GOD IS & WAS

GOD IS & WAS BEFORE THERE IS & WAS TIME, SPACE, MATTER, ENERGY & AFTER THEY CEASE TO BE. AMEN .

LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL DELIGHTS

LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL WAS A LABOR OF LOVE One of my most savoring experiences was being a volunteer in education instructor at Lincoln High School KCMO, 1977-1978, when I was employed by the U.S, Dept. of Labor. As a new Missouri lawyer, I had applied to teach at Lincoln, in a joint program with the KC Bar and the school district, when Dr. Charles Wheeler was Superintendent. Mrs. Katherine Smith was the teacher to whose room I was assigned. The students were bright, eager, attentive and disciplined. While we were supposed to talk about juvenile delinquency, I knew better then to bring that mess into my context. it was not me! So, me being me, I brought in black history, spirituality, and upward mobility to these all-black students. Consequently, I brought in stock brokers, commodities dealers, real estate brokers, insurance agents, physicians. and others, after explaining to the class how these people interacted with their lives, and showing them, how they, too, come become such. The program lasted just one year. The students showered me with gifts in the end, and with a surprise classroom party. A few years later, a young woman came to work in the United States Attorney's Office, in KC, where I then worked, as a clerk. I was delighted! she regaled in my tutelage at Lincoln. After that, a former male student, sent his sister to me with a worker's compensation case, when I was in private practice; that male student had become a railroad executive in France. Finally, a few years later, another of my students, a Senior V.P. with Charles Schwab & Co. retained me to represent him in his legal case. in KC, while he lived and worked in Florida. At a concert in KC, a young man in a gas mask approached me, with marijuana smoke seeping from its seals. Turned out to be another of my students! "Mr. Coleman! Mr. Coleman!" he said, "I'll bet you didn't recognize me, did you?" No indeed! I conceded. I took this example to talk about drugs and chemistry, relative to obtaining "utilizable skills" in life, rather than being victimized by any public, scurrilous conduct. No names were mentioned. I later learned he had eared a degree in chemistry from a Missouri university. Praise God! All of these wonderful experiences rewarded me for my work, as a volunteer- educator. All rewards are not immediate; nor cash. Feelings of love, joy, communion, hope are rewarding !

RULER AND SUNDAY SCHOOL BOOK

A RULER, A SUNDAY SCHOOL BOOK A ruler and a Sunday School book were our late Uncle Emmett Love's emblems, symbols, stock in trade. Uncle Emmett Love Coleman was our father's younger brother, who went to trade school in Mississippi, who built a house at age 16, who became a licensed bricklayer and stonemason of note in St. Louis from the 1950s-2000s. He was an artist with his trial, a magician with his creative artistic imagination in construction and homebuilding. At age 4 or 5, I walked about in a big house on Big Bend Boulevard in Meacham Park, Kirkwood, Missouri, that he and other skilled workers, including Daddy, were repairing and rehabilitating prior to moving his family from Electric Street, where they resided down the street from us. A bit of plaster nearly splashed in my face, as I was watching one of the Ward brothers plaster the ceiling. He told me to "get back out of the way", lest I be hurt, accidentally injured! I have never forgot plaster's near-miss! My brother Harold recently recalled Uncle Love to mind, in a phone call. Harold reflected upon our uncle's ruler and Sunday School book, that he carried around with him as he traveled. His being a brick and stone mason explains the ruler. The Sunday School book was from church. For like all our Coleman clan, Uncle Love loved the Lord! Uncle Love was a vested member of the Olive Chapel AME Church. A stained glass window bearing his name is still in the church. He was a delegate to the AME Church's 1984 General Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, that I briefly attended just in time to receive a "Discipline" that was distributed freely to delegates. I was not a delegate, but at Uncle Love's behest, I went down to the gathering of colored folks in KC to witness the wonder of it all, and to see our beloved Uncle Love! So. I got a Discipline too in their mass distribution, being colored myself! Ten years later, I would be first a member, then a preacher then an ordained itinerant elder at Brooks Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, myself, after joining Allen Chapel KCMO, under Rev. Alvin L. Smith; then being assigned to the Butler, Missouri, 1871 facility by then Presiding Elder, W. Bartallettte Finney, in September 1995. But whenever I was in St. Louis, I especially enjoyed attending Uncle Love's Sunday School class at Olive Chapel AME Church in Kirkwood, Missouri. It was taught by the late Harold Whitfield, Esq., an older black attorney, who may have been the first such in St. Louis County, a testament in itself to a lowly status. Though in my 40s-50s by this time, I was still viewed as a pup by these elders. But a bright and active pup! In a way, then, Uncle Love's ruler and Sunday School book led me straight into the AME Church from a period of religious uncertainty as what followed my fellowship in the St. Matthews CME Church, also in Meacham Park, Missouri, our family Church, where Daddy and Mama raised all of us; where also Mama's named is etched in its cornerstone. More broadly, then, having some command of the technical and the spiritual is a winning family ticket! Get you a ruler and Sunday School book! You will see! wonders, when you put them to their naturally intended uses!

