Thank you for coming out. It is a pleasure to spend some time with you afternoon. This year will mark the 51st year of the celebration of Black History Month in America which was inaugurated, as you know, at Kent State University in 1970, in Kent, Ohio.

The United States of America as you know now is 243 years old; it seems like we have a lot of catching up to do. To get started I am going to give you several important dates in the history of African and African-American people. I want you to keep these dates in mind as we set the background for our discussion today. I am sure most of you know about these events so I am only going to give you a snippet about each of them. If you want to discuss any of these issues further just write me at otislee.com I am on a personal journey to write three books, a trilogy some would call it, all of them dealing with African-American people and our struggles. I have written two of those books over the last 15 years both of which, I will, to some extent, discuss this afternoon and, I have begun research on the third book, which will deal with Afro-Brazilian culture during their colonial period.

The first book is entitled “From South Boston Cambridge, the Making of One Philadelphia Lawyer,” and the second is “The Last Train From Djibouti.”

Now, I am not a historian but I am, a student of history. As one of my favorite historians, John Hope Franklin, has said, I am self tutored on many of these matters. Perhaps self tutoring is the best way to learn anything thoroughly.

It is important to me, to take note of important events especially in the history of African-American peoples. I want you to take a trip with me, some would say a journey through history. I am going to mention only a few epic dates of importance to the black diaspora there are many other dates that are important including the dates when African countries gained independence from European colonialism. It is important to know your history and equally important to be familiar with your culture, your ancestral culture being the most important to a people whose ancestral culture has been forfeited through no fault of their own.

Now we are told that in 1492 Columbus discovered America. Dick Gregory used to say when he was alive, “how can you discover something that was already discovered.” But I want to take you 50 years before 1492 to

August 8, 1444, Portuguese sailors unloaded 235 slaves near on the southwest point of the Algarve, in Portugal. A seaport city in the southernmost region of Portugal, nowadays a very scenic and tourist frequented place. Thus began the European traffic in slaves from West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa and southern Africa.

In 1619 the first Africans were brought to British North America to subsequently be known as the United States of America. This would have been in Jamestown in the Tidewater area of Virginia. The slaves brought to Virginia were seized from a Portuguese slave ship.

1791 Toussaint L’Ouverture led the only successful slave revolt in the Americas resulting in the establishment of the country of Haiti. 400 years later In 1833 the British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act which ended slavery in the British colonies:

In 1834 slavery ended in the British Caribbean Islands; Bermuda, Cayman Island British Virgin Islands etc. And in 1848 slavery was abolished in the Danish West Indies; St Croix, St. Thomas, St. John and Water Island, and in that same year, in the French Caribbean, Martinique, St. Martin.

In 1857 a black man by the name of Abraham H Galloway who was born in Smithville now known as Southport, NC escaped from slavery along with seven other men by rolling down the Cape fear River until they came into contact with the a Union Army ship that was a part of the blockade of Wilmington wherein he and his fellow men were set free. The Cape fear River played a big role in providing access to freedom for slaves along the southeast coast of North Carolina.

The local author and professor at UNCW, Philip Gerard, found that “180,000 black men fought in the Civil War. 82 African-American men from the Wilmington area ran away and joined the Union Army or Navy and a dozen of them returned to fight in the final battle of Fort Fisher; of the 9000 troops who stormed the redoubts nearly 1/3 belonged to what I called the United States colored infantry regiments most of them former slaves…” There were two other notable colored infantry regiments among several during the Civil War, namely the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry Regiment and the more famous Massachusetts 54 military Regiment which was organized in 1863 after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. I have a copy of an etching of this Regiment in my office that I have retained for many years. When I look at it I am inspired to keep fighting for myself my family and for my people. I had the pleasure of seeing the memorial to this Regiment and to Col. Robert Gould Shaw the commander of the unit in Boston Commons in Boston Massachusetts several years ago on a visit to Boston.

That The Cape Fear River for those who could swim or were familiar with boating, offered a means of escape from slavery if the slaves could reach the union ships anchored off the coast of the mouth of the Cape Fear River blockading Confederate batteries and redoubts. The “Black Waterman and Black River pilots manned what became known as the “Nautical Underground Railroad” from Wilmington downstream in the Cape Fear River to its mouth.

In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Dred Scott versus Sanford: that slaves were not citizens and could be taken to any state in the union while remaining a slave. There were prior Supreme Court rulings which were more onerous to black people than the Dred Scott decision but we will reserve that for discussion at another time.

The Civil War in the United States began on August 12 1861 and on January 1, 1863 Pres. Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in all of the states that seceded from the union. And not those slaves being held in border states that supported the union. on April 9 1865. when the Civil War ended there were just under 4 million slaves in the United States . On June 19,1865, otherwise known as Juneteeth, Independence Day for slaves, slavery was ended in Texas and in the remaining parts of the Confederacy.

