Stories of Reflection
A collection of stories reflecting on some of life’s most impactful experiences.
I’ve decided to talk about things as they occur to me, rather than subject you to a chronological slide show like our parents’ friends used to bore us with (“… and here’s another shot of ...
We walked for miles in every Southern city we visited. Urban walking. We wore jeans and sneakers. Sidewalks. Paved park paths. Asphalt. Cement. Church to parsonage to park to museum to memorial. We chose centrally-located ...
We drove west on Alabama state and county roads – blue highways – from Montgomery to Selma: beautiful farmland, flowering trees in spring bloom, small towns, and, unlike the winter-bitten roads in the North, smooth ...
As I sit here today, it hurts and frustrates me to see that for some business leaders, their resolve to achieve racial equity appears to be fading already, as their will to effect substantive change ...
When the tears are everything: love and anger, hope and fear, pride and pain That is what I feel tonight. I sit here on the verge The tears want to spill and I tell them ...
Hey America! Happy Fourth of July! Are you bored with Black Lives Matter yet? Of course some of you are. I can hear it, read it and watch it. The conversations are turning, because some ...
Last week, I removed a Fraternal Order of Police badge that was on the back of my car. The badge came with the car when my brother-in-law sold it to me—he had worked for a ...
“You are a Joseph,” my mother used to say to me. It was her way of saying I was a bridge between people. A connector of the unexpected sort. I’ve always known this to be ...
I originally shared this on May 30th. And unsurprisingly, you can substitute “last night” in the first paragraph for any point in time over the past four weeks and it is still relevant. This is ...
My family didn’t have generational wealth – at least the financial kind. My mother didn’t have any retirement to speak of. When we moved her to Richmond after her quadruple career as a professional singer, ...
