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DETROIT NATIVE SUN

By Evelyn M. Bingham

SUN COLUMNIST

How many of us have had our hopes and dreams dashed, discouraged, and destroyed by the lack of encouragement and assistance, especially as were growing up. Quite a few of us, I’m sure.

As you continue to pursue your goals and dreams, keep the other components of success in the forefront. In addition to Hope, include those of Faith, and Love and Work!

Don’t be too afraid or apprehensive to try out an idea or a thought. It takes a good idea to help motivate forward action, with invested interests, sufficient to accomplish the goal!

To most people, the thought of failing or the actuality of it happening, is extremely disappointing and has devastating effects. When failure, becomes a part of your life, it is difficult to see how there can be any recovery or turn around. When your focus, is temporarily clouded or obscured, it makes the possibility of winning or achieving a goal inconceivable.

Achieving at anything, no matter how elusive or impossible the goal, can be achieved to personal satisfaction, through strong determined perseverance, listening to wise counsel, not being afraid to put shoulder to the wheel and forging straight ahead with your eyes on the prize!! Remember, that the dream or goal is yours, that it must be nurtured and protected by you, and that you are ultimately responsible for its success, and nothing reaches a successful completion or conclusion, without so called failures along the journey or road. Success, could be failure on fire, or, Success, could be failure turned inside out, or the dark clouds silver lining, where once there was doubt!!

Failures and disappointments and set backs, are all parts of the lessons we must learn to conquer, as we matriculate through the curriculums in The School of Life. Let us all press forward to our personal achievements of success, and try never, to be deterred!

By Evangelist B. Colbert Brooks

SUN COLUMNIST

Sonia Sanchez was an African American poet, writer, and professor. She is noted for authoring over a dozen articles, books of poetry, short stories, critical essays, plays, and children's books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeted towards African-American audiences, and published her debut collection, Homecoming, in 1969. In 1993, she received the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry.

Sanchez earned a BA degree in political science in 1955 from Hunter College and pursued post-graduate studies at New York University. She has taught as a professor at eight universities and has lectured at more than 500 college campuses across the US, including Howard University. She was also a leader in the effort to establish the discipline of Black Studies at the university level. In 1966, while teaching at San Francisco State University, she introduced Black Studies courses. She was the first to create and teach a course based on Black Women and literature in the United States, taught at a predominantly white university. Sanchez was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1977. She has read her poetry in Africa, the Caribbean, China, Australia, Europe, Nicaragua, and Canada. Sanchez supported the National Black United Front and was a very influential part of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Arts Movement whose aim was to promote a renewal of black will, insight, energy, and awareness. She gained a reputation as an important voice in the Black Arts Movement after publishing the book of poems Homecoming in 1969. This collection and her second in 1970, titled We a BaddDDD People, demonstrated her use of experimental poetic forms to discuss the development of black nationalism and identity.

I personally salute Sonia Sanchez above all else because of her soulful lament to the legendary blues singer, Billie Holiday. Sanchez was not only a woman who achieved profound honor and success in the literary arena, she possessed a keen sense of awareness and compassion for those who struggled battling their own personal demons. She opened her heart, put pen to paper and paid tribute to another legend, who may not have been one in her own time, but was to become one nevertheless. For Billie Holiday, Sonia penned “For Our Lady”. A depiction of the battles of Lady Day from the inside out. Expressing in ground level prose and guttural slang, Sonia wrote plain and simple no holds barred, no frills or flowers, how she felt the Lady Day’s pain and sorrow;

With that, I say farewell to two great women in history. Sonia Sanchez, a woman extraordinaire in so many ways and an outstanding master of the literary arts, and Billie Holiday, a legend whose story was told up close and personal by that great master. May they both rest in peace as their memories never cease to linger on.