Dr. Rosalyn | Thank You is Not Enough

So today reminded me of two things. Life is short and we have work to do while we are here. I am asked often when I sleep, and thanks to what feels like inherited insomnia, I don't really sleep much. But I'm okay with that because while I am up I am usually working on something. Something for my students, campus, my family, me but something. Part of that is because I know I've been blessed a multitude of times just because I was in the right place at the right time and I need to put that energy back out in the universe

One of those places was Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. I got there decades after a civil rights icon walked around the small but love filled campus. He also protested with Diane Nash and others in Nashville to integrate the city and make it palatable for people like me who showed up completely unaware of his connection. I had seen him in Eyes on the Prize specials but there's something different about being in that space and understanding the struggles that he must have faced. He came back to visit often as many as our stellar alumni did and so you will see my classmates with photos of him, I was a Nikki Giovanni stan so that's who my photo is with, and you will see what he meant to them and me. What you won't see is that every visit he did with a quiet grace and wanting to make sure that we were okay. I don't know that I really still understood what it meant for him to sacrifice there and with Dr. King later in Selma so that we could have the vestiges of freedom we had even though there were still struggles to be had and battles to be fought. 

It's what I think some of the younger generation when they are complaining about what we and others didn't do for them don't understand either. Every battle won made the next fight easier and no we should have to fight at all but without men and women like him and CT Vivian and Dr. King and Malcolm X and Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman and Shirley Chisholm and countless others the moment we are having now would not be possible. I get it. Wanting change now is what we can do when we know where we could be and we are tired of waiting. But we have to take a moment to pause, reflect, and thank every one of the ancestors who had the audacity to survive and thrive in the wake of things would couldn't begin to wrap our minds around if we wanted to. So thank you, Mr. John Lewis. It's trite and not adequate but every part of who I became is attributed to being blessed enough to walk in the shadows of giants from a vast arena of fields both in my family and outside of it. I'll continue working on my six hours of sleep because I have work to do. He was a gentle giant in a compact frame and nothing that anyone says about him in the ensuing days will really be enough to speak to what he meant to America--all of America--in the work that he did. Rest well, Senator. The fight is ours now.