Occasion

  • Occasion - Bro. Phil Petrie
    Memory: Fuel of the Past That Energizes the Future

     

     Memory, I believe, is the stuff of which tomorrow’s dreams are made.  Consequently, we must be careful that memory doesn’t become imagination, fantasy.  In the parlance of today’s youths, we have to “keep it real.”  Which is why on this occasion, ground breaking for a 74-year-old Beta Omicron anticipating its 75th anniversary, I begin with a very real story.

     

    There was once an old black farmer in Christian County, Kentucky, not far from here.  He was poor, with a frail mule that pulled an aged plow up and down seemingly endless rows of tobacco.  Each morning, the farmer rose and saw his future framed by a mule’s behind.  Sometimes the mule would lift its tail and drop a fecal emphasis on the bleakness of it all.  The old man kept plowing, kept dreaming that one day his grandson, who helped him on the farm, would attend the state college, get an education, and become somebody.  Sometimes you could hear the farmer across the fields singing:

     

    “Just another day that the Lord has kept me.”

     

    Just another dream.

     

    I am here today to tell you that the grandson is now the Rev. Doctor Somebody at a mega-church in Northern Virginia.  He is an Ivy-League college graduate and has a theological degree from a prestigious HBCU.  To the dismay of his “high” members, a mule’s collar hangs in his pristine, paneled office.  These members sometimes peer, peep, and point at the stained and wrinkled collar hanging between the Rev. Doctor’s Cornell University degree and his degree from Virginia Union Seminary.  Bewildered, these high members shake their heads, lift their noses, and with magnificent contempt look much like haughty roosters that think the sun rises just to hear them crow.  When one of them gathers the courage to ask the reverend about this, to say the least, peculiar display, the cleric says simply: “The collar comes from a mule my grandfather owned.  I hang it here as a memorial.  Grandfather has passed on, the mule, too, is dead.  What I have left of the farm is this collar.  When I have problems, I come here, look at the collar, and it reminds me -- it is the ocular proof, so to speak -- that I am a dream come true.”  That’s what a memorial, a symbol, can do — inspire the present and future by honoring the past.  A symbol is as useful to the soul as a tool is to the hand.

     

    If we are what we say we are, indeed sing that we are, we too are dreams come true.  What memorial will we bring to bear?  It is clear that whatever construction, installation, sculpture, or classical monument that eventually rises on this now hallowed plot it must reflect the aspirations, inspirations, hopes and effort of the seven young men who banded together and organized Beta Omicron — the 58th chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.  The times were harsh when a fledgling Beta Omicron pitched its tent here at a college itself only 22 years old and set aside for African Americans nailed on a cross of apartheid - like racism.  Across the entire state of Tennessee, from Bristol to Memphis, there was not one black municipal, county, or state elected official.  Nonetheless, the Beta Omicron Seven planted their hopes here and worked with the Alpha Phi Alpha headquarters to proclaim that a “vote-less people is a hopeless people.”  In honoring them, and ourselves, with a tangible, palpable construct for generations to observe, we begin the process of joining art and imagination (the object that will stand here) with courage and industry (the spirit and values that gave birth to the idea).  Our memorial is not intended to measure the achievements and success of Beta Omicron brothers.  I can assure you that they are significant and abundant.  The men of Beta Omicron are ancestors, sources, and initiators.  Our aim for creating a memorial is not to measure Effort, but to make it.

     

    The band of brothers who founded Beta Omicron, like the farmer, were planters of a dream.  The dream, however, is not exclusively the benefit of those who embody it.  Those who succeed planters have the obligation to become harvesters — gatherers of knowledge and traditions that enable us to harvest the best of the past while planting new seeds for a new generation.  This is our memorial, too, and will be a symbol for our children and their children’s children.  It should be spared our founder’s, and our own, caprice, psychobabble, and excessive fraternal jargon.

     

    We break ground on this 31st day of October, 2008, for a Beta Omicron memorial.  Although it is well to remember the past, indeed imperative, we know that yesterday’s meaning can only be prologue for the present.  We are creating in the present, for the present and for the future.  There is no place here for those who want to make their past life better.  What we do here today in preparation of what will stand here tomorrow is our exercise of Effort, not an exhibition.  We remember ’06 and ‘34: manly deeds, scholarship and love for all mankind.  We make manifest Beta Omicron for the world to see.  Alpha yesterday!  Alpha today!  Alpha tomorrow!