. The struggle was simply one of recognition - to get to state on the same page, the goal was to hip the government that no man could take away their God-given humanity.

But beyond all that, to think that all those people, the ones we name and remember and those that fell off the pages of history's footnotes loved us and their country so much to risk damn near everything moves me, confounds me and pushes me to keep it moving. This is for them.