Hiya Tino Hadley !

I like you pretty well too. I was pretty pissed off when I wrote this stuff last night. W. E. B. DuBois is one of my heroes. I don’t like so much the disagreement he had with Booker T. Washington, because I think they both wanted the same thing. DuBois was just ahead of Washington and thinking further into the future in my opinion. I love them both, either way.

They stay alive for me. I remember them. I wept for days the first few pages into Washington’s biography — when I read that he didn’t know how old he was because no one bothered to write down a slave’s birthday.

I just wrote that and started crying. That makes me SO ANGRY. He grew up without a birthday! I can’t even fathom not knowing something like that about myself. It’s illustrative of something else too —

I interviewed a man named Mario, he was studying to be a Jesuit Priest. He told me that he couldn’t go back further in his family line then Mississippi where his father joined the military. He didn’t know where his family was from before Mississippi and the Great Migration! This is a very common unknown.

They say, don’t look at Geneology.com — you won’t find anything there. To steal someone’s history is one of the sickest forms of abuse I can think of — and it is abuse. This is something that IS for many people in this country. Lots of people don’t know about this stolen history — the robbery that keeps on stealing. Forever.

But they don’t let their ignorance stop them from running to Wikipedia to degrade one of the greatest mulatto (hey! Those are MY people!) writers this country has ever seen for their own foolish purposes.

I am and was so frustrated. One of the founders of the NAACP, a great man, a fighter for all human beings and a brilliant mind. He’s still alive for me. I get angry when he’s disrespected.

Thank you for this, it made my whole morning. Would be interested in learning more about you and your thoughts on DuBois.

😎