Editorial: I am writing to Black people. If you are not Black and you are reading this letter, I recommend that you try your best to put yourself in our unique shoes before you judge what I am about to write.

The year is about to end. Indeed, three years are about to end. And we are wasting a great opportunity. With all that has happened to us, we have been given a chance to make things better. But, I am convinced that we are wasting that chance.

Our people have lived and survived a difficult history in this country. We are descendants of the once great nations in Africa: doctors, lawyers, business managers, governors, kings and queens. And, over the past 400 years, we are also descendants of slaves, Indians, and white people.

We are mixture and a product of this history. It lays the foundation of who we are. And who are we? We are certainly not pure African. And, we are certainly not pure white, even though some of our fore-parents were raped or seduced by white slave masters.

We are educated, under-educated and uneducated. We are wealthy, struggling middle-class and poor. We are angels and devils. That is, we all have sin, but there is still goodness in us. We have developed our own point of view, but we are often forced to view what is not our point of view.

Yes, to be Black in America has its advantages and disadvantages. We live in a nation of great wealth. But, for us it has been an experience where we have been denied much of what has made this nation so great.

We view its beauty, but we are told that only what white people say is beautiful is beautiful. Even when we don’t see it that way. We were deprived of so much during slavery and Jim Crow. Limited access to government and business.

For hundreds of years many of us were forced to work for white slave masters for no pay! We were told that we were savages and that we were inferior. We were told and treated as if we were property. Even the U.S. Constitution told us that we were like cattle, less than human. We were told how beautiful white people are and how ugly we are. We were deprived of a good education, money and resources that were often available to whites.

After the Civil War, during the Reconstruction Period, we were able to elect and send some Black lawmakers to the State Legislature and to Congress. But that only lasted for a few years, as the KKK, white citizen councils and white rage ushered in the Jim Crow period of apartheid in America. There has never been a time in this country where Blacks as a whole weren’t considered and treated as second class citizens.

I grew up in the segregated North. When I was a boy, we didn’t have separate drinking fountains or bathrooms like the South. But we were separated in just about everything else. Whites had the better schools, more money and wealth. Only white people were mayors, council persons, county and state lawmakers, and governors. For the most part, all of the people in power were white and that was the way many white people felt it was supposed to be. We had no voice.

When I grew from a young child to an older boy, I began to take notice that all of the super heroes I idolized were different than me. That is, they were all white. Even the ‘king of the jungle’, Tarzan was a white man who had to save and protect those simple and inferior Black Africans. I started looking for heroes that looked more like and thought more like me.

Ebony and Jet magazines were big in our house when I was growing up. While all of the other magazines were promoting the beauty and superiority of white people and the white world (like Life and Time magazines), Ebony and Jet showcased the beauty and equality of Black people and the world of Black people that few white’s in America knew about. Thank God for that!

It was never about being superior for us. It was about not being inferior. We can do whatever you can do. We are just as intelligent. Just as pretty. Just as good. Just as bad. We are human and we are just as important!

I hated (and I still do) the lists that come out every year from People magazine and all the others that tell us who are the best dressed, best looking, most sexy, etc. In the past, they were always and only white people. How ridiculous! That’s changed lately, where there are a minority of Black people added to these lists.

No wonder Black children who were surveyed recently still chose the white doll over the Black doll. All of this has been a pattern of psychological rape of the mind of all Black people. After being told and shown that everything white is right and Black is bad and inferior for hundreds of years, all the way up to this very day, the very foundation of our purpose and existence continues to be challenged and contributes to actions of Black people that we witness in this country every day. The good and the bad.

With all that we have been through, including denial to the power and money that can help us, I again say that we are wasting a great opportunity. Right here in Pike County Mississippi. We have a great opportunity.

Since the early settlements here, through the development of the land into rural communities along with the development of the railroad, and the growth of Magnolia, Osyka, Summit and McComb, Black people have been regulated to the same plight of Blacks around the country, “separate, but unequal”. So, when we get an opportunity to do something about it, to gain access and move from second-class citizenry to first-class, we should be rushing to improve our own condition.

I was so proud when Summit and Magnolia elected their first Black mayors. How many of you could have imagined that happening during your life time. And, the first Black mayor of McComb. Before it happened, so many of you never thought it could happen. White male mayors. That’s all there had ever been. Some of us believed that a woman would become mayor before a Black man would.

First Black U.S. President. Few believed it could happen. Not in this life time. We have so many Black elected officials now in local, state and national government. What a great opportunity. Right?

