JumpStart by Robb Armstrong for January 17, 2019

I once got into a “discussion” with a student who told me he couldn’t do something because he was Black. After the steam stopped coming out of my ears, I nailed him. “If I patted you on the head and said ‘Oh, you poor little darkie, you were born stupid and you’ll never be anything but’, I’d get sued within an inch of my life, and rightly so. But YOU sit there and tell me the same thing and expect me to buy it?!” I gave everybody in the room – black and white – an obscure black to report on the next day. Hiram Revels, Absalom Jones, Bessie Coleman, Elijah McCoy, Charles Drew, James Lafayette, etc. Not a “give-away” in the bunch. Class the next day was very interesting.