Taki S. Raton spoke at the Downtown Milwaukee campus about presence, invention, and civilization in black history. Raton is a professor at Springfield College in Chicago. He received his master’s degree in 1992. His first job as a professor was unintentional. He was found and asked to teach at Malcom X College. They were looking for black members of the community that were making a huge difference.
They didn’t want just anybody; they wanted to get people in the college that would inspire students. Most people put on that list were black folk that had a track record of doing something in the community and Raton was one of them.
In addition to being a professor, he has a radio show broadcast on Harambee Radio. Every Thursday from 8 until 9 p.m., he is on the internet radio station discussing issues. He has also written numerous times for the Community Journal.
Raton currently has plans to change the community slowly. He wants to open a private school for blacks and he is also donating money for kids that go through home schooling.
On Feb. 25, he was at MATC to talk to students about the history, presence, invention and civilization in black history. He shared a lot of facts that anybody would have found interesting. All his work is dedicated to Donald Johnson. Raton shared with us the two oldest bones ever found. One was of Lucy, who was dated to be about 3.4 million years old. Lucy seemed to be an African- American woman.
Years later they found Salem. Salem was a black child and was dated to be 1,000 years older than Lucy. This goes into another point Raton made. There were no “whites” in the Stone Age. They all had the same melanin. It was about 6500 B.C. when whites emerged. They had a lack of melanin. They had loss of memory, loss of color, loss of humanism, and loss of spirituality, he said.
To this point, Raton showed the audience multiple things that whites think they built, but in reality, the black folk created it all. The great pyramids of Egypt and the great Sphinx of Giza were built by blacks. That was because all ancient Egyptians, also known as Kemites, were black. In many of the pictures drawn to show their civilization, the people were shown to have darker skin. Another thing the blacks built was the first university in the world, the temple of Waset. It was known as the scepter. They also invented chess and checkers.
Raton concluded his discussion by saying that it is natural for a group of people to take another person’s culture and call it their own. But the people who take the culture, build it forward. And that is where black culture stopped. What they need to do is to continue moving forward with the culture. He teaches so he can retrieve the past for the future.
Taki S. Raton is an amazing and inspirational speaker. You can learn a lot from him in just two hours. He grabs your attention and makes you wish you could sit for hours just talking with him.