HOME TO HOWARD GRADUATION
"Home" is wherever one's family is, with parents, siblings, shelter, food.
I vividly remember when Mama and Daddy and my siblings came to my graduation from Howard University School of Law in 1976. It was epic!
They drove over east on I -70 from St. Louis. "They" being our parents, of course, Elvis Mitchell and Margie Dean Coleman; younger siblings: brothers Alvin, 17, Anthony, 15, Edwin, 8, sister Pamela,10, and niece , Mequilla Farrar, age 2, who had cried all the way from Missouri.
Brother Harold, 21, was already an undergraduate student at Howard at the time. Brother Stephen, 20, now deceased , was at the time, an undergraduate at Amherst . They all, we all, stayed together as one at me and my wife's azalea-trimmed townhouse off Wisconsin and Upton in northwest Washington, D.C. We resided near Howard's then-new campus dubbed "Dawn of Dumbarton" (of whose legal history I later wrote in "New Directions Magazine") the sinecure location of the historic Howard Law School.
It was a great, grand, good time!
Momma and Daddy went grocery shopping around the corner. They came back home and began cooking. Nothing like smells of home to let you know that you are at home! I do not recall the menu. But I have no doubt but that fried chicken, collard greens, cornbread, potato salad, baked sweet potatoes, iced tea, and cake were deeply involved!
Nor do I recall who may have been the principal speaker at the main campus graduation on Howard's Georgia Avenue campus, nor who, if anyone, was our supplemental law school speaker, beside Dean, Wiley Branton, Esq., of Little Rock, Arkansas, a civil rights icon himself, who bestowed our Juris Doctors on each of us 100 or so, individually.
But, I do remember our large Coleman family living together as one, way up in Washington, D.C., along with the thousands of other families who had come from far to commune in the love of their very own Howard University graduation!
The music for this magical 1976 moment was George Benson's "The Masquerade." That song's harmonious rhythms typifying our beauty, our majesty, tradition, love, history was played on Howard's own radio WHUR-FM, 96.3-FM's playlist. The "360 Black Experience" was the Howard beat, the DC beat and our family beat too!
Monday, November 27, 2017
"HOME" TO HOWARD GRADUATION
HOME TO HOWARD GRADUATION
"Home" is wherever one's family is, with parents, siblings, shelter, food.
I vividly remember when Mama and Daddy and my siblings came to my graduation from Howard University School of Law in 1976. It was epic!
They drove over east on I -70 from St. Louis. "They" being our parents, of course, Elvis Mitchell and Margie Dean Coleman; younger siblings: brothers Alvin, 17, Anthony, 15, Edwin, 8, sister Pamela,10, and niece , Mequilla Farrar, age 2, who had cried all the way from Missouri.
Brother Harold, 21, was already an undergraduate student at Howard at the time. Brother Stephen, 20, now deceased , was at the time, an undergraduate at Amherst . They all, we all, stayed together as one at me and my wife's azalea-trimmed townhouse off Wisconsin and Upton in northwest Washington, D.C. We resided near Howard's then-new campus dubbed "Dawn of Dumbarton" (of whose legal history I later wrote in "New Directions Magazine") the sinecure location of the historic Howard Law School.
It was a great, grand, good time!
Momma and Daddy went grocery shopping around the corner. They came back home and began cooking. Nothing like smells of home to let you know that you are at home! I do not recall the menu. But I have no doubt but that fried chicken, collard greens, cornbread, potato salad, baked sweet potatoes, iced tea, and cake were deeply involved!
Nor do I recall who may have been the principal speaker at the main campus graduation on Howard's Georgia Avenue campus, nor who, if anyone, was our supplemental law school speaker, beside Dean, Wiley Branton, Esq., of Little Rock, Arkansas, a civil rights icon himself, who bestowed our Juris Doctors on each of us 100 or so, individually.
But, I do remember our large Coleman family living together as one, way up in Washington, D.C., along with the thousands of other families who had come from far to commune in the love of their very own Howard University graduation!
The music for this magical 1976 moment was George Benson's "The Masquerade." That song's harmonious rhythms typifying our beauty, our majesty, tradition, love, history was played on Howard's own radio WHUR-FM, 96.3-FM's playlist. The "360 Black Experience" was the Howard beat, the DC beat and our family beat too!