REGGIE

PHOTO BY RANDY BACON

REGGIE

“My Family is Proof”

Growing up down south, there are not a lot of opportunities for growth and wealth without education. My mom, dad, and grandmother drilled this to my brothers and I. Not only in words but in actions.

My grandmother was born in 1914, when sharecropping at its peak and she only was allowed an 8th grade education. My mom, dad, and her would talk about going to the field at the crack of dawn to pick cotton and running home after school to pick more cotton as if it was no big deal.

My mom did go on to graduate high school, but my dad chose not to when he got my mom pregnant. He went and found a job. It was all he knew to do at that time. They both were poverty stricken and my dad has a big heart and wanted to provide for his family. Soon after that my 4 brothers and I were born. My grandmother was there to help my mom and dad out as they had to travel 45 minutes each day to work to provide a stable life for our family. In their travels they always brought the Newspaper home. We didn’t have cable TV and where we lived cable was not accessible at the time.

Since I was a baby, I loved sports. As I began to want to learn about sports, I would try to read the sports section of the newspapers and sports magazines. It was tough, so I used the dictionary and thesaurus to help me read it. I would have sports debates and conversations with the older kids on the bus and dominate the sports conversations at school even though I had no Cable TV!

My parents held my brothers and I to a high academic standard. They always preached that school was about learning and you had to learn to take schoolwork seriously if you wanted better for your life. They would talk about the mistakes they made and explain to us that reading, writing, and learning math was the foundation to bettering our lives. I would see my grandmother's budget, read the newspapers, magazines about plants etc. I saw my mom and dad read the newspaper each day as their unwinding mechanism. I would see them write and they could write well. They read about things they wanted to learn about or gain information on.

My dad is an extremely smart man. I felt that the lack of a high school diploma did hold his career back from getting more leadership roles in his career. His bosses were always amazed at what a fast learner he was. He was a welder, machine operator, mechanic, and bootleg engineer. Seriously, my dad can watch something and listen to it and look at the instructions and come up with a solution to fix the problem in no time. I watched him lead by example and saw the importance of reading and literacy, but also understood how not having the basic high school diploma or college degree can hold you back.

I feel the example of literacy and the lack of literacy starts with one decision by one generation. My mom, dad, and grandmother were denied great education growing up pre-Civil Rights age, but they had a vision that their kids and grandkids were going to use literacy and education to have a better life than them. My family is proof- my nieces, nephews, cousins, all value literacy and education and living out their vision for a better future. Literacy and learning open up so many doors and they can cut down some of the effects of social-economic injustice