Manns Medium

Rockford’s rich black history began in 1834 when a young 22 year old slave by the name of Lewis Lemon, made the journey from what is now Galena Illinois to what is now Rockford Illinois via the Rock River with his then master Germanicus Kent and a fellow explorer, later turned school teacher/farmer Thatcher Blake. It is also known that approximately 4 plus years later, Lewis Lemon was able to purchases his freedom from Germanicus Kent but that is about as far as it goes.  Very little else is really known about Rockford’s first black founder except the little that can be found about him in some of the old journals and books carefully secured in certain places and of course the fact that he was buried in what is now referred to as Greenwood Cemetery with an inscription on his gravestone that reads “Born slave–Died Free”. Now there are none left to help us discover more about the beginning of this city’s black history regarding this man. Other point of interest that encompasses o...

I touched the wings of an angel today and it felt like all was right with the world.   I didn’t know that I was speaking to an angel at first and only realized it long after the contact was over.   This feeling of euphoria still sticks with me and it is because of that that I would like to share it with you. I have been involved in the Transportation industry for quite some time now and that combined with my years in the military plus all of my interactive experience with people; have made me come to believe that there are angels among us.   They are nothing like those we see in movies or in print and they do not come with halos or wings.   These angels are very similar to us and many times so much like us that it makes me wonder why we can not be much more of an angel than some of us already are. The angel I met today went by the name of Jay and drove for a company called Natural State Carriers.   The first time I met him it was strictly business.   I...

My dream ended on the day I had to shut the doors of my business because a one-man shop could not compete with well established businesses especially with the economy crashing as it had.   That day was December 12, 2009. Since that time I have lost everything that I had worked so hard to obtain and took a serious hit to my manhood.   Seeing the look in the eyes of my children when they learned our fate, did little to make things any better.   There was no unemployment compensation for me because of being self-employed and even after surviving a family of 10 with a single mother, this sequence of events seemed insurmountable.   The only place left to turn besides family was my faith in God that things would get better. April 22, 2011 my prayers were answered and a new job was mine.   It’s funny that it is exactly the same job that I had been doing so I attribute acquiring this position to my experience.   It’s also strange that other agencies that I had co...