Last Thursday My Kids Were Home For Roshashana. So I Read John Henrik Clarke To Them.

"We need to reconsider the 19th Century black man and woman, who were tall in comparison to what we are right now. They made less excuses. They had more hardships, and they faced them better. They had something we don't have, they had less detractions: no television, no radio. They had their work, and the church was the main outlet. Spiritually, they held themselves together. Culturally, they held themselves together.

"The church was also the school. The church was the recreation center. The church was the place where you would go to look for a lady to court that might be your wife. The church was the center of the being of a people. The church was not a weekend thing. The church was an everyday thing.

"Our forced migration into this country helped to make this country what it is. We have a claim that's outstanding. That's going to have to be satisfied. We've contributed to the culture and to the direction of this country. We live in an American society that's now dying, and we can bring it alive, if we think it's worth being brought alive.

"With all of our faults and all the things that's crippling our development, we are a nation within a nation, looking for a nationality. Once we find that nationality, our relationship to Afrika, we will join others in marshaling our true strength, our peopleness, our nationness once again. We'll stop answering to the term "minority." We will stop acting like a minority. We will stop feeling like a minority. We will know then, that we are world people.

"We must stop killing ourselves about belonging to mother countries not of our making. Languages not of our making. Stop worshipping gods not of our choosing, and realize that wherever we are on the face of the earth, we are an Afrikan people. No matter where our bodies are, our heartbeat, our future, our political being is in Afrika. We are an Afrikan people wherever we are on the face of the earth. We have to learn how to relax about being an Afrikan people. How to use it as a source of strength, not as a source of retreat or regret. We must wear it like a badge of honor, and contribute to it as though it was a new world religious order, which indeed is what it can be.