Executive editor's view.

I count myself among the many African Americans who begin each new year with a period of personal reflection and meditation rooted in our heritage and culture. On New Year's Day, a pot of black-eyed peas is always on my stove to share with anyone who comes into my home. It's an African-American folk practice from the South that provides a traditional grassroots link to the season of celebration marked by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday and Black History Month. For me, this time resonates with cultural memory, spiritual consciousness, historical awareness, and a communal celebration of identity and thanksgiving for how far we've come and what we'll yet accomplish. That's what the months of January and February, in particular, mean to me. It is what I've tried to share with readers year-round in the pages of Black Issues Book Review, from our very first issue in 1999.

This year, my backward glance at black history and heritage extends authentically beyond my Southern rural roots to my firsthand experience with Mother Africa. I only recently made the pilgrimage to the continent last August, when I visited four West African countries with a Cambridge, Massachusetts, sister city delegation organized and headed by one of my dearest friends: Ken Reeves, who continues to serve in the Cambridge City Council after more than a decade.

How special it was to be able to share the experience of meeting the people and enjoying the hospitality of Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo and Benin with the college buddy who first engaged me in serious discussions about black identity, pan-Africanism and the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. Imagine the flood of emotions called forth when our 10-member delegation visited the Du Bois Centre for Pan-African Culture in Accra, where his body rests, and the ashes of his widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois, reside.

Du Bois died at age 95 in 1963 in Ghana, where he had lived at the invitation of independence leader and first president, Kwame Nkrumah. During my visit to Ghana, our group was ushered into the study where Du Bois worked for the last two years of his life. I immediately spotted a large, framed commemorative poster with his portrait on the opposite wall. Upon closer inspection, I was startled to see that the poster had been produced at my mother's alma mater, the historically black LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, Tennessee. I immediately responded to this artifact as a kind of spiritual welcome from my mother. At the time, it had been less than a year since she joined the ancestors, long separated by the Middle Passage and hundreds of years. At that moment, I felt whole--intellectually, culturally and spiritually--and prepared for when our delegation later traveled the four-kilometer Route des Esclaves in Benin.

The dusty road leads from the Musee d'Histoire d'Ouidah, housed in a former 17th-century Portuguese slave fort, to the beach where enslaved Africans were herded to be shipped to Brazil and the Caribbean. There, through the huge memorial arch known as the Portal of No Return, built by the government of Benin in the 1990s, we gazed upon the waters of the Atlantic, angrily stirred, it seemed, by the spirits of the ancestors who did not or chose not to survive the Middle Passage. It wasn't anger that overwhelmed me as I watched those waters roil, but a sense of the triumph of our people, and gratitude that my ancestors had somehow found the will and strength to survive the voyage. They had made their home in a strange place that over generations produced African-Americans who could and did return to these shores to complete a tortuous circle, from this so-called portal of no return.

Now, in my own career at BIBR, I am completing another circle. After three years as its executive editor, I'm embracing a new position and a new set of projects. I'm also pleased that Evette Porter, who I've known since she first became a journalist and editor, has been selected by BIBR founding father William E. Cox, to succeed me. It's been exhilarating to pass the torch--or maybe it's a pot of black-eyed peas--to this accomplished younger colleague, who is joining us in time to contribute to and close our third anniversary issue.

I will be fully engrossed with a new position at Essence, but I am honored that I have been asked to contribute occasional pieces to BIBR. I look forward to contributing and watching BIBR expand. And I am very grateful to all the other dedicated professionals I've been privileged to work with in BIBR's first three years--especially associate publisher Adrienne Ingrum, a valued friend who brought me to the magazine's team in the first place. Finally, I salute and thank BIBR's growing readership, who have been such a great source of inspiration and encouragement. Happy third anniversary to us all. The best is yet to come!