Saturday, February 17, 2018

CHECKING AND PREPLANNING

CHECKING BACK, PREPLANNING As snippets of microscopic DNA tell us about our very distant past, snippets of our distant recollection can tell us, teach about ourselves . In grade school, our teachers told us, continually to check, to go back over our answers, before turning them in. I periodically resisted this time consuming activity and when I did so, I also later paid for it in my grade. As I moved along further in school, I learned of the value of outlining sentences as well as future activities before doing them. Preplanning is just as important "checking" before doing anything. These thoughts occur to me as I reflect back upon my last night's reading in RADICAL EQUATIONS (2001) by Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr., whose breadth of wisdom, history, practical utility leaps forth from their heroic struggles in Mississippi in the period 1960-1964 in SNCC. This book has introduced me to the magnificent Mrs. Ella Baker whose long life 1903-1986, grandmotherly training about slave revolts as a child in North Carolina, where she graduated from Shaw University in Raleigh, in 1927, made her the main resource for multitudes of leaders. Ella embraced "checking back" on the values, work of black forebears and the tactile strength of common folks, while preplanning for all work ahead. She reached everybody who was anybody and just as many nobody's who became somebody!