“Mommie, you have transformed into that cosmic bird Hawk that lives and breathes Freedom,” Allen wrote. “We will follow your trail of golden dust and continue to climb higher. We promise “to be true, be beautiful, be Free.”
The celebrated choreographer and founder of the Debbie Allen Dance Academy signed off the post with her name, her siblings’ names, and other family members. She also gave a shoutout to “all the Turks in our family,” a nod to the affectionate nickname “MaTurk” that her family used for Ayers.
Ayers lived a life devoted to scholarship, arts, and culture, passions she eagerly shared with her four children. A graduate of the Brainerd Institute, she became the founding director of the Brainerd Institute Heritage after Phylicia Rashad purchased the 12-acre property where the institute once stood in 1999. Ayers’ distinctive poetry style earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination, a place in Langston Hughes’ 1964 collection New Negro Poets, USA, and praise at NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, where enlarged renderings of her 1952 poem “Hawk” are displayed.
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Source: Black Enterprise
