Allen M. Price

I was born five years, three months, and two days after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Providence, Rhode Island on July 10, 1973. My mother, who divorced my father when I was five, raised me in the predominately all-white neighborhood and schools of Warwick so I could get the best education they could afford. At the time, Warwick had one of the best public school systems in the state. For eighteen years we lived there. I was one of only two Black kids in the neighborhood as well as in my elementary, junior high, and high school. Blackness took a back seat, though it was always in the rearview mirror. I desperately wanted to be like the smart white kids in college-prep courses, and I did everything I could to be one of them. For many years, I had a reading and math disability, and once a week I was humiliatingly taken out of class to go to resources to improve my learning challenges. I entered high school having overcome those impairments, put myself into college-prep classes, and graduated my junior and senior year with honors. My need to fit into well-educated white society continued after high school. I graduated from Rhode Island College with a bachelor’s in accounting, becoming a first-generation college graduate. I then went on to graduate school, becoming the first one in my entire extended family to attend a private college, Emerson College, and be one of only two in the family to graduate from grad school, receiving a master’s in journalism. Leon Wynter, a Wall Street Journal columnist, former NPR All Things Considered commentator, and co-author of Congressman Charlie Rangel’s memoir, And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since, was my thesis advisor. I spent a summer at Harvard Summer School, a semester at MIT as a special student, and a semester at Harvard Extension School. Then I was accepted into Boston University School of Medicine for a Master of Science in Medical Anthropology and Cross Cultural Practice, but declined because I couldn’t afford the $50,000 a year tuition. I have studied with some of the world’s best and brightest minds from Paul Farmer to Owen Flanagan to Pulitzer prize-winning author, Paul Harding. I’m unapologetic and proud of having been so well-educated and the opportunities that were afforded to me as a Black man. My pride flags, though, in the wake of the strong opposition by parents and states banning critical race theory in schools.

From 1979-1991, I attended Holliman, Aldrich Jr. High, and Pilgrim High School. Every year the same one-size-fits-all, pure white, all-America curriculum was offered to us. My primary schooling provided me with no teachings on Blackness or Black literature, and little Black history. As I reflect back on it now, it was as if Black history wasn’t American history, as if Black literature wasn’t American literature. All these decades later, I still have all my notebooks and can still recall everything I was required to read in my history and English classes. Not one piece of Black writing was assigned to the only two Black students (me and another boy named DJ). And because of that I spent the first half of my life believing what those teachers and textbooks taught me. I believed them when they said Christopher Columbus discovered America and treated my ancestors with civility upon his arrival. I believed the Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower in 1620, landed in Plymouth, befriended, and had Thanksgiving with the Indians. I believed slavery ended in 1865 when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. I believed Rhode Island didn’t take part in slavery. I believed that Black equality was fully accomplished with the passage of the Civil Rights Bill and Voting Rights Act. I believed Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by James Earl Ray. And I pledged allegiance to the flag five days a week, putting my hand over my heart the same way I did when singing the National Anthem. I believed my teachers when they told us the song and pledge represented American pride and freedom. With all of that carved into the walls of my cranial, I emulated white America in order to be seen as a patriot so that I had as much of a chance of attaining the American Dream as any white man. I went out into the country with those learnings as the basis for how to live the American life, feverishly excited, optimistic, and open to the possibilities I was certain awaited me.

Over the next two decades, throughout my twenties, and by the end of my thirties, my optimism waned despite having made significant accomplishments. After college I worked as a pricing analyst for what was then the world’s largest mutual fund company, Scudder Kemper Investments. After graduate school I wrote for Natural Health and Muscle & Fitness magazines. I have since published in some of America’s most respected literary journals from Shenandoah to The Missouri Review to Transition. To see my name in storied journals where William Faulkner, Cornel West, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, and Flannery O’ Connor were published is still jaw-dropping. To know my work will continue on and have an impact long after I’m dead, I struggle to comprehend. I get goosebumps every time I think about it. But what I came to realize was that the more I wrote, the more I read, the less I knew about Blackness and the Black writers who wrote about the subject. I wondered why, how was it possible that none of my primary schools and colleges exposed me and my classmates to these Black Americans? I never imagined that my teachers and the required reading they assigned to us were untruths, so I didn’t question them.

