[Posted Dec. 12, 2007]

Angela Bassett Tells Hampton Girls What Love's Got To Do With It  

Sean C. Bowers      

        Speaking to 200 young girls on Thursday, Nov. 29th at the Hampton, Girls Inc. fundraiser, actor Angela Bassett encouraged the youth to excel despite the hardships life might present.
Bassett told the young women to “dream, have goals and focus.”

Actress Angela Bassett greeting youths at a Girls Inc. fundraiser.

        Drawing on her own background, she said, “I was a little girl just like you, in St Petersburg in the projects with just my sister and my mom with no daddy around. I told myself I’m going to be somebody someday.
      “You are the only person who can allow yourself to be taken off your path to your dream. Education will make your dreams come true.

       “When I was in the Upward Bound program a man came into my life (Mr. George Langhorn) for only one year. At the end of the year he wrote a letter to me and my mom telling me to apply to Harvard, Yale and University of Virginia. I did and I got in and then I was scared to go. I would stand in the mirror and give myself a good talking too. What you going to do, quit, give up? You want to cry? Go ahead cry for ten minutes. Then clean up your face, comb your hair and you get to work, and you do what you have to do to stay here!”
Bassett, whose film credits include “What’s Love Got To Do With It” and “Waiting To Exhale”, closed with a powerful performance of a Ruby Dee poem she had memorized as a young girl as the room full of this “new school” generation of impressionable young women hung on her every word.
      “Life is for the living, life is fine; love life,” she said. 
       Sean C. Bowers is a local progressive youth development coach, author and poet, who has written for the New Journal and Guide the last nine years. He can be contacted about self-empowerment seminars and presentations at V1ZUAL1ZE.ORG (Yes, those are 1’s, are you 1?)

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