Poverty. Black on Black crime. Single parent (absent of father) homes. Glass ceilings in corporate America. Limited and unfair amounts of capital available for Black businesses. Prevalence of low self-esteem. Great distrust towards other Blacks. Self-hate. We have a great opportunity to overcome all of this. But we are allowing it to waste away.

We must get involved and support President Barack Obama, Mayors Melvin Harris, Percy Robinson and Zach Patterson, every way that we possibly can. Each of us must support these Black men, and require them to work to even the playing field, to make sure that Black people are not neglected and that our condition is improved. Right now!

These men are the leaders of their administration. They can help to address the problems of the Black community. You don’t have to agree or even support everything that they say or do. I don’t support President Obama position on gays and gay rights, and I will tell him that. But I support most of what he is trying to do, because I believe he is trying to do what is right. And, as a Black man, he knows what the Black experience is all about, and the kind of change and help that we need to improve our lives and our community.

You can support their efforts to improve the condition of Black people, along with everyone else. We have a great opportunity in Pike County to lay a positive foundation for our children, as we struggle for change that will benefit us and them.

We owe it to our children to support the administrations of these Black Mayors. And, these are all good men. I’ve been to church with Mayor Harris. He is a good man. I’ve participated in many functions with Mayor Robinson in the community. He is a good man. The same with Mayor Patterson. He is a good man. All of them are trying to help us.

They are not in their position just to help white people and to keep Black people in our place. Don’t let those people who have controlled everything political in the past, stand in the way or win the battle against any of these Black leaders to keep them from changing things for the better. If we allow some white people and a handful of confused Black people stop these capable Black leaders from moving us forward, then we will have wasted a great opportunity.

You don’t have to like them or agree with everything they propose and do. In fact, you have every right to tell them how you feel about an issue or their position on something. Tell them what you want from government. Tell them how you want your money, your tax dollars used. Tell them that you support them and help them in whatever way you can. And, then do it. Stop wasting this great opportunity.

In McComb the city board is majority Black. First time in history. One Black mayor and three Black selectmen who know and understand the Black experience. Four to Three. That’s the majority vote that we have that can help improve the conditions for Black people in McComb, even when the minority of white selectmen don’t agree with us.

At-Large-Selectman Wade Lamb, who is a republican, has made it real clear that he will not support or vote for anything that improves the condition in the Black community if it does not pass his financial standard of spending. Lamb participated in the reversal of the $10 million bond that would have repaired streets and buildings and directly improved conditions in the Black community, after members of the white community organized and petition against the measure.

It was simple math. It primarily benefited the Black community, but not the white community. So they stopped it. This was one of many wasted opportunities to help our community and our people. Lamb and selectmen Danny Esch, Bobbie Maddox, and new Black selectman E.C. Nobles reversed the measure and stopped the bond, to the pleasure and delight of those white citizens and business owners. Those problems and conditions that Mayor Patterson’s administration tried to address with the bond have not been address to this very day! What a wasted opportunity.

There have been too many wasted opportunities like this in McComb over the past three years. Mayor Patterson has tried to move McComb forward during his first three years in office. His administration’s list of first accomplishments is long and glowing. And he has accomplished a lot while encountering great resistance, to the point where those four above named selectmen illegally stripped him of his governing powers.

We have been in a position to help the Black community and ourselves. And, by doing that, we help everyone, including white people. But people resist change. We know that. That is why everyone’s support is so important. Preachers and pastors, teachers, business owners, employers and employees, home-makers, farmers, wealthy, middle-class and poor, Black and white, everyone: we must come together and stop wasting this great opportunity.

And, if the majority of white people don’t want to change, just like during slavery and during the civil rights movement, then we who know what’s right and what’s fair should stand up and make sure that we take advantage of this opportunity. Support an administration led by a Black mayor who is in a position to help us.

E.C. Nobles, stop voting with those white selectmen against your own community. Stop fighting against the mayor. Start doing what the Black people in your community elected you to do. Stop wasting the great opportunity of a Black majority on the city board that can benefit so many more people.

Black people, get on the phone, go to city hall and let the mayor and the selectmen know that we want change, and we want it now. Tell them, make them give the mayor his powers back and tell them to respect his office and administration, like they did for all the other former mayors—everyone of them white men. That’s what we will support.

And we will support those who understand the Black experience and are willing to do what is necessary to change that experience for the better. In McComb, Mayor Patterson has one year left in this term. Stop wasting this great opportunity.

Happy Holidays.