I Want To Be A

Wherever You Go In The History Of America, There Have Been Black People Making Contributions, But Their Contributions Have Been Obscured, Lost, Buried.

You Can Say I Had A Severe Case Of 'roots' Envy. I Wanted To Be Like Alex Haley, And I Wanted To Be Able To... Do My Family Tree Back To The Slave Ship And Then Reverse The Middle Passage, As I Like To Put It, And Find The Tribe Or Ethnic Group That I Was From In Africa.

The African American's Relationship To Africa Has Long Been Ambivalent, At Least Since The Early Nineteenth Century, When 3,000 Black Men Crowded Into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church In Philadelphia To Protest Noisily A Plan To Recolonize Free Blacks In Africa.

No One Thinks Of Mexico And Peru As Black. But Mexico And Peru Together Got 700,000 Africans In The Slave Trade. The Coast Of Acapulco Was A Black City In The 1870s. And The Veracruz Coast On The Gulf Of Mexico And The Costa Chica, South Of Acapulco Are Traditional Black Lands.

Very Few Black People Ever Embraced Back To Africa Movements, And Very Few Actually, A Tiny Number Actually Went Back To Africa. They Said, "we Are Going To Make America Live Up To The Ideals Of The Declaration Of Independence And The Constitution Of The United States." They Produced One Of The World's Great Cultures; They Produced Individuals Who Were Just As Brilliant And Made Contributions To The World Civilization. In Fact, They Produced A World-class Civilization, The African American Civilization, In Music, In Dance, In Oratory, In Religion, In Writing.