It wasn’t until I read The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson that I got my answer. In it he wrote, “The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples. For example, the philosophy and ethics resulting from our educational system have justified slavery, peonage, segregation, and lynching. The oppressor has the right to exploit, to handicap, and to kill the oppressed. Negroes daily educated in the tenets of such a religion of the strong have accepted the status of the weak as divinely ordained, and during the last three generations of their nominal freedom they have done practically nothing to change it.”

I was 46 years old when I first read that. I savored every one of Woodson’s words, highlighting paragraphs on every page. I was never more acutely aware of my lost identity than I was in that very moment. The biggest and most important piece of evidence of the Black American landscape had been missing from my education, and in me, and left me wondering if that was the reason my teachers and/or school system didn’t want me to know my history, Black history. When you erase a person’s history, you erase a person’s identity. You erase how a person connects with their community and with humanity as a whole, and so I wondered, Does my life matter, do Black Lives Matter? Woodson wrote, “The only question which concerns us here is whether these ‘educated’ persons are actually equipped to face the ordeal before them or unconsciously contribute to their own undoing by perpetuating the regime of the oppressor.”

In spite of what I had done with my life, and being one of a handful of Negroes in every school, college, and workspace I entered, I was constantly wondering, do I belong in those white spaces? Am I truly traversing them or are they making a fool of me? Jim Crow was all about designating white space from Black space. But from the day I entered school I was consciously aware that those spaces still existed. When I was in the first grade, I went over to one of my white classmates and asked him to play. He told me, “I’m not allowed to play with niggers.” It disturbed me so much that I went home that day and told my mother and she told Mrs. Hickey, my first-grade teacher. My mother and Mrs. Hickey then told the principal. The principal called the parents of the boy and they all had a meeting in his office. The parents said, that that was how they were raising their children. So for the rest of the school year, they kept us away from each other. That six-year-old Negro endured enormous psychological trauma from that. I was a lab rat for racist whites to learn how to have their children not interact with Blacks, and for me to know what white spaces I was allowed in. That incident stayed with me like a rock in my shoe: Driving while Black, eating while Black, sleeping while Black, walking while Black, shopping while Black, talking while Black, biking while Black, standing while Black, sitting while Black, working while Black, and schooling while Black. That Negro kid was refused so peremptorily that for the rest of my schooling and beyond, contempt swam in my head. I questioned, was I an extension of that person or was that person an extension of me? Double consciousness became me. For I knew the country I lived in would yield me self-consciousless. I had no one to help me combat the feelings of resentment and self-hatred and lostness I harbored all those years. My lost identity left me with a bitter cry, why did God make me hated by so many white caste Americans?

“It is a peculiar sensation,” W. E. B. DuBois wrote in Strivings of the Negro People, “this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost.”

The miseducation, the uneducation, and opposition of my schools teaching Black history caused me immense emotional scarring, believing there was something wrong with me, and believing the history they taught me was true. I was shocked to learn that Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America, that he didn’t even make it to North America, that he only made it to the Caribbean islands, raping enslaving, and killing hundreds of Blacks who lived there, and that one of his crew members, Bartolomé de las Casas, wrote about the atrocities Columbus’ voyages caused and condemned them in his book, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Spanish: Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias.); that the Pilgrims didn’t land in Plymouth but landed in Provincetown first, and infected the Natives with the diseases they brought with them, killing the Natives in ways that have been defined as genocide; that at the time of the American Revolution there weren’t thirteen colonies but fifteen. Spain gave up La Florida in 1763 in exchange for recovering Cuba from the British. England then created East and West Florida as royal colonies making them the 14th and 15th colonies. East Florida stretched from the Atlantic to the Appolachacola River. St. Augustine was the capital. West Florida with the smaller settlement had Pensacola as the capital and reached to the Mississippi River; that slavery didn’t end with in 1863 when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but not until two years later on June 19^th, now an official holiday; that a Memphis jury concluded in 1999 that James Earl Ray didn’t fire the shot that killed Dr. King, but that Lloyd Jowers, a Memphis cafe owner, as well as “others including governmental agencies” were part of a conspiracy. Jowers, in a 1993 television interview, said that he had hired a Memphis police officer to kill Dr. King from the bushes behind his cafe, and he had been paid to do so by a grocery store owner with Mafia connections. One juror, David Morphy, said, “We all thought it was a cut and dried case with the evidence…that there were a lot of people involved, everyone from the C.I.A., military involvement, and Jowers was involved.” But the worst was learning that the pledge of allegiance was written to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival, a murderer, slave owner and sex trafficker, responsible for destroying the land and lives of thousands of Natives and Blacks in the “New World.” I pledged allegiance to the United States flag that flew over the nation at a time when my ancestors were whipped, shackled, mutilated, branded, imprisoned, raped, and impregnated by slave masters. When America allowed my ancestors to be legally lynched by the thousands. When the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy V. Ferguson that segregation was not only legal, but Jim Crow Laws were biblically just. And when FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover wiretapped, bugged, and sent MLK a letter threatening to expose his illicit affairs if he didn’t kill himself, calling Dr. King the most dangerous Negro in America.

