Black History Month: Who Inspires You?

-

 

The other day, on LinkedIN I posted inviting folks to celebrate someone who inspires you this #BlackHistoryMonth. As I thought about who inspires me every day, it turned out to be someone whose name most people wouldn’t recognize, someone not in the history books. It is my mom, Kathleen A. Benjamin.

Mom became a para-professional working in classrooms when our youngest brother at the time started first grade. When we were in Junior High, mom started going to college part time. She eventually went on to earn her Master’s in special education. During a teacher’s strike, she joined others in crossing the picket line and teaching her class, dad standing guard outside her door. She said black kids needed an education more than she needed a raise.

As a teacher, she taught our peers and their children and in some cases their children’s children.

As a parent, she taught us “By the sweat of thy brow, thou shall eat bread.” Back before Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday was a federal holiday, a lot of black and brown students stayed home on his birthday. Not us through; mom made us go to school. She stopped our protests by telling us, “The best thing you can do for black people is go to school, get and education and make something of yourselves.” She and dad produced two writers, an accountant, and an engineer.

I think our youngest brother, Kenon, summed it up best when at her funeral he said: She may have only been four-foot ten, but she was a giant in my life.

Who inspires you?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Catching Up With...Stacey Thomas, the Philadelphia Wedding Chapel

-
Image
If you read this blog regularly, you know that I recently married my longtime partner (see Musings Stanley (left) and me with Stacey Thomas of a New Husband, June 29, 2014 . Ever since I was a kid, I dreamed of marrying some bright prince. And as a writer of gay romance, I’ve written gay weddings into two of my books, brilliant, extravagant affairs both. The wedding in What Binds Us ,  included a groom on horseback and “Ten thousand pale pink roses—an entire crop from Holland flown in that morning,” while at the comparatively simpler wedding in Unbroken “it seemed everyone in the world was there” including a flock of startled peacocks. Yet, when it came to my own wedding, panic set in. I didn’t know where to start. I knew I didn’t want to get married in a church and I knew there wouldn’t be hundreds, or even dozens of guests in attendance. In desperation—at that point we only had two weeks to get married on our 17 th anniversary—I goggled “weddings in Philadelphia.” The Phila
Read more

On Writing Part Two: (You’ve Got to be) Ruthless

-
Image
I remember when I first started writing seriously, I would come across all these articles where writers talked about “honing their craft.” That would immediately trigger an eyeroll and a metaphorical flipping of the page (after all most of these articles appeared online). Now seven years later as I begin work on my fifth novel, I’m rethinking that. I still dislike the term, sounding as it does as if one was practicing sorcery. Though, now I’ve come to realize that when we write, we create something out of nothing, which is kind of a neat conjurer’s trick; you (hopefully) pull gold from straw like a literary alchemist. And sometimes, too, being a writer can feel like you’re playing God playing house. You breathe life into your characters after all and give them companions and adventures. The story itself is the Universe you created for them. The characters are the bones of the story; the plot and the conflicts are the capillaries and veins and arteries. And the words are the skin. T
Read more

A Fatherless Father's Day

-
Image
Max as reluctant to let Dad go as we were. I remember the accident as if it was yesterday. I had been living in Washington, D.C. for three years. That particular morning, a Saturday, I was running late for work. It was a gray, wet morning at the edge of Winter. Heavy rain, like molten white gold, fell from an aluminum sky as I blazed along at 80 mph. A gray car merged onto the roadway from the right, then proceeded to move into my lane without signaling. The car was moving so slowly it looked like it was moving backwards. I pressed the brakes hard, pumping steadily with increasing pressure, my right hand tight on the gearshift ready to down shift. Realizing collision was inevitable, I glanced at the speedometer: 60. The impact sent my little car spinning towards the concrete divider separating west-bound traffic from east. The world seemed upside down. I remember thinking, I’m going to die and I never got to be friends with my father . I glanced up at the sky, oddly unafraid,
Read more