How we can help future history makers

OPINION - In schools and in neighborhoods throughout this country, a new generation of history makers are budding...

Sep 23, 2011

When he was a child growing up in Chicago, Governor Deval Patrick father, a musician, left the family to be raised by a single mother on Chicago’s South Side in the housing project’s of Chicago. His life could have taken such a different course. This man who would become the first African-American elected governor of Massachusetts. What a marvelous end to such an inauspicious beginning. What a role model and inspiration and example to today’s youth-many from a similar backgrounds.

Patrick’s life would take a different course when he was recruited into a program called A Better Chance, which provided scholarships to inner city students. He went on to attend Milton Academy and Harvard College and Harvard Law School. This is also the case of another Chicagoan, former Correspondent and Bureau Chief for Time Magazine, Sylvester Monroe, a graduate of St. George’s Preparatory School and Harvard College.

In schools and in neighborhoods throughout this country, a new generation of history makers are budding. Another Deval Patrick, another Barack Obama, another Sonia Sanchez, another Nikki Giovanni, another Melba Moore, another Common, another Andrew Young. They are there, but they too many are burdened by life’s circumstances. Too many are burdened by failing schools and failing school systems and a non-supportive and restricted community with few, if any role models.

Almost every week, we get a different report showing a high dropout rate for African American males in high school, a disparity in the scores of blacks on college entrance tests, and an achievement gap between blacks, whites and browns on national standardized tests for elementary school students.

Those failures are not excuses to continue a cycle of failure in our communities. Instead, they present for current day history-makers a chance to lift and inspire today’s youth, to talk to, coach and mentor them and to show them another way out, just as others showed them and they were inspired to pursue another, different path.

What would happen if Cornel West or Skip Gates and others descended from the halls of academia to spend a year or two sabbatical working and teaching in the urban schools of today? What a difference that would make. The chance to bring Ivy League education into urban America while mentoring young boys and young girls who have never heard of Princeton, Yale or the Ivy League? What would happen if those who have “made” it dedicated their free time to improving the lives young people in need-not randomly, but with a plan?
In our African-American communities and in our rich African-American heritage we have the resources we need to close the achievement gaps, reduce the level of poverty, and equip our children for brighter futures. We are that resource and this is a call to action.

That’s where The HistoryMakers, the nation’s largest African-American video oral history archive steps in.

On Friday, September 23, hundreds of African-American leaders across the country will go into classrooms all across the country for the Second Annual Back to School With TheHistoryMakers program.

As leaders, we first must commit to supporting education and excellence for all of our children. Education is that privilege that ensures the promise of a better life beyond the poverty line that for generations has held back the hopes and dreams of many.

As leaders, we must inspire the leaders of tomorrow as they sit in crowded classrooms with increasingly less literacy. By returning to our schools and maintaining a presence, we show our children living examples of success and achievement. We will show them a different and better way-a new paradigm for an increasingly global economy.

Yes, the names of our HistoryMakers appear in history books, in newspapers and on the internet. But new subjects will be needed in the future, and our children must be challenged and prepared now to step into the footsteps and make longer strides than those who have gone on before.

We cannot sit on the sidelines and ask others to do for us the things we can do for ourselves. We cannot deny our children the experience of a personal encounter with success.

We, the African-American leaders, parents, and mentors of today, must do everything in our power to ensure future generations their place in our history in the years to come.

Julieanna Richardson, a Harvard trained lawyer, is a public historian and Ffounder and Executive Director of The HistoryMakers, www.thehistorymakers.com, which is headquartered in Chicago