“The same educational process which inspires and stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished everything worth while, depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples,” Woodson wrote.

The psychological trauma my mind felt from learning those revelations filtered through my body deceptively and created permanent damage. The deceitful history I had been fed was appropriated, used, manipulated, rewarded, and forced upon my consciousness with the equivalency of a blow on the head, leaving a lacuna in my psychic system. As part of the unraveling process, I realized how I had two different ways of living: believing that I was valued enough in America to make something of myself, and also believing that America saw my Black ancestry as something to hide, lie about to me and the children they teach. But then I realized that I had held these two beliefs in my mind at the exact same time just never in the same moment until I read The Mis-Education of the Negro. How this contradiction eluded me for so long was gut wrenching. The reschooling I was undergoing created this massive awakening. I had this sense of betrayal. The central tenant of this way of schooling me and my classmates left me convinced it was a system of the dehumanization of the other so that once they set up a frame of mind, which is essentially us against them, they could do things in terms of dividing people and turning them against each other. Why else would the school system have such disregard for teaching its pupils about American Black history? Why would they do this? Perpetuate such a lie? What is the reasoning, the strategy?

“Facing this undesirable result, the highly educated Negro often grows sour,” wrote Woodson. “He becomes too pessimistic to be a constructive force and usually develops into a chronic fault-finder or a complainant at the bar of public opinion. Often when he sees that the fault lies at the door of the white oppressor whom he is afraid to attack, he turns upon the pioneering Negro who is at work doing the best he can to extricate himself from an uncomfortable predicament. They hope to make the Negro conform quickly to the standard of the whites and thus remove the pretext for the barriers between the races. They do not realize, however, that even if the Negroes do successfully imitate the whites, nothing new has thereby been accomplished. You simply have a larger number of persons doing what others have been doing. The unusual gifts of the race have not thereby been developed, and an unwilling world, therefore, continues to wonder what the Negro is good for. These ‘educated’ people, however, decry any such thing as race consciousness; and in some respects they are right. They do not like to hear such expressions as ‘Negro literature,’ ‘Negro poetry,’ ‘African art,’ or ‘thinking black’; and, roughly speaking, we must concede that such things do not exist. These things did not figure in the courses which they pursued in school, and why should they? Aren’t we all Americans? Then, whatever is American is as much the heritage of the Negro as of any other group in this country.”

I became depressed, dispirited, broken because I realized how I had conformed naturally to the requirements of my role, the role that the school system instilled in me as a youngling. This instilment was nothing about me as a person, a Black person, but everything about the role I was to play in white American society. This discovery made me question who I was as a human. Why I even existed. To perform however white American society who ran the majority of school systems wanted me to. The same white American majority that ran the school system back then are today refusing to implement critical race theory.

Critical race theory originated as a field of legal study in the 1970s spearheaded by the first permanently appointed Black law professor at Harvard University, Derrick Bell, to address the little understanding we knew about how racism and discrimination are perpetuated in American law. In other words that race is a social construct, and that racism isn’t merely the product of individual prejudice, but is embedded in our legal systems and policies. An example was in the 1930s when government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black folk in those areas.

