Mothers ]'Mother's Day Gift

What I have to say is designed for the enlightenment of those who suffer from a school system that hypocritically manipulates Black history in a way that causes a disconnection from Black students and their history,” Noldon writes in the speech. “If you try to make a Black child co-exist with a racist school system or a Eurocentric school system, then you are basically putting that child back into slavery, perhaps mental slavery…There is something wrong with the educational system and the country. I believe the parents should take an active role in challenging the school system and even the curriculum of this school so that any residue of Eurocentrism is gone.”

Noldon continues, “All the history teachers I ever had were White and from every last one of them I never received the link to the genius of Africa. Those teachers always taught European history with a much stronger emphasis. The result was I was brainwashed. I was brainwashed because I thought genius equated to White people because the teachers talked about how much a genius a person like Einstein was or the Greeks.

“Later on I had to realize that those people that the White history teachers talked so greatly about were used as devices to implant a slave mentality in me and an inferiority complex. But, what the textbooks never taught me was how Europe took a lot from Africa and how Africa precedes Europe with thousands of years of philosophical, religious, mathematical, scientific, artistic, and medicinal knowledge. The African represented a genius so powerful that advanced civilizations flourished even before the concept of Europe was thought of.”

Noldon, set to graduate June 27, wrote the speech for a Black History Month assembly held Feb. 27. Instead, he ended up calling the NNPA News Service, pleading, “I want my voice heard.”

Noldon said in an interview that he never got to do the speech – for one main reason: “The principal was basically talking about how he wanted me to change what I was saying in the speech… There were certain things in my speech, the content, you know, he wanted me to change to make it appeal to everybody. The principal gave me two options. The first one was to omit what I was saying in my speech, the other option was to not read my speech at all.”