Express Yourself
SHOCKLEY, JEFFERY A. -ES479, SCI-FAYETTE
How is today different than the yesterday we seldom remember or choose to be encouraged by?
Why are we not able to walk together, embracing one another in the strength meant to last past the Freedom Marches started long before ever I was born?
As a new generation scorns the manners displayed, the unity that stayed, giving no respect for our ancestor's blood spilled. Lives lost at the cost of just being Black. Do lives no longer matter from their yesterday as we shout Black Lives Matter today? Forgetting the changes made that we may live "Free Them Now", today?
Shall we forget the atrocities seen in the media that mean to demean the very nature of the Black man throughout Black History when their crowds gathered round so their children could see, would see, another Negro hanging from a tree?
Strange Fruit.
We cannot look away from the actions within our communities where names are changed to numbers under the gavel of a judge, yet blame the system for the work we as Black men have not done, building up ourselves. Of our own accord destruction is made, sending each other to the grave.
Why do we shy away from the back history of Black History where the tenacity, ability, to succeed, to become doctors, lawyers, inventors, artist and politicians was different than the resistance today to lift each other up beyond the hope of a good cellie.
They navigated through the time when it was a crime for any Black man to become educated beyond menial labor, now we run to work for pennies of a dollar, resiting to excel beyond the limitations of a prison cell too many of us occupy today.
When will we rise together past the last number of years and hear the songs that made us, a people, Black people capable of overcoming what was done yesterday even through the tomorrow's we are not promising our children to be the King's and Queen's, Prince's and Princesses our history said they could be?
Before time became defined by shackles and chains that mentally remain...
In our DNA
SHOCKLEY