Build Black Better America: My Uncle Sam

"NOW THAT THE WAGON IS OUT THERE, WHO'S GONNA BRING THE WAGON BACK?"REV. SAMUEL DEWITT PROCTOR

Rev. Gardner "Transfiguring Power of the Cross" C. Taylor to many black preachers of the old days, after colored folks became what the President who even at Arlington Cemetery on Veterans Day called Negroes, far beyond Brookly was the "Dean of Black Preachers", said that any one of his achievements for another man would have been the culmination of a career, but nobody can doubt that the black preacher who could actually preach a sermon in Harlam pulpit on the Kantian Categorical Imperative and managed to get an amen, valued education, and it would be very difficult to say that Rev. Samuel Dewitt Proctor was in any position just because he was black.

Unless you ascribe athletic talent to the way that colored folks were bred or by genetics, not every black person is Tiger Woods, Jessie Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan or even Simone Biles, and they got to where they were, like General Benjamin O. Davis, General Frank Pedersen and General Daniel "Chappie" James pinned on a star, because they were a lot more than just black at a time when there was a push for affirmative action and an upcoming election.

Samuel Proctor lived amongst the priestly class of black preachers, coming from a family of black preachers, in an age where you were not considered a preacher without a proper education to include graduation from seminary, and even he will tell you that when he was attending Crozier Seminary, nobody let him in just because he was black, and in that priestly class, religion notwithstanding, if you were a preacher without the proper credentials in education, you were not really a preacher and were not considered a part of the club in the "preacher mafia."

The preacher mafia could pick up a phone and put their kid in an HBCU, no tests, no interviews and no application required, but in that old black aristocracy, even defying the brown paper bag tests and continuing focus upon skin color, by the time we got to the 1970s, if you were not at least second generation college, you were NOKD, and when your parents sent you to college, you did not marry the not marrying kind, no matter what else that Devil inside you told you to do.

So, whether you look at Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., or Rev. Bill Gray, or Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., you are not just looking at people who had preachers in their families, you are looking at colored folks who had gone to college, and in a video tribute to Rev. Proctor he either engaged in willful blindness or simply had never had inside his circle of interactions, a preacher who simply was not "qualified to preach", calling of the Lawd notwithstanding.

And, in an election year where white folks have decided to make black folks the election issue and battleground, again, before anyone gets too excited about new holidays for the wrong day, white folks saying they loves black folks and we need to teach them their history in school and teach whites that they are inherently racist--assuming only white folks could properly teach that lesson, a bit racist in itself--I would highly recommend doing a little homework on what a black preacher like the ever optimistic or aspirational leader Rev. Proctor would describe as an "America great again."