Black Achievement and Success Stories”

The time is overdue to turn the page on the backward-looking 1619 Project. Has it caused a single black person to better themselves and set a standard to which the wise and honest may repair?

The path forward is to exalt, celebrate and salute black achievement and success stories to inspire the living and those yet to be born to strive for excellence and courage.

It should be underscored that the achievers and successes represent a rich diversity of thought and convictions. They marched to their own drummers even if it meant encountering stiff head winds. Nothing is more insulting or demoralizing than to be told that your ambitions, viewpoints and philosophy are predetermined by your race.

Let us begin with miseducation about a fictional character: Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" published in 1852. Uncle Tom is extraordinarily Christian. The climax of the story comes when Uncle Tom is asked to reveal where two slave women are hiding, who’d been sexually abused by their cruel master Simon Legree. Uncle Tom refuses. Knowing that he is going to be beaten to death, he refuses to reveal their whereabouts. In other words, Uncle Tom signed away his life to save two black women – the very definition of heroic.

But later movies and critics airbrushed out the true Uncle Tom in the novel. They substituted a craven, docile, submissive black man to be execrated – akin to substituting Satan for Jesus. No one protested or corrected the dastardly falsehood. Uncle Tom today is understood as a slur to disparage a black person thought to be humiliatingly subservient or deferential to white people. But the real Uncle Tom was a hero. Just read the novel. It has been in the public domain for more than 170 years. It is not ambiguous about Uncle Tom's gallant bravery. The true Uncle Tom infuriated slaveholders, which is why

President Abraham Lincoln quipped upon meeting author Stowe in 1862, "(S)o you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

We have lost Uncle Tom as a wonderful positive role model through sheer ignorance and intellectual cowardice.

Crispus Attucks anticipated the genuine Uncle Tom. He escaped slavery to become a mariner. He was murdered during the 1770 Boston Massacre, the first casualty in the American Revolution. In death, Attucks was afforded honors that no person of color – particularly one who had escaped slavery – had ever received before in America. Samuel Adams, spearhead of the Revolution, organized a procession to transport Attucks' casket to Boston's Faneuil Hall, where Attucks lay in state for three days before the victims' public funeral. An estimated 10,000 to 12,000 people – more than half of Boston's population – joined in the procession that carried the caskets of Attucks and the other victims of the Boston Massacre to the graveyard.

Attucks became a symbol in the 1840s for African

From the Editor

“On Assignment from God”

RowVaughan Wells said her son told her that he would be famous one day. No one could have ever guessed that it would be because of what would happen to him while trying to get home safely to his mother.

But Wells now believes that Tyre Nichols’ fatal drive home was an assignment from God–that his death would serve to change a system.

We surely hope so, though that hope is often diminished by the continuous flow of fatal police encounters around the country and a club of mothers (no one wants to join) who hope that their sons’ lives were not lost in vain.

Of course, much has been said about the five now fired and criminally charged police officers being Black, which really only magnifies the hurt while flying in the face of the one constant –that traffic stops can be fatal for Black men.

Perhaps the Rev. Al Sharpton put the best twist on the Black police officer perspective in his eulogy at the funeral of Tyre Nichols.

"Five Black men that wouldn't have had a job in the police department - would not ever be thought of to be in the elite squad - in the city that Dr. King lost his life... you beat a Brother to death,” Sharpton said.

“There's nothing more insulting and offensive to those of us that fight to open doors, that you walk through those doors and act like the folks we had to fight to get you through them doors.

"You didn't get on the police department by yourself. The police chief didn't get there by herself. People had to march and go to jail and some lost their lives to open the doors for you - and how dare you act like that sacrifice was for nothing?"

The Tyre Nichols case has been said to be a defining moment for the Memphis Police Department, but I believe it is a defining moment for all of us to push for the abolishment of qualified immunity which protects law enforcement officers from individual liability. It has been a sticking point in the passage of federal police reform.

Just two years ago, New York City became the first big city to ban qualified immunity for police officers, permitting individuals to sue those who violated their rights, mandating that they pay for at least part of civil rights violations.

You want to see change? Then speak to that. Advocate for that, understanding that being able to hold officers liable for their actions is a gamechanger.

Turning to this month’s issue, we celebrate a man whose accomplishments–too numerous to mention–can hardly be done justice in one article, though we have certainly done our best in the cover story starting on page 12.

Truth is, his impact is immeasurable–be it in the lives he’s touched through his preaching, through those his church’s 75 ministries have served or in the tens of thousands who have been inspired by his words, his books or his life.

I am privileged to call this man–on assignment from God– a friend. I met him in the year I launched L.A. Focus and we immediate hit it off, so much so that he said to me, ‘You need to have your offices in my building.”

That was in 1996 and that is–to this day–where L.A. Focus is headquartered.

I’ve watched him do things most people would never attempt with the fearless courage of a champion, the true test of which is not so much the victory as the overcoming of obstacles to attain it.

He said something to me once that I’ve always believed to be the secret of his success and that is simply this: “If you ever grasp how big your God is, it will impact how big your dreams are”.

ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS Guest Columnist

American activists in the abolitionist movement, who promoted him as an example of a black citizen and a patriot. He gave the lie to Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney's counter-factual, racist assertion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that African Americans "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Martin Luther King wrote in 1964 that black schoolchildren "know that the first American to shed blood in the revolution that freed his country from British oppression was a Black seaman named Crispus Attucks." Could he write that same sentence today?

The black pantheon includes the likes of Dr. King, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, W.E.B. DuBois, William Monroe Trotter, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Jesse Owens, the Tuskegee Airmen, Paul Robeson, Ralph Bunche, William Hastie, William Coleman, Jackie Robinson, Edward Brooke, Muhammad Ali, Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell and Ben Carson. A complete list is impossible as a concession to the shortness of life and article space. I regret the omission of many other deserving black Americans. All have proven the electrifying truth of the poem "Invictus" ("unconquered" in Latin) by William Ernest Henley: "I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul."

Dwell on the positive, not the negative, in black history. Exult over the glorious possibilities for the future rather than cry forever over split milk. Every parent knows a child is doomed if given excuses for failure like manna falling from heaven. Scapegoating accomplishes only stagnation. Everyone is capable of genius: "(O)ne percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration," according to inventor-genius Thomas Edison.

Go for it!

To find out more about Armstrong Williams, visit www.armstrongwilliams.com.

LISA COLLINS Publisher

They are words I am sure inspired many of those on whose shoulders we stand as we celebrate Black History month and those whose sacrifices have paved the way for our successes.

I was fortunate enough to be raised by history makers through my Dad, a former Tuskegee Airman who served as Executive Director of the Western Christian Leadership Conference under Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; and my stepmother, Evelyn Boyd Granville, the second African American woman to receive a Ph.D in mathematics in the nation (the first from Yale University). She went on to work on orbit computations for NASA’s space program, ultimately becoming one of their “hidden figures.”

Next month, I will be in Atlanta celebrating a statue being dedicated to one of my first mentors, Xernona Clayton, a civil rights activist who became the first African American from the South to host a daily prime time talk show before going on to establish the Trumpet Awards.

To be sure, there is a lot -to celebrate in our rich history and the powerful testimonies of faith that have seen us through. I take pride in knowing that the fruits of those who labored, sacrificed and died for us have resulted in a rich harvest of talents that have powered our progression and bred a new generation of dreamers and achievers.

Keep the faith.