Like so many young black men in search of their identity like a fly in a big bowl of buttermilk, one can only wonder why they are lost. While book reports on Harriet Tubman and Matthew Henson sparked his interest in black history, and a Budweiser series of African Kings and Queens posters on neighbors walls shook his curiosity will Mega was still lost.

Growing up in the black community in the 1980’s under the government orchestrated attack of the black community masked by Oliver North’s documented and Contra’s crack cocaine war on black people he still saw the light; his third eye was still “cracked” open. Yet, somehow in the midst of a society that demonizes black folks and barely acknowledges us in her public school history books the hip-hop conscious lyrics of the likes of Public Enemy, X-Clan, KRS 1 and Rakim did more than peek his interest, it WOKE him up. It cracked the door open for his only black male teacher from grades K-12 to push him to critically think about who he was as a black man, and the responsibility it came with being a man.

By the time he got to college, he was woke as a result of reading multiple black history and fiction books from Hakim’s bookstore in West Philly. He was influenced by the likes of black scholars and activists like Julani Ghana, Naim Akbar, Sistah Souljah, Haki Mahabudtki, Rev. Dr. Ishakamusi Barashango, Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, and Ava Muhammad. This quest to know himself, and make a difference on campus and in the world led him to host on-campus seminars, voter registration drives, student protest and he even was elected the first black homecoming king in the history of West Chester University. He even entered a partnership with a black-owned black store and became an on-campus black book sales distributor. Yet there was a constant yearning for a brotherhood of which he sought to fulfill through pledging a fraternity and seeking brotherhood through political and religious organizations. He has taught free grassroots Self-Help and Black Liberation Community Empowerment Classes in the black community for over a decade.

Today, he serves as a Dean of Students at a prominent African centered high school wherein part he is responsible for maintaining and sustaining the rich African centered culture, history and the African centered pedagogy of the institution. Through both formal education and personal study, cultural commitment, political and community activism, he is steeped in the principals of black empowerment, Maat’ and the NGUZO SABA.