SLAVE TO MANHOOD

MOVING SELF FROM SLAVE STATUS TO MANHOOD STATURE There are three books, stories from my youth, that demonstrate the power of redemption of black men, who have been caught up in a web of crime, sin: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X, MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND & SOUL ON ICE. Though some of these men had been "raised right", albeit briefly , they had gone wrong, into prison. Evil often overcomes good in the world since its sensate tendencies receive succor, success ; thereby are renewed, reinforced in gravitas. The one who eats is the survivor. It not only takes individual's personal desperation; outside intervention; a renewed sense of self-worth from any accretive successes; but, most importantly the rejuvenated "hope" that, he will have been transformed from what he was, to what he wills himself to become, by faith & work. The accounts of these three men's emergences (Malcolm X's , Claude Brown's and Eldridge Cleaver's) from broken, "enslaved minds" and lives, into moving examples of men into vigorous, liberated, manhood recalls to mind the story of iconic, 19th century, Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass' extraordinary emergence from the humble status of being an actual physical slave, in Maryland, into the refined stature of redoubtable Frederick Douglass, of history, is described in his three autobiographies (NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE, MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM, and LIFE AND TIMES); representative, demonstrative of human transformation from slave status into the stature of manhood. Douglass' epic battles with the slave-breaker, Covey, is about young Fred refusing to be whipped anymore: but turning around and beginning to whip the whipper with its own whip! Thereby he assumed the faith that he could command his own destiny by similar means of self-assertions and exertions. This pairing requires equal parts faith and work. Assertion invites testing. Exertion proves the assertion (or not). Thus our formerly, famously enslaved forbears used to sing a song of assertive self-exertion: "Oh, walk together children, don't you get weary! Walk together children, don't you get weary! A big camp meeting is up ahead ." The same may be said for the two million "slaves" who are in prison. That they are "slaves" clarifies for them, as it does for us, the actual breadth and meaning of the 13th Amendment, which excepts from its freedoms those who have been "duly convicted" of crimes. Those who have been "duly" and unduly convicted of crimes are principally, disproportionately, black people! So one way to help our prisoners to pull themselves up out of the rut of slave status is to empower them to work from within self to move from slave status into manhood stature. They cannot go wrong reading any or all of the six books listed above.