To schedule Kathleen McGhee-Anderson for an upcoming event, please contact Bruce Brown.
The Bruce Brown Management Co.
217 19th Street, Suite B
Santa Monica, CA 90402
email: brucebrownmgt@gmail.com
tel: (310) 395-9071
Topics
- Writing For Television
- The Playwright’s Journey
- Female Empowerment and Achieving Your Dreams
- Living a Creative Life: From Detroit to Hollywood
- Self-Esteem, Success and the Quest for Wholeness
- A New Deal: Raising a Black Male Child in America
- Sipes vs. McGhee: Behind the Landmark Supreme Court Decision
- Writing While Black and Female
- Zora Neale Hurston: Florida’s Folk Shakespeare
- A Dream Called Spelman
Speech Excerpts
“Building Our Lives With Greater Purpose”
Lord of the Streets Episcopal Church – The Community of the Streets Outreach for Abused Women – Houston, Texas
“…You can flip the script tomorrow and rewrite the next chapter.
Ask for help, and help each other. In order to get help, you have to give help. While you’re busy helping others you forget about your own troubles and the miraculous happens. Your energy takes a shift. It’s like setting a ripple in a pond, once the first ring goes out…others emerge one by one and the flow of energy expands in a circle. As women, we can start with this small circle and by making one small step everyday—our circle of support, achievement and success can grow wider and wider.”
“A Dream Called Spelman”
Founder’s Day – Spelman College – Atlanta, Georgia
“…It is certainly not expected of us, in this day and age to give up all to succeed. On the other hand, I ask to succeed– at what? To succeed at business? Or at family life? Those certainly are good and worthy goals, but think of the footsteps that have created the path that brings us here to this moment. The footsteps of our founders, Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles, who created a school where none existed before– in this place which was once was a place of mud, dust, desperation, and ignorance.
What I am asking of myself and for each one of us, is to strive for higher goals. Goals that include more than just personal needs, but the needs of many. To set our sights on a goals that may seem impossible, but which have shown are attainable. What the Founders have shown us too, is that no dream, if it is noble, is impossible, if you are willing to give of yourself the very things that they themselves gave for us.
And this moment for us, the moment that we experience here at Spelman, took a lifetime of preparation, motivation, courage and sacrifice for Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles to build. The Founders of this great school sacrificed everything to build it. These were women who were safely ensconced in traditional, genteel, Protestant New England, where they could have taught school, attended lectures, and put on pretty bonnets forever. But instead they pursued a dream called Spelman.
It’s amazing that our culture celebrates heroes, innovators, statesmen, and movie stars, but rarely if ever is there mention of women like Harriett and Sophia. They changed the conditions of black women in America by educating them, and in doing so they effected their families, their communities, their descendants, in essence, sent out ripples that have moved beyond our campus, down through the generations, and throughout the world. Each and every one of us here has something of them in us. Each and every one of us is sitting in the house they built for us. We walk in their footsteps in the buildings they built. We walk we walk in their footsteps across this campus, in every classroom we sit in, and their footsteps take flight in the ideas and the knowledge that Spelman imparts. We converge and blend with our Founders everyday by living their dream as educated black women and hopefully, by dreaming and doing and accomplishing things that they would be proud of.
So how do we get there? How do we accomplish the goals and the dreams that define our lives? Those answers Sophia and Harriett have given us as well. In the way they lived, in their actions and in the examples they have bequeathed us not just in a school, but in the model they gave us of how to make dreams come true. If we follow in their footsteps we are on the right path. If we find in ourselves the qualities that they embodied we will be in good stead. Those are the qualities of Perseverance, Generosity, Optimism, Faith and Passion. Perhaps the most striking quality they possessed was perseverance…
Perseverance seems like an old fashioned word. John D. Rockefeller, (who also had a hand in helping Harriett and Sophia build our school with his generous philanthropic gifts and whose wife’s family Spelman is named for,) called this quality, STICK. But call it perseverance or call it STICK, they had plenty of it…
