ALPHA PHI ALPHA FRATERNITY, INC, MU LAMBDA CHAPTER
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The President’s Message Greetings Brothers, Perspective. During the this past month I was on sabbatical and out of town for the most part. During that time my plans were to ride my motorcycle taking a scenic route through the Sky Line drive and Blue Ridge Parkway to Atlanta and then to Montgomery AL. While in Atlanta I was going to see three of my line Brothers who live in the Atlanta metro area along with other Beta initiated Brothers who were available including my special who is also a member of Mu Lambada. In Montgomery AL my goal was to visit the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, (https:// museumandmemorial.eji.org/), along with visiting the campus of Tuskegee University. I actually considered going to Tuskegee when I was graduating from high school but had never seen the campus or been to the state for Alabama. The ride along the Sky Line Drive was both beautiful and terrifying. It was off and on cloudy. When riding in the clear sky along the mountain and stopping by the overlooks it was breathtakingly beautiful. When riding through the rain clouds with very, very little visibility it was terrifying. It was definitely a test of my riding skills and concentration. When I completed the Sky Line Drive it was close to dark and I decided to not ride the Blue Ridge Parkway in the dark and clouds. So I took the regular road to a quaint little inn in Floyd VA along the route. Thinking along the way hmm I could have not made it through those clouds. The next morning it was too cold for me to ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway to Atlanta and decided to jettison that part of the trip and take regular roads to Atlanta. While in Atlanta for a few days before the going to Montgomery I got to spend time with my line Brothers and other Brothers who have shaped and influenced my life. I also spent time with lifelong great friends from my days in college and beyond. It was a refreshing and
wonderful time. During one of those days I noticed the foot shifter parts were loose on the bike and I made a mental note to fix it or replace the parts when I got back home. On to Montgomery to the museum, memorial and Tuskegee. My one and only niece lives in Atlanta and I invited her to go with me on the journey to Montgomery. She accepted so instead of taking the bike we road in her car for the 2.5 hour trip. Along the way it was great talking with her about her life my life, family history and characters, and various topics. The Legacy museum was a powerful, unflinching, serious, realistic and high tech focus on our experience as a people from the transatlantic slave trade through mass incarceration. Unlike the NMAAHC in our home town the Legacy Museum is more narrowly focused. It shakes you to your core and gives you a visceral reminder of what we have experienced as a people, how much strength we have to had endured and that this strength is still in our makeup today if untapped in some of us. Equally somber and powerful was the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It is an outdoor quite place where the names and unknown names of the hundreds of Black men, women and children who were lynched are etched in 805 hanging rectangular metal structures almost like coffins and above the names of the lynched is the county and state where the atrocities occurred. Maryland and Pennsylvania is represented sadly as well as Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and many other states. My niece was pretty shook up. After the memorial we took the journey to Tuskegee University which in a way gave us an emotional uplift. Of course I had reached out to the Brothers at the Gamma Phi Chapter and exchanged emails with their president but they were attending their district conference so I did not get a chance to connect with them, but I still dragged my niece to their plot. The ride back was of course full of conversations about the journey. continued on the next page
MU LAMBDA TORCH 2021
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