Ramsay Explores Own History
Senior Kyan Ramsay’s chapel presentation started with a video, put together by fellow senior Cristian Arocho, in which they asked students and teachers to choose between a favorite interest and Black History Month. When Madame Rebecca Keel was asked “French or Black History Month?” she responded, “French Black History Month!”
The video was a humorous way to highlight the question Kyan asked himself about Black History Month: Why? Why is it important? Why do we celebrate it?
He realized he couldn’t grasp “Black history” until he understood his own history, and he proceeded to share details of his family tree, which has roots in Jamaica, Louisiana, and Missouri.
“I am not sure I would attend this school if not for the scholarship of my great-grandmother. Would I have been born if not for the tenacity of my grandfather, a high school dropout who worked long and hard enough to send my father to college in the States, where he’d eventually meet my mother?”
After researching family history, he felt “an overwhelming sense of pride” about how far his people had come – “from island-born carpenters and Louisiana sharecroppers to a suburban Black kid growing up in the heart of Germantown.”
He came upon a quote from Lonnie G. Bunch III that helped answer his own “why”: “There is no more powerful force than a people steeped in their history. And there is no higher cause than honoring our struggle and ancestors by remembering.”
He closed by encouraging his fellow Owls to understand their own ancestry. “This month I call on each and every one of you to remember because there is power in your history. And, therefore, there is power within you.”
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