1888 Emperor Pedro the II who was succeeded by the princes Isabel Imperial Regent abolished slavery in Brazil on May 13, 1888, freeing over 4 million slaves. In 1896, the Emperor Menelik II, defeated the Italians at the battle of Adwa, that, add to the Japanese victory over the Russians in 1905 marked and emancipated episode in the history of nonwhite people over the whites of Europe. The victory at Adwa celebrated the victory of blacks over whites. At Adwa “the symbolic weight of the victory was greater in the areas where white domination of blacks was most extreme and marked by overt racism, that is, in southern Africa and in the United States of America.” Further discussion of this can also take place at another time. Adwa blew back the Italians when they attempted to colonize the country of Ethiopia. Ethiopia was never colonized, it was however, later occupied by the Italians. This was the first time an African country defeated a Western country in combat.

In 1896 in the case of Plessy versus Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal accommodations did not violate the law. But we all know that separate was very much unequal. I came up under this regime as many others did especially the older black folks. And in, 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown versus the Board of Education that segregated schools were separate and unequal and therefore unconstitutional. A lot of the younger people here came up under this legal precedent. Now, with regard to Brown vs Board, Brown was an aggregation of cases dealing with segregated schools in, Washington DC, Charleston South Carolina, Prince Edward County, Virginia and in Topeka, Shawnee County Kansas. In different parts of the country, black lawyers who handled these cases were: Thurgood Marshall, who finished first in his law school graduating class at Howard University School of Law, my alma mater. You know the rest, he was lead counsel; George E.C. Hayes, a, Howard University school of Law graduate, Charles Hamilton Houston who became dean of the Howard University school of Law, James Nabritt, Jr. who also became president of Howard University, and was president of the University during part of my matriculation there: Spotswood W Robinson III, a graduate of Howard University School of Law graduated first in his class in 1939 and earned the highest scholastic average in the history of the law school. There was also, Robert L Carter, a graduate of Howard University School of Law who went on to become United States District Court Judge. And Oliver W. Hill from Richmond, Virginia, a friend of mine, handled the Farmville, Virginia segregation school cases and presented me to the Virginia Supreme Court for admission to that bar years before he passed. Severnty -six, 76, years later, more than three quarters of a century on July 2, 1964 the Civil Rights Act in the United States was passed.

So, for more than 520 years, 1444 – 1964 some would say, over 17 generations Africans in one form or another, in one place or another, in the Western Hemisphere were held in bondage, subjugated, raped segregated, Jim Crowed, deculturated and lynched; kept from being treated as free men and women and their ancestral culture denied to them. You noticed I used the word deculturated. Decultrated means to be emptied of ones culture, an example would be to take a bottle or a glass and turn it up side down and pour the contents out, then put new ingredients into it, to fill up the space the old contents occupied, that is to be enclutrated with another’s culture and then asked to be assimilated with that host culture. You noticed I use the word assimilated and not acculturated. To be acculturated you retain some or most of your existing culture and traditions, that has not happened in the case of African- Americans. I talk about this in my book The Last Train from Djibouti. Aristotle has said “what is honored in a place is the culture of that place.” If you do not honor your ancestral culture then that culture will not be a part of the culture you live in every day.

So for over 17 generations Afro Americans Afro Brazilians Afro Caribbean’s and Afro West Indians were denied access to their native cultures. This was not by happenstance, it was intentionally done to deprive Africans of their connection to their homeland and culture.

So the question is, what has been the consequences of this deprivation? The book that I have written The Last Train from Djibouti tells the story of the affect of this deprivation on two African-American women, and what they did in an attempt to overcome this deprivation.

How many of you have experienced being in an elevator with people who do not look like you, most of the time, standing across from you who start talking in a language you do not understand. It is the language of their culture. In most instances they understand your language, English but, you do not understand their language. In most cases you have only one language you can speak fluently, English, why is that? One simple reason is that the language of your ancestral culture has not been carried forth in the culture you live in today in America. And there is a reason for that, it is called deculturation which means depriving one race of its culture while enculturating that race with another culture. That is what has happened to us since the 15th century, in one form another.

Language is an important aspect of culture. Depending upon where your ancestors came from in Africa your native language may have been one of many languages spoken in the continent of Africa, perhaps Swahili, the lingua franca, of Africa. But most of you know nothing about that. “Africa beckons me but America is my home” this phrase is the subtitle of my book “THE LAST TRAIN FROM Djibouti” so the language you know is English the culture you know is Anglo-American culture but, as the author William T Campbell in his book Middle Passages, African-American journeys to Africa 1787 to 2005 exposed me to an African proverb from the African Mende tribe in Sierra Leone “you know who people really are by the language they cry again.” What language do you cry in?

