Black History Month: A Letter to Role Models
Elijah Mason
2/10/2022
Washington Track & Field's Elijah Mason acknowledges those in his life who helped shape him into the student-athlete he is today.
Give Them Their Flowers
by Elijah Mason
Any opportunity for me to brag about how amazing the people in my life are and what they mean to me, I jump on immediately. I believe the people you love and look up to have not only earned to be spoken highly of publicly but would also want to know how much they are appreciated privately. So, for this Black History Month, I am choosing to give my Black heroes their flowers because it is the least that I can do to show them what they mean to me and how grateful I am to have them in my life. Please enjoy this montage of individuals that have made me the young man I am today!
This Black History Month, I am choosing to give my Black heroes their flowers because it is the least that I can do to show them what they mean to me and how grateful I am to have them in my life.
Each member of the village that chose to raise me has played a unique role in molding me into the man I am today. From moving to Arizona young all the way to today, this village continues to grow but it always feels likes they’ve been there forever. After listing this portion of my village, I would like to refer to them as the Dream Team from here on out. So, thank you Mom, RaShad, Samuel, Tbo, Uncle Troy, NFT, and LeBron James. The impact each of you have had on my life is insurmountable. The stories we have we can talk about forever haha; but the next few paragraphs are to commemorate you all and to be proud of what you all created.
Ever since I can remember, each of you has promised me that success was in my future in anything I chose to do.
Ever since I can remember, each of you has promised me that success was in my future in anything I chose to do. I used to steal the pots and pans in the middle of the night and sneak them to my room so I could practice the drums before I stopped wearing diapers. Mom would wake up in the morning and when she could have been mad that we were running late and that she didn’t want to run around the house looking for breakfast supplies, she would still want to hear what I had taught myself that night. I used to be afraid to go to football practice when I first started because I was a big kid so due to weight limit rules, I was a 3rd grader playing with middle schoolers; but with RaShad being 8 years older than me, he would get me ready by letting me run at him full speed to break that fear. Samuel and I have been called twins our whole life although we look nothing alike. He is 15 months older than me so I am sure anyone reading this can imagine the stories we have! But Samuel, you have played one of the most important roles in my life because you have always been two things first and have never run away from them. First is being honest and second is standing up for what you believe in. In a world full of peer pressure and individuals too afraid to just be themselves, you show me every day that being yourself is the only way people should be.
In a world full of peer pressure and individuals too afraid to just be themselves, you show me every day that being yourself is the only way people should be.
Tbo is my cousin and is 13 months younger than me, so he was kind of like my little brother, yet he was always way cooler than me in my eyes. We had this trading of strengths thing that we have done our entire lives. I was always the one wise beyond my years, and he was the one that knew how to take care of the things you love. I was destructive as a kid, but Tbo had order. He would wake up and make his bed, always remembered to brush his teeth, and would even clean his shoes on his own so they looked nice all the time, and these were the coolest things in the world to me. Where we come from, we had this understanding that you had to pay a lot of money for things to look nice and then I would go to Tbo’s house, and I knew things didn’t cost that kind of money, yet everything looked nice. I know now that it was his at-home village that made him this way but because Uncle Troy, Aunt Debbie, TJ and Deshona made Tbo that way, they also made me that way. Uncle Troy, you were and are living proof of a successful Black man. You are the inspiration I needed as a kid to start understanding money. With your money saving techniques, you used to teach us, it was never about how much money we had but you showed us the importance of saving our money and working for it. Rather than buying candy with my $50 for Christmas each year, you showed me how to spend half and save half and that bled into the rest of my life. It was the way I bought my first pair of headphones when I was in 6th grade and the way I bought my first car in 2020.
Uncle Troy, you were and are living proof of a successful Black man. You are the inspiration I needed as a kid to start understanding money.
Now, NFT stands for No Family Tighter and Never Fold Together. We decided to make this group in 2017 right after we graduated high school to officially establish that we would be family forever. NFT consists of Samuel and Tbo as we just spoke about, but also Kolbe Dumas, Ahsan Arthiste, Alex Soto, Tyrek Ball, and Myles Wilson. This friend group started in elementary school, and we have been working towards a better future for ourselves and our families ever since. Being a member of NFT just gives me chills to think about because of the success that has come from this group at such a young age. Every one of us are young Black men from low-income families that got into college on some kind of scholarship. We all played varsity sports in high school and 4 of us went on to play collegiate sports. Myles is a football player who is going to be a scientist, and Kolbe works in public policy and is getting his masters right now but he just launched his first Crypto coin project so who knows what he’s going to do but he will be successful at anything. Ahsan worked all throughout college as a pharmacy assistant and now has a 6-figure investing portfolio. Soto worked hard to get his mechanical engineering degree where he accepted a $70k+ job right out of school. Tyrek has moved back and forth from Florida to Arizona, attended two different universities playing baseball, and is one promotion away from being regional manager at Nike. Tbo went the JUCO route in order to continue pursuing his dream to play professional baseball. Starting at Gateway Community College, he made his way to Pima Community College where he then got a scholarship to play baseball at North Dakota State University! Samuel works at the same community center we grew up at while he is in school and learning another in woodworking. I mention all of this because it has always been all about the people around you that make you you. Having brothers like this to grow up with for such a long time, we have never let each other fall down the wrong path although we came close a few times. Thank you NFT for committing to being the best version of yourselves and wanting to truly make a difference in the image that has been set upon us as Black men our whole lives. Your strength has bled into me and will always be one of my key sources that I tap into whenever I need some more.
Thank you NFT for committing to being the best version of yourselves and wanting to truly make a difference in the image that has been set upon us as Black men our whole lives.
And finally, I want to thank LeBron James for being the man on TV with an unlimited arsenal of superpowers. You have always been my favorite basketball player, and I believe it was nothing but the Lord himself that caused my father to leave one thing for me before he passed which was a rookie Cavs basketball with your signature on it. Ever since then, I have always known that the Lord gave you one of the greatest opportunities he could have given anyone and that was being the father figure and role model to a nation full of Black boys like me that would go home every day and never get to see one. Trying to explain to people my whole life what you mean to me has been a battle in itself, but it is one I encourage all day every day because nobody that I know of has ever had more expectations placed on them since you were just a boy and has found every way possible to destroy all of them and take them to another level. No amount of pressure has ever broken you, and you are the definition of pressure makes diamonds.
I have always known that the Lord gave [LeBron James] one of the greatest opportunities he could have given anyone and that was being the father figure and role model to a nation full of Black boys like me that would go home every day and never get to see one.
With all of this, I hope each of you are proud to say that all of me reflects each of you. Athletically, I am 2nd all time in Arizona high school discus history, I earned a full scholarship to the University of Washington which is one of the best academic public universities in the world, I am a 2X Pac-12 Discus Champion, 2X First team All-American, competed at the 2020 Olympic Trials, and placed 8th in the Junior World Championships in Finland. But in life, I have made lots of friends. I believe if you asked anybody that has shared the same space as me that they would say I am a nice and hardworking person. I was appointed captain of the Men’s Track and Field team, Co-President of the Black Student Athlete Alliance, and the University of Washington’s Male PAC-12 SALT rep. None of these were positions I applied for, but the individuals around me felt that I would be a good fit in these roles. I am about to finish undergrad and we are waiting to hear back to see if I got into a master’s program. I hope y’all are proud!
To everyone mentioned in this short paper, I thank you, I love you, and here are your flowers!
To everyone mentioned in this short paper, I thank you, I love you, and here are your flowers!