"FEWEST OF ALL PEOPLE"

My church in Butler, Missouri, in 2008, had only 3 official members, a 300% increase over what it was in 1995, when I was sent there to pastor to but 1 member, "Mother" Helen Cooper, now deceased. We did have about 12 regular non-members who came to worship the 2 Sundays per month that I preached there, and who fully participated in giving and all related church labors. But the Spirit of the Lord moved on that tiny, Brooks Chapel A.M.E. Church in a very mighty way. That divine movement is best epitomized in a mounted, bronze, statuary model of a black, Civil War-era, soldier on the Bates County Courthouse grounds. We raised the money for the statue, hired the sculptor, secured the ground, and dedicated the statue in 2008, in a large public gathering featuring U,S. Congressmen, state Senators, bands, floats, prayers and praise, and 1st Kansas Colored re-enactors from Oklahoma. This was done through our church's Amen Society, to honor the six former slave soldiers and one Cherokee Indian, who all fell for freedom in battle. Their valorous memories were not only unconsecrated, locally, but were long forgotten,if ever known, by local residents. Those gallant pre-United States Colored Troops, (U..S.C.T) were members of the "1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry". They died heroically October 29, 1862, in the Battle of Island Mound, in which they defeated a mounted unit of about 400 Confederate irregulars who were at least twice their number. The 1st Kansas Colored infantry whipped them on their feet! They were the first black unit to fight in the Civil War. Their widely publicized victory surely further encouraged President Abraham Lincoln to issue his "Emancipation Proclamation" on January 1, 1863, as a "military necessity," which enabled the general enrollment of black troops, and the liberation of slaves. in parts of Confederate states, but not in Missouri, a so-called "border state," like Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware. Henceforth, I shall equate always Deuteronomy 7:7 with Brooks Chapel A.M.E. Church, and the Amen Society, who, although small, were and are mighty in spirit, faith, and works, as stated in the scripture. Cudos to Rev. Harold Coleman for the scriptural reference, which inspired this holy post. Amen! Deuteronomy 7:7 King James Version (KJV) 7 The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people: King James Version (KJV)

TRUTH IS TRUTH

Truth is truth. No matter who affirms or denies it. Truth sustains itself, being reified in nature.

