Getting Ready for Black History Month: A Little Girl's Dream

The following story was sent to me by a former classmate of mine from high school. I thought it a creative way to remind us all that Black History Month is approaching, February 1-29. Like most children's stories, there's a message for all of us as well. This is a Guest Contribution.

A STORY FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH
by Diane Williams Cunningham

Please close your eyes and open your mind to a school girl kneeling down to pray at bedtime.

“Almighty God, thank you for this day in my 9-year-old life. Forgive me for anything I did, or thought wrong. Thank you for my family, friends and my teachers, too. God, I’m the only black person in my history class, and I’m sad that no black people who look like me get mentioned for achieving anything, but were only used in slavery to pick cotton. Could you please answer me, Lord, as to what else they did, so me and my people can feel part of history? You put us in this color skin and You teach us that our lives do matter. In Jesus Christ’s name, amen. Goodnight, Lord.”

I fell asleep and in my dream the Lord appeared as a tall man wearing a green tee-shirt with bronze-colored arms. I could not recognize His face, but he took me on a history journey. In my dream, morning came fast.

As I awoke and touched the lamp next to my bed I found a name written on a tag--Lewis Latimer: black inventor, 1848-1928, light bulb carbon filament. He was the draftsman for the patent Alexander Graham Bell was awarded.

Thomas Elkins

I rushed to use the bathroom and here I found another tag--Thomas Elkins, black inventor, 1872. The commode toilet. It had an easy chair, washstand, table/mirror and bookshelf all in one dresser unit.

Much to my surprise everything I needed for my hair was lying on the sink; shampoo, conditioner, healing formula and straightening comb. The tag read--Born Sarah Breedlove; married name--Madam C.J. Walker--the first self-made female millionaire, black inventor, 1867-1919.

Thank you, Madam C J. You knew us girls needed help for our hair.

As I ran down the stairs and opened the refrigerator another tag stared at me--T. Elkins again, 1874, refrigerator apparatus. He used metallic coils that chilled as coolant liquid cycled thru them. No more ice needed to keep food preserved and cold.

Well, now I needed a sandwich to go with my glass of cold milk, so I grabbed the peanut butter. Oh, to my surprise, yet another tag: George Washington Carver, first version of peanut butter 1860-1943, botanist, chemist, nicknamed the plant doctor. He is accredited for over 300 uses for peanuts, soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes.

George Washington Carver by F.B. Johnston
Library of Congress

George W. Carver was educated at Iowa State University 1894-1896. He invented crop rotation. He made improvements to peanuts and many other things such as: adhesives, axle grease, bleach, buttermilk, chili sauce, fuel briquettes, ink, instant coffee, linoleum, mayonnaise, meat tenderizer, metal polish, paper, wood filler, gasoline, washing powder, plastic pavement, shaving cream, shoe polish, synthetic rubber, hand lotion, face lotion, talcum powder, wood stain and so much more!

Dr. Carver was asked in a letter from Booker T. Washington to come help him at Tuskegee University where they could not pay him the salary he was earning, nor give him a luxury place to live. He felt so honored that he adopted Booker’s middle name, Washington.

He said, “It’s not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank that counts. These mean nothing. It is simple service that measures success.”

Whoa, I thought, go my people!

Mailbox invented by Philip B. Downing (1857-1954)

I’m on my way to catch the school bus now, and passed a mailbox tagged--Black inventor, Philip B. Downing 1891. I’m smiling and excited, too. Then the bus stopped at a traffic light--tagged black inventor 1877, Garrett Morgan.

History class just couldn’t come fast enough. I’m going to tell them all about our black achievements. Lord, just let me out of this dream. The man in the green tee shirt said, “It’s Black History month every day. Go on and tell them how important All my people are to me. Wake up now, my child, and go tell them.”

Copyright Diane Williams Cunningham

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"I love to think of nature as unlimited broadcasting stations, through which God speaks to us every day, every hour and every moment of our lives, if we will only tune in and remain so."
--George Washington Carver, letter to H.W. Pelt

Related Links
Against All Odds: The Rags to Riches Story of Sarah Breedlove Walker
Inventions By Thomas Elkins @ My Black History
Inventor, Entrepreneur & Publisher Garrett A. Morgan
Inventor and Engineer Lewis Howard Latimer
100 Great Books by African American Women  

EdNote: If you are a children's book publisher or know someone in that field, I believe this little story could easily be expanded and become a wonderful teaching tool. 

Kylie Jenner: World's Youngest Self-Made Billionaire? Only In America.

 Creative Commons
 Attribution 3.0 Unported

When I was doing the karaoke scene in the 90s* one of my openers would frequently be the 1964 hit Come A Little Bit Closer, by Jay & the Americans. It fit my range and I'd enjoyed the song in my youth.

For 50 years I'd always assumed that Jay & the Americans were a Latino group from South o' the Border, based on that song and another in the playlist, Only In America, which opens like this:

Only in America
Can a guy from anywhere
Go to sleep a pauper and wake up a millionaire

Only in America
Can a kid without a cent
Get a break and maybe grow up to be President

I had no idea that Jay Black (real name, David Blatt) and his buddies were from Long Island. The sentiments in this song were similar to what many have believed who migrate here from abroad.

Only in America
Can a kid who's washin' cars
Take a giant step and reach right up and touch the stars

The song, of course, is about a poor boy ending up with his dream girl who also happens to be from a higher class. But it's also cherishing this "land of opportunity."

