If Charles Edward Anderson Berry was still alive he would be celebrating his 93rd birthday. Heck, Charles Edward Anderson Berry is indeed still alive because the energy that he put into his life, the spirit that he generated each and every time he performed was unmatched and unparalleled. Now only a few of his fans knew him as Charles Edward Anderson Berry, they simply recognized two words, Chuck Berry. Mr. Berry, the majestic King of Rock and Roll, the coolest cat in the music industry during a period of time when Jim Crow controlled the arenas and coliseums in this country. Chuck Berry was pure unadulterated electricity. Think about the magic in the songs he manufactured for his audience; Johnny B. Goode, Maybelline, Roll Over Beethoven, No Particular Place To Go, My Ding A Ling, and the list goes on and on.

To me, Chuck Berry invented the very nature of smooth. He was pure electric, pure cool, and pure dynamite. That's why I created this poem that reflected my thoughts on the smoothest, coolest cat who ever picked up a guitar. Chuck Berry broke down the color line because when he started playing his vibes the mind might've said rebel but in reality, the soul said let go. So today, I bring back in honor of Charles Edward Anderson Berry's 93rd birthday my creation, Chuck B Invented Smooth.

Lerone Bennett Jr.'s was born on 10/17/1928 and his glory day was 2/14/2018
Today I honor his greatness by reading aloud "A Different Path"
If you are my age, black, male or female or a couple of decades younger. You grew up in what I like to call the Ebony-Jet era of black community news and information. You grew up without access to anything close to being an information aged internet that was capable of delivering the news in nanoseconds. You also grew in an era where the major news publications either ignored totally or minimized greatly the important aspects of information about the black community. You also grew without any black faces delivering the national news on any of the three major networks NBC, ABC, or the informational news giant CBS. There was no CNN, MSNBC, FOX, or BET to deliver the quick response accounts of national events. If you were black and wanted to be informed about the black communities nationally you were well knowledged about publication dates of two incredible avenues of news and information. The weekly edition of Jet Magazine and the monthly edition of Ebony Magazine.

Today, I want to celebrate the historian who delivered much needed black history to me and countless millions of black people on a monthly basis Lerone Bennett who would've celebrated his 91st birthday today had he been still living. Lerone Bennett was my hero because of his delivery of black history of African Americans that wasn't available to schoolkids of my color in the classrooms of yesteryears. I mean I clearly remember reading the column that outed Abraham Lincoln as a white supremacist in 1968. I was just as attached as a literate young black boy to Lerone Bennett's columns as I was to the Jet Magazine's weekly inserts of the Black Beauty of the Week. Lerone Bennett was every Blackman's historian. Today, I am going to read a column from Lerone Bennett to celebrate his 91st birthday. I hope you enjoy my reading. You see I loved Lerone Bennett and I and countless others owe our black consciousness and black understanding of our story to this marvelous man.