THE NEW NEGRO, ALAIN LEROY LOCKE

"THE NEW NEGRO" Dr. Alain LeRoy Locke , the first African American Rhodes Scholar, wrote an essay in 1925, entitled "The New Negro." I read it for the first time last night in the book he edited: THE NEW NEGRO AN INTERPRETATION (1925, 2015). I had not previously read this essay, although I had attended Howard University, for seven years, where Locke taught for 40 years, and I had taken classes in Locke Hall that was named for him, in his honor. I encourage each of you to read it, the essay, at least, if not the book. My first annotation to the text of his essay came upon reading the following: "And finally, with the Negro rapidly in process of class differentiation, if it ever was warrantable to regard and treat the Negro 'en masse' it is becoming with every day less possible, more unjust and ridiculous. "In the very process of being transplanted, the Negro is becoming transformed. "The tide of Negro migration, northward and city-ward, is not only to be fully explained as a blind flood started by the demands of the war industry coupled with the shutting off of foreign migration, or the pressure of poor crops coupled with increased social terrorism in certain sections of the South and Southwest . Neither labor demand, the boll-weevil nor the Ku Klux Klan is a basic factor, however contributory any or all of them may have been. The wash and the rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for improvement of the conditions. With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance--in the Negro's case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern ." P.5-6. Being myself a beneficiary of that "deliberate flight" from South to North in search of "social and economic freedom," through my parents, who migrated from Mississippi to Missouri in 1955, Locke's explanation comports with my parents' many declarations! Yet, as I continued to read on, I noticed that Locke seemingly was avoiding any mention of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, or of Garvey's great idol and mentor, Dr. Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee , except by indirection and veiled allusions. Consequently, I was fully prepared to dismiss Alain Locke as a useful commentator, until I read the following redemptive conclusions: "The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem. A Negro newspaper carrying news material in English, French and Spanish, gathered from all quarters of America, the West Indies, and Africa has maintained itself in Harlem for over five years. Two important magazines, both edited from New York, maintain their news and circulation consistently on a cosmopolitan scale. Under American auspices, three pan -African congresses have been held abroad for the discussion of common interests, colonial questions and and the future of cooperative development of Africa. In terns of the race question as a world problem, the Negro mind has leapt, so to speak , upon the parapets of prejudice and extended its cramped horizons. In so doing it has linked up with the growing consciousness of the dark-peoples and is gradually learning their common interests... "Garveyism may be a transient , if spectacular, phenomenon, but the possible role of the American Negro in the future development of Africa is one of the most constructive and universality helpful missions that any modern people can lay claim to." P.14-15. I salute Howard's Dr. Alain Locke's perspicacity and faith expressions! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_LeRoy_Locke

THE NEW NEGRO

"There is, of course, a warrantably comfortable feeling in being on the right side of the country's professed ideals. We realize that we cannot be undone without America's undoing . It is within the great gamut of this attitude that the thinking Negro faces America, but with variations of mood that are if anything more significant than the attitude itself. Sometimes we have it taken with the defiant ironic challenge of [Claude] McKay: "'Mine is the future grinding down to today Like a great landslip moving to the sea, Bearing its freight of debris far away Where the green hungry waters restlessly Heave mammoth pyramids, and break and roar Their eerie challenge to the crumbling shore.' "Sometimes, perhaps more frequently as yet, it is taken in the fervent and almost filial appeal and counsel of [James] Weldon Johnson 's: "'O Southland, dear Southland! Then why do you still cling To the idle age and musty page, To a dead and useless thing?' "But between defiance and appeal, midway almost between cynicism and hope, the prevailing mind stands in the mood of the same author's 'To America ', an attitude of sober query and stoical challenge : "'How would you have us, as we are? Or sinking 'neath the load we bear , Our eyes fixed forward on a star, Or gazing empty at despair? 'Rising or falling? Men or things? With dragging steps or footsteps fleet? Strong, willing sinews in your wings, Or tightening chains about your feet?' "More and more, however, an intelligent realization of the great discrepancy between the American social creed and the American social practice forces upon the Negro the taking of the moral advantage that is his. Only the steadying and sobering effect of a truly characteristic greatness of spirit prevents the rapid rise of a definite cynicism and counter-hate and a defiant superiority feeling. Human as this reaction would be, a majority still deprecate its advent, and would gladly see it forestalled by the speedy amelioration of its causes . We wish our race pride to be a healthier, more positive achievement than a feeling based on a realization of the shortcomings of others." P.12-13, "The New Negro," THE NEW NEGRO AN INTERPRETATION, by Dr. Alain LeRoy Locke (1925, 2015)