Reverend Cecil Murrary spoke dynamically today in the Marsee Auditorium about Black History Month in a speech entitled “Who’s History is Black History.”

“We must be grateful we are a nations of nations, our dream is one we can never ignore,” Murray said in his opening.

Murrary, an NAACP award winner goes over a brief history of African Americans from slavery to civil rights before getting to his thesis of who’s history is black history.

“The story of is his story, the story of God, the story of empowerment, black history is God’s History in color,” Murrary said.

Walking around the stage in a fitted suit Murrary speaks with eloquence and flair as he discusses the 18 million slaves who died crossing the Ocean to the new world or how the North couldn’t win the Civil War without blacks.

How the Tuskegee Airmen never lost a single plane they protected and how we’ve gone from slaves building the White House to where we are at now with America’s first black president, Barack Obama.

“Slaves build the White House, now one who looks like (that slave) is in there,” Murrary said.

Murrary tackled social issues in his speech as he addressed that the biggest issue facing African Americans is poverty but not just economic poverty, but social poverty and educational poverty.

“It use to be said that being poor ain’t so bad, just inconvenient,” Murrary said.

Spitting out statistics Murrary talked abut how 30 million Americans go to bed hungry, how 40 percent of black families have a mother and father, mostly because the fathers are in prison, 80 percent of them are there for substance abuse crimes.

“If we can crawl them out of the darkness of despair we can make a difference,” Murrary said.

He addressed the hip-hop movement which he said was  brilliant but wished people wouldn’t embrace the street element. All in all it was a captivating speech that ended in the idea that the future and what happens is up to us and we must not let racism into the 21st Century.

“It’s in your hands my son,” Murrary said.