Although the field of study has been the domain of university law schools and graduate programs, it has become the framework for historians, journalists, and educators in school districts across the country trying to find ways of teaching about discrimination rooted in race. How the concepts translate into a school curriculum and teacher training have become the flashpoint of the CRT controversy. Because it’s a concept and not a subject, opponents have assembled lists for parents to identify what they see as harmful terms and topics. Opponents fear that CRT admonishes all whites as oppressors while classifying all Blacks as oppressed victims. These fears have spurred school boards and legislatures to ban not just CRT but all teachings about racism in classrooms. These narratives are gross exaggerations of the framework. It’s not a theory, and that’s where the problem lies. Because whites think it’s not based in fact, that it’s nothing more than a hypothesis, they think they have to refute it. It’s a proven, well-documented fact that white legislators invented laws that have created an inequitable system for Black and brown folk that still exist today. To refute that is to deny history.

“The teaching of history in the Negro area has had its political significance,” wrote Woodson. “Starting out after the Civil War, the opponents of freedom and social justice decided to work out a program which would enslave the Negroes’ mind inasmuch as the freedom of body had to be conceded. It was well understood that if by the teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his superiority and the Negro could be made to feel that he had always been a failure and that the subjection of his will to some other race is necessary the freedman, then, would still be a slave. If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action.”

The entire training of teachers’ teachings is to follow command, and the schools find ways to justify their programs. Regardless of the future ramifications to them or the children they’re teaching, teachers follow that command because the immediate threat is not having a job, or an income, or they deeply believe, perhaps in their DNA, that they have a moral reward in the belief that what they’re doing is right and for the betterment of the human race. Teachers are smart, charismatic, thoughtful individuals, but that combination also makes them extremely effective and successful and typical in the leadership role of a movement. The result can be division, polarization, which taps into the cultural genocide where one side believes it’s better than the other. White cultural genocide is the most current form of this in America, which many sociologists and scholars believe exploded when Barak Obama became the first Black American President.

The notion of cultural change scared millions of white Americans, and the tiki torch march in Charlottesville, Virginia was an example of that fear felt by white supremacists who shouted, “You will not replace us.” They believed that a Negro being president, and then taking down the confederate monuments was a take down and replacement of whites with Black and brown folk. That the true American is one who has white skin and white skin only. That the Natives who had been living in this nation for thousands of years before aren’t the true Americans because that’s not what is taught in our schools or what it says in our social studies books.

Trump, who is regarded by David Duke as a friend of the white supremacists, and whose security advisor Stephen Miller is a known white supremacist, said to the press after the Charlottesville riots, “You had people in that group to protest the taking down of a very, very important statue, and the renaming of a bar, from Robert E. Lee to another name. George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we gonna take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson, you like him?” to which one reporter responded, I love him. “Ok, good. Are we gonna take down the statue because he was a major slave owner? Now are we gonna take down his statue? So you know what? It’s fine. You’re changing history, you’re changing culture…” Trump’s comments are what the miseducation has done to Blacks and whites in America. The gilding of the lily, brand cleansing, has left us confused, lost, angry, sad, feeling foolish, and at one point in my life all those emotions brought out the best in me and the worst in me.

“History shows,” Woodson wrote, “that as a result of these unusual forces in the education of the Negro he easily learns to follow the line of least resistance rather than battle against odds for what real history has shown to be the right course. A mind that remains in the present atmosphere never undergoes sufficient development to experience what is commonly known as thinking. No Negro thus submerged in the ghetto, then, will have a clear conception of the present status of the race or sufficient foresight to plan for the future; and he drifts so far toward compromise that he loses moral courage. The education of the Negro, then, becomes a perfect device for control from without. Those who purposely promote it have every reason to rejoice, and Negroes themselves exultingly champion the cause of the oppressor.” “The lack of confidence of the Negro in himself and in his possibilities is what has kept him down,” Woodson wrote. “Here we find that the Negro has failed to recover from his slavish habit of berating his own and worshipping others as perfect beings. No progress has been made in this respect because the more ‘education’ the Negro gets the worse off he is. He has just had so much longer to learn to decry and despise himself.”

