IDIOMS OF AFRICAN AMERICANS

IDIOMS OF AFRICAN AMERICANS "Eyes are bigger than the belly" means putting on a plate more than one can eat. It was one of several idioms I heard as a child. Its meaning is akin to "ends exceeding the means." Idioms teach practical wisdom and counsel conservative restraint. "Use your head for more than a hat rack," was another idiom, witticism, practical wisdom bit, that was told me often by Mama. That means think! Use the brains that God has given you to move! These thoughts come to mind as I continue to embrace the power of practical wisdom of the Rev. Dr. Thomas Nelson Baker, a man who was born a slave in Northampton Virginia , yet went on to acquire a Ph. D. In philosophy at Yale, 1903. With roots in the South, where he was taught letters by his mother, and farming by his father, to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads, he exhibited that dual depth and dimension in his roots that corroborated the infamous, if conservative, self-help principles so widely propagated by the great Booker T. Washington of Virginia, and of Tuskegee Alabama, who, despite his later acclaim, was also a slave at birth, like Rev. Dr. Baker. Baker once wrote in a magazine: “When the Negro really feels as proud of being black as the white man does of being white he will no longer feel humiliated by being seated by himself.” Baker stated that focus ought to be on destroying the “Jim Crow Negro” instead of the “Jim Crow Car.” Baker, ironically, went on to pastor a Congregational Church in Pittsfield , Massachusetts for over 40 years. Pittsfield is in western Massachusetts in the Berkshire Mountain region, near Great Barrington, the home of W. E. B. DuBois. As he was with Washington, DuBois was also a caustic critic of Rev. Dr. Baker, although here the full venom of DuBois' spleen was not written in book form, i. e. "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," in THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK (1903), rather it was in letter form and magazine. But, he criticized both. Being born in Mississippi and raised in Missouri, my natural allegiance lies with the idiomatic, practical philosophy and wisdom of Dr. Booker T. Washington, and Rev.Dr. Thomas Nelson Baker, Sr. My great respect for Dr. W.E.B. DuBois' 96 years of life's work and scholarship has rather been tempered and mitigated by later information that I learned about his philosophical opponents in the battle over the hearts and minds of black folks, and their pathway to freedom and prosperity . For now, DuBois' forces are far ahead, but the race for freedom is not yet won. And as another famed idiom proves, turtles are slow, but sure.