Tim Campbell. "A Concerning Video: 'The Lion King'" . Radikal; February 23, 2017 . Retrieved December 10, 2017 .
Category:Songs from The Lion King
Category:Disney songs
Category:1994 songs
Category:Songs written by Elton John
Category:Songs about animals
Category:Song recordings produced by David Foster
Category:Songs about Africa
Category:Songs about parenthoodPhoto: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.” We all know the rest. Today is a day to remember the tradition of what has been the greatest time in human history for black people. But there is another anniversary worth remembering, the day that the nation decided to put its best foot forward, not by reminding America of all the things it was doing wrong in the 1960s, but by allowing itself to slip, ever so slightly, into the past.
Forty years ago, I was standing on my living room rug, watching the sun rise, waiting to go to work as a black man in 1970. I was a second-year medical student and beginning to understand what it meant to be black. I saw my parents, who I love dearly, struggle to help me make sense of this new identity that I was about to put to the test. The memory is crystal clear. I was told, “Son, you might be the first black man in the history of medicine.”
While I accepted this news with a kind of secret elation, I didn’t dare tell my mother how delighted I was by this outcome — a fact that still puzzles my parents — because she would never have understood that. I felt ashamed. I felt that I had failed to live up to my own expectations. She had entrusted me with her firstborn, and now this black boy was about to disappoint her. I resolved to hide my feelings until the day that I made it through the six years of medical school.
The day that I told her that I had been accepted, we took a drive through Harlem. The neighborhood was shrouded in a thick fog of goodbyes. A man was selling “Freedom Stars” on the corner. A young boy was in a small group that was playing a pickup game of basketball. We cruised past a group of boys running through the streets, ringing doorbells, gathering
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