Having little knowledge of my ancestry destroyed my identity, which is vital to humanity. The disconnect I felt from my nation, from myself I still feel today. Part of how I have dealt with it has been by taking a trip to God’s Little Acre in Newport—the oldest and most intact burial ground of enslaved and free Africans in America. I didn’t know Rhode Island had such a place. I didn’t know Rhode Island played a leading role in the transatlantic slave trade, having more slaves per capita than any other New England state. I didn’t know that one of the first slaves to buy his freedom and sail back to his home country of Liberia lived in Newport, Rhode Island. Newport Gardner was his slave name. Occramer Marycoo was his birth name. Occramer spoke English and French and his native language. He learned to read, write, sing, and compose music. In 1778, he married an enslaved woman named Limas, and they had thirteen children. He was allowed to open his own music school, and keep some of the profits, which he saved to free him and his family. The school was located on Division Street in Newport, in a neighborhood that was mostly Black. There he taught and composed music. While none of his music survived under his own name, a few songs have been attributed to him, Crooked Shanks, Newport Assembly, and Promise. The success of his school allowed him to become active in the Free-African Community in Newport, Rhode Island.

In 1778, Rhode Island banned the importation of enslaved people, passed the Gradual Emancipation Act in 1784, and in 1787 passed a law banning slave-trade. Now free, Occramer established a school under the African Benevolent Society, and became its schoolmaster when it opened in 1810, staying on until September of that year. Shortly after leaving the school he was elected president of the Society, a position he held for a few years. But in 1821 his wife, and his grandson, Solomon, died. He grieved deeply. Then he along with one of his sons and other members of the African Benevolent Society traveled to Boston where they planned a voyage to the continent of his birth on the west coast of Africa. Before the voyage, he said, “I go to set an example to the youth of my race. I go to encourage the young. They can never be elevated here. I have tried it sixty years—it is in vain. Could I by my example lead them to set sail, and I die the next day, I should be satisfied.” He and his retinue set sail on January 4, 1826. The voyage took roughly five weeks, landing successfully in February. Unfortunately, many on board the ship had no immunity to the diseases in their new home and by April, almost all became sick and died, including eighty-year-old Occramer and his son.

January 4, 2021 marked the 195th anniversary of Occramer’s voyage to his homeland. I decided to go back to God’s Little Acre where Occramer’s wife, Lima, and three children are buried. God’s Little Acre is a small corner of the Common Burying Ground in Newport comprised of nearly three hundred markers of enslaved and free Africans—the largest and most intact African slave burial ground in the country. I discovered it by accident in June 2020. Stuck in the house because of the Covid pandemic, but riddled with anxiety and frustration over what had happened to George Floyd, I took a trip to the water, which is about a ten minute drive from my house in Cranston. The spiritual signification I had when I was there last summer whipped through the tunnels of my mind as I drove this time. The pictures swiftly fled into the shadows and evaded my grip, like a riderless raven horse with ironshod hooves kicking up clods of brain turf in muted thuds leaving hoof prints filled with black holes.

When I arrived I got out of my car and walked over to where Occramer’s wife and children are buried. The orange aurora was setting over the tombstones where life’s billows once soared. Green and yellow tie-dye colored summer grass hid the bones of my ancestors forevermore. Rays of sunlight shone down from the mauve sky and reflected off of the plain. Freshly leafed maple trees perfumed the air. On every leaf a light zephyr delighted. Shine and shade played on a bravura’s of red birds perched on every bough. They whistled with a cheer that filled the land and boosted my spirit. Echoes and ripples of the sea traversed the ethereal mead. I stood observing the atmosphere, inhaling the fragrance. The distillation perfumed my lost soul and revived my frame. My spirit meeting my ancestors meant no longer taking things at second, or third hand. No longer hearing the talkers talking. No longer letting the history I learned burn. No longer getting schooled about what never existed. Picturing the saints of my sable race winging their rapturous way to the native skies relaxed the turbulent eddies of the flow of my respiration, my blood pulsating, my heart pounding underneath my Black skin, and helped me grasp the origins of my ancestors’ poetry. But the song of their sun rising was what my ears longed to hear.

