Ismael Hernandez is president of the Freedom & Virtue Institute, an organization dedicated to the promotion of the ideas of liberty, faith, and self-reliance. Ismael is a regular lecturer with the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has spoken at Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, and many other organizations. He is a regular speaker at service clubs around the country and is the author of the acclaimed book Not Tragically Colored: Freedom, Personhood, and the Renewal of Black America. He is a noted expert on questions of effectively serving the poor and race relations.
My mother was a beautiful, humble Puerto Rican woman for whom the whole of life revolved around her children. She was an intelligent woman with only a fifth grade education, having to abandon school in the late 1920s as mitigating…