Anderson Family: “Young, gifted and black. Oh, what a lovely precious dream."

She has always known who she was and celebrated that knowing by being herself completely in that knowledge. She is a thinker, writer, a psychologist in the making and more. She rests easy in the beautiful, complicated relationships of mothers and their daughters.

Raised by a single mother, her story is one of indomitable grit and dedication. Disagreements between them were, in hindsight, basically the mother stating the truth and the daughter “taking her own sweet time coming around." Carving her own path, in her own way, has always been her best skill.

In many ways, she is a throwback to the 1968 rising Black Power movement. Pride in being black and beautiful was expressed in big afros and raised fists. She is the intersection of Nina Simone’s effort to capture forever that moment of joy in black identity through the song she wrote for black children.

The song was a dedication to Simone's friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry and Simone bonded over civil rights and “radical” politics.

“When you're young, gifted and black … Your soul's intact.”

A few months before Hansberry died in 1965, she told a group of student essay winners, "I wanted to be able to come here and speak with you on this occasion because you are young, gifted and black."

Those words stuck in Simone's head. Thinking about Hansberry’s vision of a longer narrative, She saw that vision in a broader landscape of setback and ascent. “I remember getting a feeling in my body, and I said, 'That's it: to be young, gifted and black. That's all.' And sat down at the piano and made up a tune. It just flowed out of me."

Simone told her bandleader to wrote the words for her song, but to keep it simple — write something that "will make black children all over the world feel good about themselves, forever."

This child of today, feels good about herself. It doesn’t matter if the world tells her something different — For her "to be young, gifted and black is where it's at."