I genuflected in between the graves and listened. Ungainly, the passerines craned their necks in my direction, suspiciously, noiselessly eyeing this intruder, appearing fearful to scramble away into flight. Their glossy black eyes gazed upon me intently. I watched them watching me. Into their eyes my ancestors’ faces had remained. For some unbeknownst reason I smiled, rubbed the palm of my hand on the grass, and recalled a verse from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, “Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” I realized that the grass wants the mortal Negroes buried underneath its immortal soul, to be buried in the brown dirt it roofs, so its roots can grow and be connected, and merge them. We are all united. I was reminded of something Afro-Jamaican journalist Marcus Garvey said, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

Out of nowhere I heard my name gently whispered. I quickly turned around, and a rush of warm and wonderful wind passed through me, penetrating my pores with pride and strength. My center of gravity shifted. Ancestral breath filled my chest. Calmness consumed me as I began to feel held. A soft, hearty shiver came over me with the delight in the blessing I had been given, breaking the curse that their cruel, tyrant slavers had put upon them. My vision was impaired. I saw in a vista, which has since, and will ever afterward, torment me, my enslaved ancestors hiding from their Christian overseers in the woods, in the fields, in the sheds learning to read the Bible, knowing that if they were caught, the liability would be a severe and public whipping of forty lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails on their bare backs. I couldn’t see my ancestors’ likeness, but I could see their hearts like haints in the bayou. In my mind’s ear I could hear a cacophony of screams, and a cracking whip companion it. The terrorism their minds were under, starved for education, cramped with illiteracy and the freedom from unrelenting torture and labor. It was the shrieking realization of all the horror, which the Antebellum South and chattel slavery fostered in me, and gave my mind an enormous amount of sensibility. As my Black skin quivered, and the hellish suggestive unnerved me, I grew quieter and stiller and fearfuller, forgetting every injunction to scream. Then the flash subsided. The intense feelings peeled off of me, and I could see that every book I’ve ever read is nothing short of a miracle. Every page I’ve turned is more precious than the last. Especially after seeing just how deadly it was for my ancestors, the phantoms of troubles that loomed before them, and in their brains, and how quickly it can all be taken away. What a peace-destroying nation I reckoned. The twisted mindset of a racist society. Like having one of God’s creations tied up on a leash. I saw this as plainly as the light of God shining down on me like it does when I’m writing.

In the half-light, the colony of cardinals that were dwelling in the maple abruptly spread their pinions to the heavens, took wing, and departed at great speed, the tree bleeding into the sky. Their presence generated a strong connection, as if they were my ancestors with a message, a reminder that I’m a uniquely divine being who should trust my instincts and stay true to my identity. Their swarm caused a roar as they passed over me, which fell upon my ears like a strong zephyr rolling over trees leaves. The warblers flew in a southeasterly direction. I watched until they were clean out of sight. My ancestors’ souls were earth’s directional guardians, no longer “Still a slave, still wandering in the depths of spirit-devouring thralldom,” as Frederick Douglass wrote in his memoir, My Bondage and My Freedom.

Since that day I’ve dedicated my life to educating white America about Blackness and Black literature through my writing. Some days I’m happy with the progress made. Some nights I feel despair. Those are the nights when I have this dream of a racist white president signing into law a ban on teaching America’s racist history against Blacks while white supremacists on the steps of the Capitol are burning the books that once did. I can only make out two of the titles as the flames turn them into embers, The Souls of Black Folk and The Mis-Education of the Negro. I know it’s not real, that it’s just my imagination, but my mind seems unwilling to let it go. In the dream I’m frantically pulling books out as the white supremacists with shotguns and rifles, some holding knives, some carrying nooses approach me. But as I look closer, it’s not me who I see. It’s Carter Woodson. Tears dripping, hissing as they hit the embers. Standing next to him is his confidant, colleague, and Harvard classmate W. E. B. DuBois who gives this prophecy as they’re surrounded: “This man standing almost alone has virtually compelled the people of the United States at least once a year to recognize the fact that a tenth of their population…has developed a history worth knowing…Whether you like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If you do not lift them up, they will pull you down.”