Many among our Afrikan-Amerikan families are overjoyed that our sitting President will remain in place for yet another four years. I, too, am thrilled he and his beautiful family will continue to occupy the House our people built during times when we were held in bondage.

Now that the high-flying is a part of history, our work on behalf of our President must immediately begin. This work we fail to accomplish during his first four years because we wanted him to bring about our change for us. Consequently, we now realize that no change is forthcoming without a helping hand from Afrikan-Amerikan families around the nation. No one man is going to bring about the change that black people in this country need and deserve. 

Our objective now should be to get our families registered in NAAFRA so that we may provide a basis from which the President can assist the people without it having to be a “politically-motivated” move.

In order for change to come among our people, we must become the vehicle for the change we are seeking while the image of our President is still fresh in the minds of our families. Perhaps, the most difficult task confronting NAAFRA is getting our families convinced that we are the change we seek. Fused into this change we seek can also be a form of the reparations we seek; making it possible for more Black youth to become productive citizens, and not locked away behind iron bars is one of the many ways that can be viewed as a form of “reparation.”

Encouraging our youth to attend two year trade schools with the help for the NAAFRA base and the government can also be viewed as another form of reparation. The NAAFRA families shall do all that is within our power to provide our youth a strong helping hand so that they may become deeply involved in “giving back to the communities from whence they came” and, in doing so, assist in bringing about the change we seek and need.

We need a new burst of interest in the building industry in order to get our contractors to hire more of our youth without having to go outside of our people to find youth willing to do construction type work. We need to bring our people back into a “Black Wall Street” frame of mind, and in doing that, our families will come to understand that in order to grow wealth we are going to have to make the money that comes into our hands stay in our hands much longer.

This is another reason why it is so important that the leaders of each family become aware of the importance of having a “Master Plan” spelling out what we need to do as NAAFRA. We must never stop celebrating and paying homage to the history and structure of each family during our annual reunions. But our situation calls for us to do more than celebrate. We can make one community’s or one family’s concerns our collective concern and then, as a national organization, move in and provide whatever help, resources and assistance that might be needed to address that concern. This is what we did when Trayvon Martin was shot down in Florida; this is what we did when we not happy with the decision regarding Rodney King’s beat down; this is what we did when the Civil Rights laws were in need of changing. Black people, as a group, have long been battering rams for human and civil rights in this country and then, once the doors are broken down and change has been made, everyone else marches through that door while we remain on the outside.

Too many of our youth are dropping (and being pushed out) of school. In either case, far too many end up being fodder for the prison-industrial complex. NAAFRA, therefore, has the task of creating a different reality for your youth and work with them to become an important link in the creative process. Without our base having a hand in creating jobs for our people, our existence will continue to be from the bottom looking up, instead of at the top looking around to see what we can and will build next.

If, indeed, we are 40 million strong, shouldn’t the question be: “Can there be another ‘Black Wall Street’ like the one that used to exist in Tulsa, Oklahoma? If so, when?