"Black History Month"

This month, February, is Black History Month.

And it chaps my ass to see young blacks with pants hanging so low theirs is all out for the world to see. I mean, come on! Pull up your pants!

I was in a Starbucks this afternoon and a young brother came in and ordered a mocha-frappa-whatchamacallit. I mean, the guy’s pants were so low, I could see the labels on his underpants. And I didn’t want to see that. Believe me. Watching him made me want to go up to the young man and say, “Youngblood, PULL UP YOUR PANTS!”

I didn’t, though.

Instead, I thought about my regular coffee – with room for cream. But it hit me.

This is Black History Month. I should be doing something to recognize this. Why was I tripping on what the folks in the office think of me recognizing my roots and my history?

Why should I be upset about the young man with the way-too-low jeans?

Then, after the Starbucks clerk gave me my drink, I thought about the Middle Passage and what my high-school history teacher, Mr. Barnaby, told me and the rest of my class back at West Side High School about it. What he said back then seemed quite relevant through the years, since it took between 30 to 180 days to make the trip. And, to be brutally honest, if a slave was sick during the journey, the slavers had no problem throwing them overboard. Later, I learned that sometimes, when the slave ship was overweight, or if provisions ran low, slaves were thrown overboard. Healthy or not.

Back in my "militant" days, I took solace in this. "Don't EVEN call us lazy, because if we are here, then someone in the family survived the Middle Passage, so you are probably trying to negate someone who is a descendant of someone else who survived the journey..."

Now, I'm looking at this kid with his pants down on his ass. And I'm thinking about some of my heroes, many who have done much more than what we've done ... often with much less:

Martin Luther King Jr., champion of civil rights, needs no introduction whatsoever.

And before there was Oprah, there was Madam C.J. Walker, who made her fortune working on black women's hair with the hot comb.

Frederick Douglass was a fantastic orator, who was a runaway slave, taught himself to read and spoke out against slavery during a time when it was potentially fatal to do so.

Elizabeth "Bessie" Coleman was the first female pilot of African American descent.

Oscar Micheaux was the first black to produce a feature-length film.

Harriet Tubman the abolitionist who led slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

George Washington Carver came up with hundreds of uses for the peanut.

Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to win an Academy Award for her portrayal of a servant in "Gone With the Wind." She told NAACP members, who criticized her portrayal of maids and mammies, "I'd rather play a maid and make $700 a week than be one for $7."

Garrett Morgan invented the traffic signal, later selling the patent to General Electric for $40,000.

Althea Gibson made her mark on the tennis court when she broke that sport's color barrier.

Alain Leroy Locke was a writer, philosopher, patron of the arts, educator and the namesake of my elementary school.

Opera singer Marian Anderson planned to give a concert in the Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., in 1939, but the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her perform because she was African American. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt was so outraged, she resigned her membership.

Crispus Attucks was the first American to die in the Revolutionary War.

Wilma Rudolph was the fastest woman on the planet during the 1960s, becoming the first American to win three gold medals in the Olympics.

Benjamin O. Davis Jr. was the first African American general in the United States Air Force and led the Tuskegee Airmen in WWII.

These are just a few of my heroes from history. All of them are gone. But they are not forgotten, so they live on. Some of them you may have heard of.

But there is a whole other list. This list includes my maternal grandmother, Julia Mae Gadsen, who came up with an interesting plan to leave the South for a better life for her and her daughters in the North. Then, there's my grandfather, Albert Redding Sr., who also decided to head north from Macon, Ga., and get to South Bend, Ind., where he could raise a family. His wife, I learned recently, was one of the first black schoolteachers in Macon.

Then, there's the host of aunts, uncles, cousins and other relatives - real and "play" - who add to the mix of what is my Black History Month.

Mine.

-30-

"Cousin Jockey"

My cousin was buried today. Celeste. She was a little older than I am, and she had cancer.

Celeste — along with her siblings, Rose, Bonnie, Linda, Sabrina, Valencia, Mark and Yvette — was more like one of my sisters growing up than a cousin. Big families were the way to go back in the day. Celeste’s father, Albert, the older brother of my father, always looked out for his younger brother Rudolph. So much so that my entire childhood was spent somewhere close to Uncle Albert and his brood. In East Chicago, they lived upstairs from us. When they moved to Gary, we moved into a house on the next block a little while later.

Celeste’s mother, Aunt Gertrude, died relatively young, leaving Uncle Albert to raise their children. And that he did. A single father back in the day. A BLACK single father, at that. Seven daughters and a son.

I remember Celeste — we called her “Jockey” — getting caught “out there” after Uncle Albert’s “curfew” and coming over to our house for refuge and to await the inevitable wrath of my uncle. You see, Uncle Albert — for a period of time — locked the kids inside his house while he worked the midnight shift at Inland Steel. He’d installed locks in the doors that worked from the outside. And whoever wasn’t in by the time he left for work … well, you get the idea. My parents implored him to quit doing that, the fire hazard that it was, but Uncle Albert was adamant. And more than once, Celeste came over to our place to wait it out.

Over the years, as often is the case, I grew further apart from my cousin. We’d see each other at family gatherings and whatnot, where we’d “catch up” and reminisce about our time back in Gary. We’d laugh about whose dad was the meanest, who got the most “whuppings.”

I remember her smile, her laughter and her quick wit. Jockey was a "pistol" and despite the fact that I wasn't always the sharpest knife in the drawer when we where growing up, Jockey always took up for me. And the other kids would back off. Nobody messed with those Reddings on Willard Street. When I got the news of Jockey's death, I was just about to dig into an omelette at Studio Cafe in Studio City. My party and I had moved inside from the patio, as it had begun to drizzle. Who said it never rains in Southern California?

Uncle Albert is gone. And Mark. Now Celeste. But they will live forever. In my heart, and in the hearts of those whose lives they touched before they left here.

So rest easy, cousin.

— 30 —