We were told we didn't have history when we were the history. A. Meredith, but all over the world. So we are very privileged this evening to have someone who is, in fact, as Gary Bird likes to say, a crown in our jewel, and not taking time to go over his. His long long history of activism and activity and movement in our communities. I will simply ask that you welcome Dr. John Henrik Clarke. Us because we are still in. Abide a mental vine, because we were made into a new people in the so - called new world that wasn't new. No, I'm going to tell an old store that I've told many times it, yet it bears. Retelling when I came to New York, avid reader, mostly other people's books, and having the fourteen circumstances of working for white people have good libraries, and they never seem to read books, so they never seem to miss them when I took them home. And because I came from a group in the school from the. But associate ology is called the subculture, and there's no such thing but the extreme pool. And that was the exception because I was extremely poor and brilliant in the classroom. No, because of the color gradations. It's the things we don't talk about, but we should. Sooner or later within the school. Generally, the kids, whose complexion was more related to that of the master, got the privileges, and finally a fifth grade teacher change the pecking order, she said, No matter what color who gets his lessons, Bess gets the privilege. Did she change the whole assembly arrangement ? And so therefore now the dark skinned kids had captured the assembly, and I was the leader of what we call then the Black Brigade. So intending to outdo those middle - class kids will freak soon, will. Shoes all the year around and ate three meals a day, you know, I decided, but I would do something exceptional in the assembly. I would let you on the African inaction history, so I'd go to this white man. Got a good lover that I have been barn fun for quite some time and ask for book on the African and action history and the phraseology of the south of that day. When a white person is not Ruby to you is when he's kind. So he let me down slow. He told me, I'm sorry, John, you came for people that have no history when I began to search for history. But this is the main point I'm leading to is if, when I came to New York and met off the Schoenberg and wanted to know the whole history of my people, I was a teenage advance of teenagers. Do think like this on his lunch hour, henceforth within the hour, I want to know it all temenos Doe, It's a. Patiently. Told me to sit down and he said, Son, go study the history of your masters. What you call black history, What you call African history are the missing pages a world history. Now the cause of. Now began to study European history. I began to understand how African history was misplaced in the history of the world. Share, believe, inspire blacks, be.