“To be what you want to be, you must first know who you once were”

Foreword Words of Encouragement: Education is not a spectator sport, but young students and their family members must all buy in, to achieve a level of success. “True teaching is not an accumulation of knowledge; it is an awaking of consciousness that goes through successive stages,” says a Kemetic proverb. Parents, grandparents, and guardians—the village needs to share the experience of this book. It is a Sankofa journey for the African Diaspora, but it is not exclusively for people of African descent. All people can benefit from what is shared. It can be applied to all cultures that have been subjected to less-than-appropriate true historical representation. Let it be clear the African historical legacy is in fact the focus of the work. All people whose story is not told in truth are encouraged to seek their own truth in order to establish a strong foundation of self-esteem for young students of all backgrounds. A suggested path for achieving this goal for students across the spectrum is presented to open the portal of pride in the connection to their individual homeland heritage of all cultures, but more importantly is that all people need to show respect for their fellow human beings, man or woman, no matter what country or continent their homeland of origin. Perhaps what will follow this aspect of respect is love and appreciation of the contributions that all races have contributed to the overall advancement of the human race that shares this planet earth we all call home.

R. E. Vincent Daniels BS & MS college degrees. Born and raised in Bedford Stuyvesant community in Brooklyn, New York. I am a parent of three and a grandparent of three, four boys and two girls of African descent. The adult children are all products of a public school system with standardized curricula and syllabuses with Eurocentric inferences. The theme of this book draws from first hand experiences in a public school classroom environment that shows little to no respect for any people of color, whether they be Native American, Asian, Hispanic/Latino, or from the African Diaspora. The false lesson learned by the student body is that those of European heritage are inherently superior to all peoples of color, and therefore it regards people of color as less than human beings. America in particular is the current incubator for such thinking and exports this mind set around the world. This work is designed to contradict this false narrative from the perspective of youthful minds when they are helped to do the due diligence to research their true history of their family homeland of origin. The resulting self-esteem upgrade translates into a life changing thirst for all world knowledge, and the students then reach for their personal academic pinnacle. It is this curriculum gap for students of color that short changes their aspirations for academic excellence going forward. The available educational metrics, both locally and nationally, confirms this theory many times over, when assessing the classroom performance of students of color versus students of European heritage.