Excerpt from first column:

October 2, 1991

 Freedom: Elusive, Illusive for Blacks

            “It has often been brought home to me that each of us has a unique perspective by virtue of having been permanently locked inside one's own vessel and forced to witness life from within its confines. Genetics significantly influence not only how we relate to life from inside this vessel, but how we are perceived by our fellow beings.

     As a Black female who attained her majority at the onset of the searing ‘60s, I witnessed gains made by my people which enabled us to begin to feel good about who we were. It is the losses however that now concern me and serve as convincing signposts that these gains--which so inspired and strengthened us in the 1960s and 1970s--have not kept pace with those enjoyed by the superstructure that is our world today. The freedom for which we labored so diligently and persistently in those heated times remains as elusive today as it was in the days of my youth.

     Freedom.  From the time I began to get a sense of what being Black was about, I knew that I had an inner yearning to be free. The word “freedom” would conjure up beautiful Technicolor images in my mind's eye--images of birds in flight, of endless blue sky, golden meadows, valleys lush with verdant growth and I, floating unencumbered through all this loveliness, lovely and loved and protected.

    While we have achieved many of the outer accouterments that signify a free society, inside our skins the chains of racism continue to chafe at our very souls. The specters resurrect each time we witness the vacant stare of a “cracked-up” brother or sister pushing a grocery cart laden with all his or her worldly goods through the streets. And as long as the condition exists, there can be no freedom. If there is one in chains, we will all wear them…”