Kelvin Allen

Looking Back to Move Forward: Reconciling the Past - Liberating the Future Kelvin Allen

The title, "Looking Back to Move Forward," evokes an inevitable comparison to the Akan word "Sankofa," from Ghana, West Africa. The word means "looking back." It's an apt comparison. For Kelvin, his adult values first took shape when he was a child growing in Durham's sprawling Hayti District, Hayti, pronounced HAY-teye. The area is often lauded as a mecca for African Americans during the days of Jim Crow. Kelvin however, painfully recalls a world cloistered in shame, insecurity and despair ... a place where the impoverished conditions that existed had more in common with a Third World country than the southern part of the United States. It's a time many of us who grew up poor in the segregated South can identify with. Indeed, reading the opening pages of the book prompted me to recall my own childhood. My grandmother too, washed my siblings and me in a tin "foot tub" because we did not have the luxury of a real bathtub. We, too, lived in a neighborhood consumed with alcoholism, domestic violence and decrepit homes where children drank out of food cans instead of cups and glasses. The dysfunction we contended with was so commonplace we thought it was normal. Kelvin De'Marcus Allen managed to survive the psychological and spiritual damage of poverty, an indifferent father and racism. Like Parks, he credits his achievements to a mother "whose personal testimony inspired you to conquer the impossible." In Dubois' "The Souls Of Black Folk," there is an African American's double-souled self. From the harrowing effects of slavery and segregation an entire race is born with a "veil, the seventh son of the races," and thus was blessed with second sight. But, the veil also blocked the African American's sight and strivings, permitting him to see himself reflected only secondhand, "through the revelation of the other world," the world of whites. Thus the veil was a tragic gift, the mythic rendering of the color line. "Looking Back to Move