We look at Black History Month as an opportunity to review the great contributions that African-Americans have made to America’s quality of life since arriving in chains on the shores of what has become this great nation of ours. To use the words of one great American, President Abraham Lincoln, “It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”

When listening to the big plans that one downtown developer spoke several years ago, suggesting Niagara’s success will be in that one big dream, a great Niagaran of the present, environmentalist Lou Riccuiti, suggested our success would be the result of many small ones.

Both Lincoln and Riccuiti are right. Our personal success is in our ability to remember our past as we walk into an unexplored future. The success of our nation will be in the small feet that step between our footprints.

Past leaders opened a nation’s eyes with the steps of their lives and experiences. They are well-documented into contemporary history. I’ll not take space to recount them.

The question is, “What are you doing — in perhaps smaller steps — to open the eyes of those young ones around you?”

During February’s Fridays, I’ll write from my own personal experiences about the encounters where I was able to gently open young children’s eyes on race issues; and where, in one case, a young child was able to open mine.

I encourage you to write your letters to the editor about similar situations during this month, be you or they black, white, brown, yellow or red.

The stories are, “Your hair feels funny” — where former Lewiston councilman Dan Kilmer’s son felt free to question the differences between his Nordic mother and me.

“Is that your dad?” is where I learned the lesson that even 4-year old children recognize differences.

“I’m with that family,” is where a white family at Walmart allowed me to share a few minutes with their remarkable son as he opened my eyes.

Most recently though, is the story of “My uncle writes for the Gazette,” which is where we will start.

My uncle writes for the Gazette

Samantha Lamantia is an 11th-grader at Niagara Wheatfield Senior High School. She is the daughter of retired firefighter Philip Lamantia and his lovely wife, Liz.

There is no question about her father being Italian; and her mother, with fair hair and light eyes, would be able to walk the streets of Copenhagen or Oslo unnoticed. Samantha looks more like her father. It goes without saying that she looks nothing like me.

With inter-racial relationships being no longer taboo, her statement that her uncle writes for the Gazette, and then she showed them my column picture, should not have been difficult for her classmates to believe. She said that the jaw of a nearby instructor dropped.

It’s all right that she calls me uncle. While there are scores of children not related to me who call me uncle, only a few of them have fathers that address me as brother. Her father does; and in a genetic sense, I am neither Samantha’s uncle nor her father’s brother.

But in a greater sense, I am just what both say that I am. We all are just what we say that all are.

I am a frequent visitor to the warmth of the Lamantia home. Their two young ones wait by the door to get their tickles when I arrive, and I do so enjoy Liz’s good home cooking.

Samantha, as does so many other young ones of every color, knows that I am there for them. For her, color is not an issue. Our success as black people will not be only in our own children, but in America’s children — as will be the success of America itself; and by God in Heaven, Samantha’s tiny footsteps has interspaced those of Dr. Martin Luther King’s as well as any.

While some of us will forever harbor the hatred and guilt of their prejudices until the day they die, many more recognize it is time to quit quoting King’s dream and start living it.

King wrote, “Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

We must do this, as King has said, by continuing to work in the faith that unearned suffering has been redemptive.

To paraphrase King, we all must understand we cannot hear freedom ring from the hilltops of New Hampshire, the mountains of New York, the Alleghenies of Pennsylvania, the Rockies of Colorado or from the slopes of California, until we it first falls from the hearts and voices of America’s children.

But that’s not good enough. We won’t be able to hear it from Stone Mountain of Georgia, Lookout Mountain of Tennessee, nor from every faraway hill and molehill of Mississippi either. Not until we all look out from our own mountainously stony hearts, hear the peal of freedom’s bell fall against our own souls, and its sweet tune musically echo into our own ears — carrying the lyrics of those whose footsteps we have followed and the words of God almighty.

We have come this far by faith; and, because of it, I often hear freedom’s clarion peal. I heard it in Samantha’s voice.