Yesterday’s passing of Heavy D made me ponder that question. I fell in love with hip-hop because it’s hard not to love an art form that literally saved thousands of children. My early career saw the beginning of teen on teen murders for starter jackets and gym shoes. My students were the first to be killed in senseless gang initiation murders. Consequently, even those students who would never make it out of the ghetto could sing along with an art form that resonated and told stories of their lives.

The first 45 I ever bought was “Shop Around”, by the Miracles. “Who’s Lovin’ You” was on the reverse side. Since my father’s turntable was designed for 33 1/3’s, I had to buy the yellow plug that snapped into the middle of a forty-five to make it fit the

Something tragic happened to the old black neighborhoods where I grew up in the 60’s. In those days, most of the businesses up and down 31st and 35th Streets, from King Dr. (South Park) to Michigan were owned by our neighbors. There was a drycleaner and a hardware store, both owned by the parents of kids I went to school with. The Griffins owned the funeral home on 33rd Street.

On warm summer mornings, we’d sit on the stomp in front of our house and watch the watermelon man go by on his horsedrawn wagon,

My 27 year-old daughter and I had a ball laughing at how my generation had to use manual typewriters for our high school and college term papers. I thrilled her with stories of hundreds of balled up papers tossed on the floor near the trashcan. These papers boasted mistakes, lumpy whited-out corrections, and strikeovers warranting me to have to start all over again. I described all-night typing sessions, pumped up on “No Doze”, while I slaved over a paper that was due the next morning.

On this Black History day, new book, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” by Jeanne Theoharis, a Brooklyn College professor shows Rosa Parks as much Malcolm X as she was Martin Luther King Jr.

The book, reviewed by New York Times writer, Charles M. Blow is on my list of books to read this month.

In the book, Rosa Parks states in her own words, “I had felt for a long time, that if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, I would refuse to do so.”

“Scandal’s” Kerry Washington, exchanged a long embrace with her Scandal co-star, President Fitzgerald Grant, played by actor Tony Goldwyn, as he presented her with the best actress in a drama award last night at the NAACP 44th Annual Image Awards. This caused the females in the audience to cheer, and that wasn’t the only great moment.