Coach Bill / Dad, Entrepreneur Special Educator, American Political Scientist, Writer, Musician.

On my father’s side my family fought against each other in the American Civil War. Protecting ideals, a way of life, family and one’s community was on the forefront of their minds and hearts. With such a burgeoning nation, Americans were beginning to live far from the original thirteen colonies. Their was expansion to the west towards the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and south towards the Floridian panhandle. Life was quite differentiated across different swaths of the United States. In the north, the yankees were focused on growing trade and communication with the world, expanding the military and  beginning to more seriously address the sin of slavery. Slavery was a topic of discussion gaining popular ground. In the south, life was much more tranquil. Plantation owners controlled huge parcels of farm land and developed their crops for sale in America and beyond its shores. Their farm lands were worked by human beings who were owned and directed to work for their masters...

Professor Le Februe was not at all liked by the rowdy 8th grade middle school Social Studies class. He was mild-mannered, in his mid-forties and would be teased by the bully's in the class he taught. There were at least thirty students in each of his classes. Mine was no different. One day he brought in a movie to class to compliment the readings we were doing on slavery in America. It was a series of films following the fictionalized account of a slave, Kunta Kinte, and his family from the time he was kidnapped in Africa to the time forty acres and a mule were given as a token of freedom to his descendants generations later. Kunta Kinte entered my life with each whiplash he received and his constant goal-directed persistence to be free at last. His heart was untamable. His spirit would not break, bend as it did. For me, watching the series of movies called, 'Roots,' brought my eyes and mind to see first hand the cruelty of enslaving humanity for profit and how this...