How Do We Get Our Children Back?
by Betty Jean Grant
Betty Jean Grant
I know I chose an attention drawing title for this Op-ed, and I am sure many are wondering why I chose that particular heading. Its words can be used to imply situations where we seemed to have lost the ability to raise our children to be productive and contributing members of their family unit through adulthood. How about a community’s push toward engaging our youths to take their rightful and earned places alongside and at the knees of our longtime Griots and other historians, whose job it is to always tell the story of who we are— where we came from and how we wound up here, in America, in the first place?
Although it is well documented that African explorers visited North American and possibly South America centuries before the artifacts, found on Easter Island, that resemble Africans— with their thick lips and broad noses— we don’t give enough credit to Africans skill as travelers (i.e., boatmen) who had the ability to travel the 7,000 miles or more, from Africa to Chile. The, dark-skinned, broad nosed, ocean travelers may have been the models for this fantastic, discovered treasure, or they may even have been the artists or sculptors themselves.
After decades of old quietness and the lack of inclusion of youths into the planning stages of how to rebuild our community, re-establish and cultivate partnerships between the old guards, who held the neighborhoods together, and the newer generation of young, up and comers. There is now a movement that seems to be coming together to achieve a workable and positive outcome to what needs to be implemented if we are truly serious about saving our young people.
This writer does not have the answer to a problem that partly developed and festered through the actions or inaction, of racist and selfish city hall and political leaders who saw no advantages in working with the poverty stricken and economically deprived neighborhoods, where the majority of Black and low income citizens of Buffalo were housed.
As I, too, celebrate the soon-to be, Grand Opening of the Hispanic Heritage Corridor on Niagara Street, I am reminded of the long and hard struggle the long neglected Eastside community and its political leaders had in bringing resources to the city to do right by the African American Heritage Corridor.
In addition to the Nash House, The Colored Musicians Club, WUFO Radio, Michigan Street. Baptist Church, and the current home of the NAACP; the leadership of the A.A.H.C. is in the process of acquiring available real estate in the area to increase their footprint. I sincerely hope that the addition of a Buffalo Museum of Black History be added to the List of Things Black People Need or Should Have in the African American Heritage Corridor, on the Eastside of Buffalo.