By The Editors

Following Orders.

That’s what Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the Dillon, South Carolina eighth-grader who was one of the special guests of President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama during his February 24 address to Congress, was doing.

Ty’sheoma Bethea embraced by First Lady Michelle Obama

Ty’Sheoma attends the Dillon junior high school that President Obama visited. It’s a facility in bad physical shape, the President said. Its ceilings leak, the paint on the walls is peeling, and school lessons stop six times during each school day because, he explained, “the train barrels by her classroom. She has been told her school is hopeless, but the other day after class she went to the public library and typed up a letter to [the members of Congress]. She even asked her principal for the money to buy a stamp.”

President Obama continued: “The letter asks us for help and says, ‘We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself, and one day president, so we can make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world. We are not quitters.”

We are not quitters.

Those words resound through the centuries-in the stories of endurance of enslaved and free blacks during the antebellum era; in the stories of perseverance and achievement of black in the century-and-a-half after the end of the Civil War; in the words of countless black Americans, known and unknown.

For us, they immediately brought to mind words written by the great American writer, Albert Murray, in his fictionalized boyhood memoir, The Spyglass Tree. Murray characterized the sensation the novel’s young hero experiences at the beginning of a school class – the feeling that he is destined for significant achievement – as his inculcating the indelible “ancestral imperative to do something and become something and be somebody.”

Obviously, and to our great joy, Ty’Sheoma Bethea has felt that same great ancestral imperative, too.

See what we mean. Following orders.