When I contemplate history, I know it is a miracle that I am here today. My ancestors survived capture from their villages, being torn away from their families, their culture, their rituals, their heritage, their language, treated like animals instead of humans. One of God’s creations. Shackled and dragged across the mother continent, then shoved into the bowels of a slave ship.

 

I am a miracle. My ancestors survived the agony of the belly of a slave ship, sandwiched together like sardines in a can. They survived sickness, torture, starvation, as they endured the tormented months it took to journey across the Atlantic Ocean in seven square feet of space to be sold at auction like animals and chattel.

 

I am a miracle. My ancestors survived four hundred years of brutal slavery. Four hundred years of white inhumanity, downright cruelty, families torn apart, beatings, and back-breaking work in the scorching sun under the direction of an overseer’s whip and the depravity of the master.

I am a miracle. My ancestors survived the Great Depression, Jim Crow, lynching, Night Riders, Sundown town, the massacre at Rosewood, the Atlanta riots, Thibodaux Massacre, New Orleans Massacre, New York City Draft Riots, the Red Summer, Opelousas Massacre, Wilmington Insurrection, the Tulsa Race Riot and countless other atrocities not documented in history.

 

I am a miracle. My ancestors survived low wages, or no wages, poor educational opportunities, housing discrimination, racial discrimination, harassment, poverty, police profiling, voter suppression, mass incarceration, human medical testing, and ignorance.

 

I am a miracle. I am strong. My ancestors were stronger, braver. They persevered in times so troubling and inhuman, I can’t begin to imagine their pain and suffering. Everything I do is in honor of everything they did.