African American Museum Tells "Richer and Fuller" Story of America, Says Obama.

President Obama officially opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture Saturday, delivering a moving address on the importance of the newest Smithsonian venue and its role in providing “context for the debates of our times.” 

“This national museum helps to tell a richer and fuller story of who we are,” the president said on the National Mall, where the museum was built just blocks away from the White House. Through it, “we better understand ourselves and each other. It binds us together. It reaffirms that all of us are America. That African-American history is not somehow separate from our American story … it is central to the American story.”  

“It is a glorious story,” he said, following speeches by those pivotal to the museum’s opening, including civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, D-Georgia, and former President George W. Bush. “The one that’s told here -- it is complicated and it is messy and it is full of contradictions. As all stories are.” 

With exhibits on slavery, lynching, and the victims of Jim Crow, the president noted that the museum showcased the uglier parts of America’s historical treatment of its black citizens alongside African-American successes.

“Our glory derives not just from our most obvious triumphs,” Mr. Obama said, “but how we have wrested triumph from tragedy and how we have been able to remake ourselves again, and again, and again in accordance with our highest ideas.”

“Yes, a clear-eyed view of history can make us uncomfortable,” he said, but he expressed hope that it would “shake us out of our familiar narratives.”

The history told by the museum, he said, “is a story that needs to to be told now more than ever.”

In his nearly half-hour-long address, the president alluded to the recent spate of violence against black Americans -- and the subsequent demonstrations those incidents have sparked. 

“This museum provides context for the debates of our times. It illuminates them and gives us some sense to how they evolved,” he said. “Perhaps they can help a white visitor understand the pain and anger of demonstrators like those in Ferguson and Charlotte.”  

For black visitors, the president said it could also help them appreciate “the sincerity of law enforcement officials… who in fits and starts are struggling to understand and are trying to do the right thing.” 

“It reminds us that routine discrimination and Jim Crow aren’t ancient history,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s just a blink in the eye of history. It was just yesterday. And so we should not be surprised that not all the healing is done. We shouldn’t despair that it isn’t all solved.”  

“Protest and love of country don’t merely coexist, but they inform each other,” he added.


Courtesy CBS.



Glory Belongs Only to God.

 “Ojo wo leda yio simi ogun?

Igba wo leda yio simi ote?

Ote nile.

Ote lode.

Ote re,

nibi gbogbo…”

 (When will people stop waging wars?

When will people stop treachery?

Treachery at home.

Treachery outside.

There is treachery everywhere…)

• The movie theme of Opa Aje, a middle-1980s depiction of the 19^th Century internecine wars among the Yoruba people in the western part of Nigeria.

This was the most tragic period in the lives of the Yoruba people. It was a very sad moment when brothers were at each other’s throats and sisters were stabbing each other in the backs. Nothing was spared in the various war fronts, from the use of dangerous charms to other metaphysical powers. The brutal wars also led to the procurement of the most sophisticated military weapons of that era in the African continent. The Yoruba used all these lethal weapons against each other.

 And the consequences were legions, top among which were:

1. The internecine wars weakened the Yoruba in their opposition to the British military invasions. In fact, the military defeat (at Imagbon) of Ijebu forces by the British colonial Army was the platform used in the eventual annexation of the rest of Yorubaland. If the Yoruba were united, the British would have thought twice before going into that war.


2. The Uthman Dan Fodio’s Jihad campaign made serious incursion into Yoruba land at Ilorin through the treachery of Aare Afonja, the then Field Marshall of the Oyo Empire. If not for the great, valiant Ibadan warriors that defeated them, the whole of Southern Nigeria would have come under the Fulani hegemony.


3. The European slave traders also took advantage of the situation to forcibly cart away millions of Yoruba individuals to Cuba, Trinidad & Tobago, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Venezuela and other parts of the World.

The sad irony though was that the crazy wars were fought merely to prove a point over who deserved the glory for the greatness and sustenance of the Yoruba race! This problem is not restricted to a race of people. Too many of us as individuals within marriages, families, churches, mosques, corporate establishments, neighborhoods and communities do also engage in glory-seeking battles.

And as it happened in Yoruba land, every quest for glory always leave bitterness, divisions and pains in its wake. Why so? Because glory belongs only to God!

 

 

William S. Scarborough - Too Much Ahead of His Time.

William S. Scarborough was born a slave in Georgia, but went on to become one of the nation’s leading scholars in Greek and Latin literature.

In fact, many consider Scarborough to be the first African-American classical scholar. Born in February 16, 1852, in Macon, Georgia, Scarborough’s father was a freed slave but his mother was still enslaved, thus he inherited her status. Although educating slaves was against the law, Scarborough was secretly taught how to read and write in the classical languages.

He later went on to serve as an apprentice shoemaker, and then worked as a secretary at a well-known Black association because of his studies. Scarborough attended college at Atlanta University before heading to Oberlin where he graduated with honors in 1875.

The following year, he returned to Macon to teach the classical languages at his former high school. Despite his gifts, many were against Scarborough teaching at the school. At the time, both Black and White figures in society believed that the liberal arts were wasted on Black people. Booker T. Washington and other prominent Blacks thought that vocational education was more beneficial to Blacks than learning the classics.

Arsonists set the school where Scarborough worked on fire, and Macon officials allowed it to burn to the ground. After that, Scarborough moved to South Carolina where he encountered even worse treatment and eventually returned to Oberlin.

There, he obtained his Master’s and became a professor at Wilberforce University, then one of the premiere Black colleges. Scarborough published a popular college textbook titled First Lessons In Greek and in 1881, he married Sarah Bierce, a white principal he met while working at the school in Macon.

Scarborough was one of the first Black members to join national academic groups, including the American Philological Association (APA), and was the very first to join the Modern Languages Association (MLA). The MLA has since created a first-book prize bearing Scarborough’s name. While prestigious academic bodies recognized Scarborough, he was constantly bombarded by racism and suffered financially because of it. One of Scarborough’s lowest moments occurred during an APA meeting in Baltimore in 1909.

Archaeologist Francis W. Kelsey rescinded Scarborough’s invitation because the hotel where the event was held would not serve dinner if the Black professor were present. Scarborough remained at Wilberforce until he was appointed to serve in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he worked until his death in 1926.

Emancipation From Mental Slavery.

That was several hundred years ago!

But this is the 21st Century.

And there are still too many people out there in the black community who have chained themselves down in mental slavery. Since this problem is self-inflicted, not even a thousand Harriet Tubmans can help set them free. And sadly, a considerable number of them is young. Under the shameful circumstance therefore, the future of the black community is terribly bleak!

The situation is so critical now that these young people keep taking one step forward while, unwittingly, they take many steps backward.

• To them, education stinks.
• A college education, on the other hand, is an abomination in their sight.
• Anyone that speaks good English around them is acting "white".
• Whoever dresses and looks proper is not real.
• Those who embrace hard work as a virtue are considered dumb.
• To a 4th grade drop-out, having a decent $10 job is too cheap and not worth keeping.
• The only ambition of these young people is---either get rich quick or die trying.