I have heard people suggest that once we arrived in America, we accepted our fate as slaves and focused on just surviving the cruelty of our situation. Nothing could be further from the truth! From our earliest days here in America, we resisted, we escaped, we fought to be free.

African Americans quick rise to success after the end of the Civil War, didn't happen by accident or by luck. Before the leaders of the Confederacy could see that they were losing, we saw, we understood and we prepared.

At same time we were educating ourselves, building our schools and institutes of higher learning, we also knew we had to be part of the decision making process. So we entered the political arena and we were very successful!

From make shift classes in living rooms and churches, to one room schools and the institutions we built with our hands and pennies. We knew that knowledge was the fuel that would power our success. And that hard work paid off. We unlocked minds that would change the world!

Fed up with the suffocating Jim Crow Laws by the mid 1900’s we had built sufficient strength to start to push back on the unfair segregation laws. After World War II, many soldiers came home expecting to be at the very least treated with the respect they feel they had...