TELL YOUR CHILDREN OUR STORY!
“If you don’t know where you came from…if you don’t know where you started on this journey, you will forever be headed in the wrong direction as you continue on your journey!”
That paraphrase of the warning given to us by the Association of Black Psychologists, 50 years ago, is a principle I encourage every person of African descent to keep in mind during “Black History Month.” (It would really be helpful if Afircan Americans kept that principle in mind every day of the year!)
Dr. Bobby Wright, one of the founders of A.B. Psy., used to say to the members of the church where I served as Pastor for 36 years (as he would come and lecture to us): “When telling your children your story, if you keep starting that story in slavery, you will forever have a slave mentality! Worse yet? You will pass that slave mentality down to your children.”
Our story that is celebrated this month has a chapter in it called “slavery” or the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, but our story does not start there.
Chattel Slavery is a reality, yes. The enslavement of Africans is an ugly experience, yes! But it is an experience we came through; our story does not start with that ugly experience.
Our story has a chapter called “segregation,” or “Jim Crow.” Our story has a chapter called “The Civil Rights Movement.” Our story has another chapter called “The Fight for Human Rights and Equal Rights.”
Our story has several other chapters which many of us here in the United States have never heard of — much less studied. (We have never heard of these other chapters because of what Carter G. Woodson called our “Miseducation!”)
Our story has chapters such as “Africans in Cuba,” “Africans in Haiti,” “Africans in Brazil,” “The Music of Africans in the Black Atlantic Diaspora” and “The Religious Beliefs of Blacks in the West African Diaspora.”
Our story has countless fascinating chapters, exciting chapters, intriguing chapters, heartbreaking chapters and inspiring chapters; but the chapter called “slavery” is only one of those chapters and our story does not start with that chapter.
I challenge each reader during this year’s celebration of Black History Month to read at least one book on some segment of the history, heritage, culture, or religion of Africans before the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade.
Learn about where our story starts so you will know where we came from (Africa) in addition to knowing what we came through (slavery). I challenge you to learn that not only so you will know where we came from on this journey. (”We have come over a way that with tears has been watered. We have come treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered!”)
I challenge you to learn where our story starts not only in order to stop going in the wrong direction as you continue on your journey.

I also challenge you to learn where our story starts so you can get our story straight! “If you don’t have the story straight, then you can’t tell the story right!”

Jeremiah Wright