In February 2012 , I was honored enough to go back to my college and participate in a conference and deliver the closing remarks with another Africana Studies graduate (the speech i delivered will be posted later).
This poem is from the closing ceremony during the Central Pennsylvania Consortium Africana Studies Conference at Dickinson College February 2012 on “Performing Memory, History and Identity in the Black World”
The Negro must climb the racial
mountain but don’t look down
cuz’ negroes are falling off the raft.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay in the water
wade in the water, dead.
But where are all the Negro spirituals?
So soulful uplifting the nation
black citizens, my people.
Where is that voice of reason?
Contemplating the true dilemma,
as that Strange Fruit in America.
The Poet, The Writer, The Lyricist…
who turns black pain into black art
by squeezing the rhythm and blues
out of neo-slave narratives.
The Preacher, The Singer…
lifting every voice to sang a
harmonious oral history of
the black experience,
The unconventional black artist
The Comedian, The Actor
who like those tall tales passed
down from African Griots,
paints a vivid history rooted
in the melody of black struggle.
The pain echoed though
the wonders of performance arts
the continuity as fluid
as our black identity
as we break the verbal
barriers of the written language
and turn generations of silence
into a inter-disciplinary approach
of black subjectivity, one
fused with the cadence of rhymes
and a multitude of expressions
-Righteous Teacher
Deffered Potential 