Happy Flag Day!

Wear your colors proudly -- whatever they are!

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

That's what Bill T. Jones said, channeling Fela, as he accepted a Tony award Sunday night.

Fences as a play and Denzel and Viola as actors done us proud.

So did Memphis.

Blacks and Broadway

The Tony Awards will be presented tonight, honoring the best of the Broadway theater season. A number of blackfolks have been nominated. Please read what I recently wrote for The Root:

June 6

I was born on June 6 in the colored side of the hospital in Conyers, Ga., the first of the six children of Minnie Ola and Johnnie Shipp. I call my mother on June 6 to sing “Happy Birthday” since, after all she did all the work that day.

That was 11 years after D-Day, a time well documented with a major exception: What about the black men who were part of that invasion of France and ultimately the liberation of Europe from Hitler’s Nazis? A column I wrote for the New York Daily News amid the 50^th anniversary hoopla in 1994 dealt with that, caught the attention of Rep. Charles Rangel and ultimately led to President Clinton belatedly recognizing black vets during at a White House ceremony. Later, with all the rave about the movie “Private Ryan,” starring Tom Hanks. I wrote in a column about the need to treat WWII veterans better, starting with health care: This is part of that column: “In 1944, blacks were usually treated as uniformed laborers, barred from combat units. One of them was my Daddy, a farm boy and shoe repairman from Conyers, Ga., whose company arrived in France on June 12, 1944, the day before "Private Ryan" ends.

We need to be angry and vigilant about an even younger generation of veterans, those of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can you imagine what it must be like to be in your 20s without adequate mental and physicial health care or even job opportunities?