ROSE: Say it: ‘I am somebody’

Published 6:00 am Tuesday, December 29, 2020

In his speech before the One in Christ conference in 1999 at Abilene Christian University, Dr. Andrew Jasper Hairston, municipal court judge of Atlanta, said, “People who have the right to define you, have the right to confine you, and if they have the right to confine you, they have the right to control you.” 

Dr. Hairston was right.

When Africans got off of that slave ship in Jamestown, Va., they were defined as slaves and then confined and controlled in the cotton fields of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, forced to lay out the orange groves of Florida and the plantations of the Carolinas. As slaves, Africans picked the white cotton, cropped his tobacco and nourished his young without compensation.

Their days were long and tiresome. Their nights were short and restless. From the rising of the sun in the morning until the setting of the sun in the evening, they looked forward only to long rolls of cotton and tobacco, the sizzling heat and the sting of the rawhide whip of the overseer. Their days were long and tiresome. Their nights were short and restless.

There is an interesting story in the Bible about sons of Anak who were in the land of giants and the Israelis saw themselves as grasshoppers in their sight and so they were. Because they saw themselves as grasshoppers, they were stepped on as grasshoppers and treated as such. If you see yourself as inferior to others, you will be treated as inferior by others. People will always treat you like you treat yourself.

The sons and daughters of slaves must hold their heads up and their shoulders back and look people in the eye when they talk to them and always act like they are somebody. And they will be treated like they are somebody. 

When Jesse Jackson came to Toledo, he had us repeat, “I am somebody.” 

I may be poor but I am somebody. I may be on welfare but I am somebody. I may have been born in the slums. But the slums were not born in me.

Floyd Rose is senior servant of Serenity Church.