More than 7,000 languages exist worldwide.  Each one beautiful and unique.  The breath of the Creator flows through us each time we speak.  These sounds create expressions that often bring us closer but also have the power to divide us.  When Africans first arrived on American soil, they could not verbally communicate because of the language barrier presented by their varied backgrounds.  They were stolen from different countries and tribes and were separated from their kinsmen to prevent the threatening, dangerous power of community.  The lack of a common language, however, led to the creation of several forms of communication - a patois, a Negro Spiritual, a drumbeat, a dance, a shared purpose of freedom.

Some of the enslaved and their descendants eventually mastered the language of the oppressor turning it into a tool for battling physical and mental enslavement.  Frederick Douglass wrote a slave narrative that laid the cruelty bare, leaving nothing out from his miraculous journey to become free.  James Baldwin employed the American lexicon to indict the supposed democracy for its glaring hypocrisy in upholding white supremacy.  Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker lyricized the lives of young, Black women in the South who could have silenced themselves and others to death had they chosen to hold their peace.  Octavia Butler placed Black folk at the center of scientific fantasy. Richard Wright gave voice to the burdensome anger that traumatizes and kills slowly and Amiri Baraka illuminated the grim reality of this burdensome anger on the stage. A dream of the illiterate slave became true when American actor LeVar Burton reflected a shining image of scholarship to countless children as host of Reading Rainbow, a children’s television series that aired for more than two decades on PBS introducing them to the power of language and literacy.  Words truly shape our world with the capacity to build bridges of brother- and sisterhood and towers of togetherness.