I remember reading a book by a young man from Indonesia who seemed shocked to discover upon his arrival that the streets were not actually paved with gold. (Currently a lot of our local streets are pockmarked with potholes, but that's another story.)

This song came to mind for me when I read this week that Kylie Jenner, age 21, has become the world's youngest "self-made billionaire"? It seemed like an "only in America" kind of story.

(How the other half lives.) Photo by Vita Vilcina on Unsplash 

The story I read appeared in Inc. Magazine, referencing the annual Forbes listing of the world's richest which they publish each spring. The article begins, "If you hope to become a billionaire, the United States may be the best place to live. That's one obvious conclusion from Forbes' list of billionaires for 2018."

The article by Minda Zetlin is titled Here's Why the U.S. Created More Billionaires Than Any Other Nation in 2018. Zetlin points out that the rich did not all get richer in 2018, that 46% declined in net worth for various reasons. (I remember Ted Turner noting that when he went from 10 billion to two billion, he still ate pretty well.)

The U.S. leads the league in billionaires, adding 21 new ones to their roster for a total of 607. That is 50% more than were on the Forbes list in 2010.

How they obtained their riches is what the meat of the article is about. Though some billionaires inherited their fortunes, entrepreneurs make up the bulk of the new billionaires. And though Kylie Jenner is the youngest ever, other notables have climbed that ladder in their 20s, including Mark Zuckerberg at 23.

There's a sense in which she gained a lot of help by flowing in the tailwinds of the Kardasians, but building a following of 104 million on Snapchat didn't hurt anything either. Oh, and did we forget to mention she created a cosmetic business? She didn't inherit her wealth. She essentially leveraged her fame, with her name an established brand.

I know that a lot of people have issues with capitalism right now, but you can be sure Kylie is not one of them.

At the pinnacle is Jeff Bezos, followed by the familiar names of Gates (the college dropout) and Buffet (Warren, not that guy from Margaritaville.)

Only in America.

* * * *
Related Links
To see the Forbes article visit www.forbes.com/billionaires/#24597813251c
Wikipedia entry on Kylie detailing her entrepreneurial acumen. She skipped college and has no college debt.
A REAL rags to riches story about a freed slave and black woman who made a fortune in the cosmetics game, Sarah Breedlove Walker.

EdNote: No doubt Kylie's privileged background contributed to her achievements. She didn't start her career as a shoeshine boy or bellhop, so would probably be disqualified as a Horatio Alger story role model.

* I actually sang karaoke in 14 states. 

Against All Odds: The Rags to Riches Story of Sarah Breedlove Walker

“You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can’t do something themselves, they wanna tell you, you can’t do it. If you want something, go get it. Period.”
-–Will Smith, The Pusuit of Happyness

"Success Motivation" seems to have become a cottage industry in this country. It didn't start with Tony Robbins. The list of familiar names in this genre is a long one: Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich), Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, and the seed corn for many of these -- Horatio Alger. Nowadays with social media we've got a whole new generation of self-empowerment gurus tooting the horn for blogging and social media as the new avenue to bank vaults of revenue.

Whereas it's fairly easy to poke fun of get-rich-quick hucksterism (as P.T. Barnum observed, a sucker is born every minute), in truth this country has from its earliest foundations been built on dreams. The Pilgrims and other early settlers saw America as a New Eden, a land of opportunity and possibilities. The Founding Fathers risked all they had to wrestle this unformed body of people into an independent land of opportunity. If you were a negro slave, however, the American Dream was not quite the same experience.

Horatio Alger published 100 books about poor boys who achieved success and riches through hard work, determination and integrity. Though the later books became caricatures of the foundational narrative (Ragged Dick) the "Horatio Alger story" became so much a part of the American culture for the next century that you never had to read any of the books and you knew the story.

ALL THESE THOUGHTS came to mind at once when I read the PBS account of Grassroots Saleswoman Sarah Breedlove Walker. Born to freed slaves just after the Civil War, she was poor, illiterate and a woman, the most unlikely candidate for a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches adventure that you'd ever encounter. Walker became one of the wealthiest women in America and a major fountain of philanthropic influence. She did this at a time when women could not own property, did not have the right to vote, and women were pretty much prevented from being in management.

Walker began her "career" as a washerwoman, bringing home a buck and a half a day to support her and her daughter. Over time she found inspiration from Booker T. Washington who encouraged blacks to learn skills and lift themselves up by hard work and "emphasizing good character."

The message resonated and Sarah Breedlove Walker pursued her dream. I can imagine that there were ample quantities of nay-sayers telling her that she'd never accomplish what she set out to do, making a small fortune in beauty products. The PBS account states:

By 1910, Walker had moved the Mme. C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company to the railroad hub of Indianapolis, Indiana. Advertising and marketing became the keys to her success. One of the largest employers of African American women, she carefully screened, groomed, and trained a 3,000-person strong sales force that was motivated by working on commission. In addition to door-to-door sales, Walker sold via mail order, and personally demonstrated her products in churches, schools, and other gathering places. She took lessons in public speaking and penmanship, and cultivated a striking persona, in fine clothing and a chauffeur-driven electric carriage.

Her contributions to African American orphanages and a new fledgling organization called the NAACP made her one of the best known women in America during her lifetime.

What is your dream? Don't listen to the naysayers. Nurture it.

* * * *

“The vision that you glorify in your mind, the ideal that you enthrone in your heart, this you will build your life by, and this you will become.” –James Allen