So the question I posed to you is the question that African-Americans have been asking themselves for over 220 years: Countee Cullen the African-American port sought to answer that question in his poem “Heritage,” “What is Africa to me?”

Let me read just a few lines of the first stanza of this poem:

Copper sun or Scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronze men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
from the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
So I lie, who all day long
Want no sound except the song…

From the end of the 18th century to this day the issue of African-Americans returning to Africa continue to reverberate in our American culture. Africa remains an enigma to many, a citadel of African-American ancestral culture to others and a repose for whites seeking to return African-Americans to their native land. The recent comments by Pres. Trump to “send them back” is not an unfamiliar declaration to people of color. The process of wanting to send African-Americans back to Africa began during the last quarter of the 18th century and was promoted by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison as well as notable African-Americans of that period including Paul Cuffee, a black man who was rumored to be, at that time, around 1815, the wealthiest black man in America.

But the debate among African-Americans in the 19th century was whether or not we should stay and fight for what we had earned or should we go back to mother Africa and try to make Africa better. By my last count there were over 3000/5000 African-Americans living in Ghana and over 121,000 living in Africa. In places like Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia. So the facts demonstrate who won that debate. The book that I have written entitled The Last Train From Djibouti encourages you to think about this perennial question, “What is Africa to me”?

“Copper sun or Scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronze men, or regal black…” The book tells a story of two women who go to Africa at different stages in their lives to find, what for them, was the “Golden Fleece” of their existence, their African heritage. You know, the “Golden Fleece” in Greek literature was sought after because of what it symbolized and there are many theories about what it symbolized but, the one that I like best says that “the Golden fleece was about a voyage from Greece, through the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic to the Americas.” So, it was for these characters, in the The Last Train book, a journey from America to Africa.

One of these women an African-American professor from a prestigious Ivy League university become in her mind, an African, and the Africans let her know she was not an African! She was rudely awakened to the fact that she was not African, and nothing she could do could transfigure her being from an African-American woman to an African woman. But, why would she want to become African, was her life so untenable in America that she saw Africa as a panacea?, the “best of all possible worlds” for an African-American? The other young woman, a student at another prestigious college sought a cultural connection, a chance to reconnect, she found that connection but also found a lot that disconnected her from Africa.

Should we stay or should we leave? That question has long been answered; we stayed, we fought and we have persevered.

Let me close by sharing with you a poem about Africa that came to my attention from Fred Joiner, Poet Laureate from Carrboro, NC, 2019, Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow; written by another great African American poet, Langston Hughes.

Africa sleeping giant,
you’ve been resting a while.
Now I see the thunder and the lightning
in your smile.
Now I see the storms clouds
in your waking eyes:
the thunder,
the wonder
and the new surprise.
Your every step towards
the new stride in your thighs.

Folks, this is what the book The Last train From Djibouti talks about; this quandary that we as black people have about being in America and not being in Africa and realizing the trade-offs between both situations.

The subtitle of my book is “Africa beckons me but America is my home” I encourage you to read it and think about your place in the black Diaspora to ask yourself what does Africa mean to me?

Our Muslim brothers and sisters have a practice of undertaking what is known as the Hajj. Malcolm X made that journey and it changed his life. The Hajj to Muslims is a sacred right of passage is the pilgrimage road for them they are required at least once in their lives to travel from where they live to go to Mecca in Saudi Arabia as a manifestation of their belief in their religion. I think it is the duty of every African-American who can afford to do so to take a trip to Africa to whatever country you desire for the purpose of being amongst our native peoples at least once in your lifetime.

John Hope Franklin in his autobiography entitled “Mirror to America” said this about this experience going to Africa. 16. “On the first full day of my visit to Legos, that’s in Nigeria, the former capital of Nigeria, I went for walk, eager to observe the people as much as I could. One man, about my age, walked up to me, extended his hand, and said, “welcome home, brother.” I had never previously regarded Africa as “home,” and his greeting gave me the opportunity to think on the idea of “motherland” and what it’s significance was to me and the millions of others whose distant past was rooted in the land south of the Sahara. I rapidly came to a firm decision; even if that handsome Nigerian was not my brother, I was prepared to adopt him and to view the soil under his feet as my home away from home. At that moment, I became determined to as assimilate as much of Africa’s culture as I possibly could.”

This is the thought that I want to leave you with today., albeit difficult, remember, you do have choices. That your people have a motherland that is not filled with anti-black racism and police brutality. Africa has its own problems many of which require difficult resolutions, it also has many beautiful cities which rivaled anything you can get in Europe and America. But think broadly about your horizons and from which you came.

Finally, Nelson Mandela, was quote by a biographer, as having said, that “he could not be broken by his many years in prison, at hard labor because he knew he had been sired by a King. Do you know who your ancestors are?

Thank you. And now if there are any questions.