Take A Moment

Growing up, I always felt like I was little different from most kids that I knew for a few reasons. One of the main reasons was because of my parent’s age. Most of my friends’ parents had them when they were in their 20’s or early 30’s. Now I would consider this the “normal age” range that most couples of individuals have kids. My mom was 40 and my dad was 32 when I was born (I was actually a surprise to both of them.) I knew that I had a little different perspective because my parents were from a different generation than my peers’ parents. My mom was born in 1956. To give you some insight, when she was born, the United States only had 48 states and the race on her birth certificate is actually Negro. Because my parents were older, I always had immediate access to their personal stories of them and my grandparents in regard to civil rights. In class today, we talked about the Great Migration and that brought back a lot of memories of stories that my mom told me. Both of my grandparents were born in rural Mississippi in the 20’s and 30’s and they would eventually move to Chicago in search of better opportunities for a black family in 1950’s. And just liked how we talked about in class, my family received a lot of backlash and they had a lot of struggles with moving to Chicago. My grandfather had a factory job, and he worked his fingers to the bone to try to get his family out of the projects and into a home. Thankfully, this would eventually pay off some years later, but the journey to get there was not easy by the least. I’m writing this post because I think it is so important to gain an appreciation for the groundwork our parents, grandparents, etc laid out for us so that we can enjoy the fruit of their labors now. Had my grandparents not make the decision to try to find a better life in Chicago, who knows how things could’ve turned out. Something horrible could’ve happened to them, my mom or my aunts and uncles had they lived in rural Mississippi during Jim Crow. I think as young adults, it is so easy for us to not appreciate all of the work that has been done before us, and I definitely think we should take a moment to just reflect on how far we have come.

#David