I find it ironic and more than a little paradoxical, even troubling, that so many black leaders have exhorted young graduates not to look back, but to only look forward ; telling them there was nothing inspiring or noble, to look backward to in their past..
Alexander Crummell, the great Cambridge-educated, Episcopal priest from New York, who had lived and worked for years in England and in Liberia, who founded St. Luke Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. , for example, said these thing in 1896 to students at Hampton Institute about looking back:
"But you are not of kingly or noble heritage. You and I are the inheritors of sorrows and disasters. The painful memories of past servitude are our inheritance ! Up they come, thick and fast; the agonies and the wrongs of our ancestors, torn from their native land; the horrors of the mid-passage; the long stretch of crushing and benighted slavery, 200 years and more, on the blood-stained soil of America!
"What can all these yield but bitterness, melancholy and despair? Human beings are born for destiny! Their lives are given to them in order to stretch out, beyond their times, to somewhat beyond and above both selfish and transitory things."
P.188, CIVILIZATION AND BLACK PROGRESS : SELECTED WRITINGS OF ALEXANDER CRUMMELL (1995)
Yet, in counseling and admonishing black students to refrain from looking back, this elite and learned man, turns right around and looks back himself to the scriptures which go back thousands of years in the past.
He writes: "You have read the scriptures and you see in them, how not a few of their great men fixed , early in their lives, their ends and objects of pursuit . They did not wait for age, or maturity, ere they decided what they would do, in this busy responsible life which God had given them." (Ibid.)
So, if looking back into the scriptures is good,--and I agree that it is --then, looking back into one's own history is just as good, at least!
Crummell regrettably like so many others did not know our history, and therefore, had little or no respect for it. Such historical ignorance and the intergenerational self-hatred that it has wrought, has been our bane and doom for over a century.
We must know our American history and African history, thoroughly, and respect them, passionately, if we would ever be free!
Saturday, May 2, 2015
BLACK HISTORY AND SCRIPTURES
I find it ironic and more than a little paradoxical, even troubling, that so many black leaders have exhorted young graduates not to look back, but to only look forward ; telling them there was nothing inspiring or noble, to look backward to in their past..
Alexander Crummell, the great Cambridge-educated, Episcopal priest from New York, who had lived and worked for years in England and in Liberia, who founded St. Luke Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. , for example, said these thing in 1896 to students at Hampton Institute about looking back:
"But you are not of kingly or noble heritage. You and I are the inheritors of sorrows and disasters. The painful memories of past servitude are our inheritance ! Up they come, thick and fast; the agonies and the wrongs of our ancestors, torn from their native land; the horrors of the mid-passage; the long stretch of crushing and benighted slavery, 200 years and more, on the blood-stained soil of America!
"What can all these yield but bitterness, melancholy and despair? Human beings are born for destiny! Their lives are given to them in order to stretch out, beyond their times, to somewhat beyond and above both selfish and transitory things."
P.188, CIVILIZATION AND BLACK PROGRESS : SELECTED WRITINGS OF ALEXANDER CRUMMELL (1995)
Yet, in counseling and admonishing black students to refrain from looking back, this elite and learned man, turns right around and looks back himself to the scriptures which go back thousands of years in the past.
He writes: "You have read the scriptures and you see in them, how not a few of their great men fixed , early in their lives, their ends and objects of pursuit . They did not wait for age, or maturity, ere they decided what they would do, in this busy responsible life which God had given them." (Ibid.)
So, if looking back into the scriptures is good,--and I agree that it is --then, looking back into one's own history is just as good, at least!
Crummell regrettably like so many others did not know our history, and therefore, had little or no respect for it. Such historical ignorance and the intergenerational self-hatred that it has wrought, has been our bane and doom for over a century.
We must know our American history and African history, thoroughly, and respect them, passionately, if we would ever be free!
