Sharif El-Mekki - Afros, Boxers, Handcuffs, and Guns

 

Good evening. From early on, I knew my parents and teachers had the expectation that I was going to be a revolutionary. My earliest dreams were about protest, and civil unrest and boycotts. They should have been nightmares when I was a kid, but they were just dreams of a child who knew he was supposed to be a revolutionary. 

 

My parents met and got married in the Black Panther Party. I was enrolled in a school that was founded by activists and revolutionaries. It was called [foreign name] It was in Queen Lane. We didn't have gym at that school. We had martial arts. [audience laughter] Baba Changa, my martial arts teacher would always say, “If you're going to speak the truth, you got to be able to defend the truth.” 

 

By the age of 10, I had met some of the most amazing revolutionaries who were not locked up and still alive. Angela Davis, Sonia Sanchez, members of the Wilmington Ten. Move members in a playground was really a parking lot in the back. As kids, we would chant, “We are soldiers in the army. We're going to fight, although we got to die.” I remember being 10, in my kitchen, my mother showing me a picture. As I looked at the picture, she said, “This is your dad is in this picture.” I'm looking at it. 

 

The first thing that stood out to me is Afros and seven guys and handcuffs. I felt such pride. I had a lot of emotions. I was proud that I was the son of this handcuffed revolutionary who I knew stood for something and stood for social justice, he and his friends. Also, I had rage. I had raged that someone had did this to my father and his friends. And also, in the picture, what really got me upset was a police officer with a shotgun. You could tell he was yelling something. I just imagined that he was yelling something foul and racist to my father. I was angry. 

 

So, I grew up, and I continued to be really upset. Furious, actually, about all the social justice issues that I would see. But I was also really confused, because I didn't know how to become a revolutionary. So, meanwhile, I graduated high school, I got a full academic scholarship to a state college. One day, in October after I graduated from college, me and some friends were playing pickup football in a field, actually Bartram High School's field in southwest Philadelphia. 

 

We were playing. Quite often I would channel my rage through football, because that's what men do. At some point, I tackled someone really hard and I celebrated. And all of a sudden, I felt this blow in the back of my head. When I looked up, everyone from the field was running. And so, I turned around to find out what were they running from. I had a gun in my face. He didn't like being tackled like that, and so he got a gun from his friends who happened to be in the stands waiting for something to jump off. I grabbed a gun, and we're wrestling with it. He just starts pulling the trigger. I was shot three times. It severed an artery. 

 

So, I was in the hospital for a month and 20 plus surgeries to try to save my leg. Periodically, I would talk to my father, who was in jail. My mother would come visit me, but I couldn't find any answers as to what to do next. I would think about the person who shot me, because at revolutionary training, I figured I would get shot by the police or something one day. But the guy who shot me did not look like the police officer in that picture. The guy who shot me looked like me. Eventually, after getting out of the hospital, a group called Concerned Black Men had a contract with the school district, and they were looking for Black men to become teachers. 

 

Although previously I had never thought of being a teacher, I thought about the young man who had shot me and I said, “I'm going to do this.” So, I became a teacher. I thought about all the times when I was younger and just said, “There's something wrong with the planet I'm in.” Like, God had it all wrong. I wasn't supposed to be born in 1971. I was supposed to be born in 1951. So, I could have been part of the struggle of my parents and all these heroes.

 

But on the first day of school, I realized that there were no mistakes. My revolution was to be a Black man by a blackboard in southwest Philadelphia, in the same part of town where that young man had shot me. I am a revolutionary.