Exactly, I think what happened was in studying Bethune, Charlotte Forten Grimké, and those other legends made me see that maybe I have some legends in my family. They didn’t make it into the history books but for my grandfather, my paternal grandfather in Charlotte to be a laborer, a construction worker and to make, I’m making it up, 50 cents a day for you know, I don’t know, stirring concrete, and maybe a white colleague made 75 cents a day for doing the same work.
They both had to feed families. And it takes a kind of genius to do the same with less or maybe to do more with less. So it made me appreciate the genius of the folk. The everyday people who survived, who didn’t give up who said it’s not fair, but I’m going to make a way out of no way. And I also realized that those people, my grandfather who only went to the third grade was probably smarter than I am and I often tell children that when I look back on my 30 something books and my degrees from Princeton and Columbia…
I always tell them that doesn’t say anything about me. Maybe a little bit, but I always tell them it says less about me and more about the people whence I come. Because I didn’t create my brain, I didn’t create my intellect, you know. As I always say what do I have that I have not received? So whatever intelligence I have come from parents and grandparents and great grandparents who had so little opportunity.
And the other thing I think we have to remember is that more so than I, they lived in almost constant terror. How do you get up in the morning when you live in an environment of terror? How do you continue to love and to dream and to hope? So I’m often saying too you know around the Museum and Black history is that if Black people, if people of African descent, if the Africans who were brought over here were a nothing people, we would have been gone a long time ago. People like me wouldn’t be here.