In days of past my people lived in lands — divided chains around their necks, shackles around their wrists, and still in my eyes you can see their pain, their cries, despair. But given to them was something greater and through the beatings and exploitation it remained. I can remember the first

time I heard "Wade in the Water." It was like honey mixed in lemon waiting to heal. It was the power of words that held sanity inside black folks heads when hands of oppression stomp in hate.

Some ask how did black folks get the legs to run past it all, all the looks, all the ways it hurt to breathe and say life was worth the wait? We survived in the way we learned to scream, "Praise God," on Mondays and dance on Sundays. We survived by lyrics of freedom songs and rumors of open opportunity past the Mason Dixon line. We hung on in the dust of dreams that mama's whispered in newborn babies' ears. We hung on through losing mothers to fathers to daughters trying to claim stability with no space to call our own. Man, we hung on. And Langston Hughes validated our struggle, while Lorraine Hansbury made us wave our hands in what we've all been through.

We even reached a point that we could shake our heads at the blues Billy sang in "Strange Fruit," talking of how black folks hung from Southern trees. We did better than hold on, we dared to surpass what people thought that we could not do.

And now, now I ask what keeps me moving through the battle of today facing my black skin in the backdrop of society. I say it is this, these same people coming back to mind and lines of Coltrane's sax jumping off my hands as I type, type my life into reality. But I only have these people because someone said to me, read, listen, and care. Care that my family came from trial and died in the fight to walk with heads high. Care that my family watched with tears in their eyes King speak and the riots of the 60's. Care that my people lost jobs and home on picket lines so I can sit here in classes next to you.

They told me to care because without the struggle and the pain there is no me. I am the fields of cotton picked until fingers bled, and backs that cleaned floors (the only job my grandmother could get). I am the black power fist calling for equality and the voices saying "by any means necessary." I am the child walking miles to "separate but equal" schools and the sharecroppers homes that seeped in the color of want. I am because they gave, gave until they could see and then they gave some more.

And because they gave, and because they cared we all should care. We should care enough to come and listen to one Black History Month event. Otherwise they cried in vain and worked in vain. Otherwise they died in vain and all is lost in the dust of crops picked in sun that blacked backs of men deserving more, more than what life offered them.

• In the spirit of black history