More than ten years ago, Port Arthur native Marcus Parker, now known to his fans and constituents as “M-Positive” embarked on a career as a motivational rap artist and mentor to hundreds of teens around the state of Texas. Today, he still raps, motivates, teaches classes on green energy and tankless water heaters, and was recently certified as a Life Coach.

Parker, who has recorded more than 100 songs and sold numerous albums spent some time in his musical career “underground,” in a place where it was just inside of thirty years ago that the more negative rap with the curse words and their derogatory meanings would have been there in his place. [Marcus Parker “slammed” on WorldStar HipHop.]

Revisiting M-Positive these many years later has shown that success has not change him one bit. Not one to give in to what’s popular just to make a buck, Parker is a Dallas institution as well as a former best-selling “Dallas Morning News” author.

Parker defines himself as a selfless leader and believes that the Black community can use a lot more of us.

One naturally asks the question whether or not today’s mega-church wives and First Ladies of the Black Church would have had the heart or spirit or the exceptional souls of a Coretta Scott King, Myrlie Evers, Betty Shabazz, or even Winnie Mandela or Michelle Obama, all women who stood beside men, their husbands and the fathers of their children, who put their lives on the sacrificial line for the “greater good of all humanity.”

To be sure, the Malcolm X’s, Marcus Garvey’s, Medgar Everses, Martin Luther King Jr.’s, and Rohilalah [nee ‘Nelson’] Mandela’s who were called upon to give up the ‘stuff,’ and the women who stood by them to the detriment of their own families are those examples and exceptions. Too many of us are familiar with the First Ladies of today’s world who will find it easier to say “I’m not letting my husband march for no folks about riding on the fronts of no buses. Tell them to do what we did and buy themselves a big fancy car like ours.”

To be sure, our Historical Mothers and their husbands did a lot more with far less resources than we have now.

“We are all familiar with the saying ‘it takes a Village to raise a child,’ and I strive to help people understand that the way to strengthen the Village is to train and teach more leaders to be motivators and focus on the bigger picture,” says M-Positive. “We have a hand full of millionaires while everyone else is barely scraping by, and we are also at a time in our history when our energies can be focused toward healing and the wholeness of community.”

In order to define selfless leadership, it’s not hard to think about the most beautiful mothers of the Black community in the “Village” that no longer exists.

Parker is currently training others in Leadership Development, seizing the moral high ground that comes with being a “Selfless Leader” and inspiration to all who cross his path. He believes that the key to re-learning our greatness as a people is first and foremost rooted and grounded in re-learning manners and respect for our elders and the struggles they had that brought us to this day in our history.

“Children nowadays are born into technology that we didn’t have. We had to rely on one another; we had to visit friends, family and neighbors, and we had to ‘holla’ over the fence and knock on Miss Susie’s door to get a question answered or to get information. It was easy to absorb manners nearly by osmosis based on long-standing traditions. Those traditions were a natural part of our character as a race of people. Personal contact was everything and we found and built our individual identities through it. Everyone seems to agree that we need that community again, but no one seems to have a clue where to begin to rebuild it.”

Most certainly, in today’s stilted world, too much pseudo-inspiration comes from being the next YouTube “viral” sensation. We find that technology, while helpful, is also a deterrent to natural creativity.

Selfless leaders understand how to reconnect, how to inspire a change in mentality that involves pride in self and the kind of personal growth that is a natural extension of the entire communities in which we live.

The demand is to move away from materialism and back to the things in life that really matter, like an appreciation for the larger picture that we all have in common. Without sunlight, trees, oxygen, flowers, and the beauty of the world we live in…everything else is a moot point, he says, as he also endeavors to help keep the world clean and green.

Graciousness or gratefulness about daily living is expedient to re-learning manners and respect in the midst of all of this technology. Those who have found fame and financial fortune keep trying to tell the rest of us it’s not what it’s cracked up to be. Parker should know – he has been there, had it all, lost it all, done that, and has consequently re-engineered his own life with a new reality and perspective, a new “grip,” so to speak.

“Don’t tie yourself down to the ‘stuff’ and let it define you. It limits ability and breeds more selfishness, perpetuating the very weeds of life that destroy everything else in its pathway,” he said. “This attitude of ‘I got mine, so the rest of you can get on with yourselves’ is not a winning formula for the future.”

Parker believes that we go through stages of personal development when it comes to access and vulnerability involved with helping others. The key is to find a personal truth that fits into the larger picture.

“If we scale our personal truths like the educational systems scale the learning process, we understand that not everyone operates on the same level of maturity at the same time. Once we understand that, it is easier to desensitize ourselves from being easily offended. We learn to take our ‘psychological whippings’ and move forward.”

“As a community,” says Parker, “we’ve got examples of people who rose above it all in spite of extreme difficulties, especially those who were willing to risk their own lives to get to the bigger picture.”

“Think about that,” said Parker. “You already know my favorite movie of all time is The Lion King. But if Mufasa had left Simba down in that hole to be trampled and mangled by the wilding herd, instead of throwing himself into harm’s way to save his son and therefore the future, the ending of that story would have been very different.”

Indeed, instead of long-term lifetime inheritance, it would have been all about self-preservation.

True, Simba trusted his father’s brother, his own Uncle Scar, which got his father killed and almost got Simba killed, but in the end the true story and history of us is never about selfishness, it is about selfless leadership. It is about the future of our own homegrown “Pride Rock,” and the generations to come who will carry on those traditions and legacies.

M-Positive’s future plans involve building a business by motivating and inspiring others in enterprise and entrepreneurial ventures that are self-regenerating. He continues to focus his endeavors on those who would rather build than destroy, and those who want to heal rather than kill. Selfless businesses, ‘people-green’ entrepreneurship, is the key to the future.

Parker, raised by a single Mother who very obviously raised her son right, understands the consequences of making hard choices. Those choices, he says, must be made even if someone else makes them for us.

“No matter what, we must stay connected and we must grow. Eventually, as was the case with Mufasa and Simba, good must overcome evil. That is our choice—to build up rather than to bring down.”

Maybe in that scenario, Parker hybridly takes on the role of the Master Teacher symbolism of Rafiki, who hit Simba in the head with a coconut hanging on a stick to get his attention and to make him stop feeling sorry for himself. Rafiki helped Simba to see the future rather than trying to fix a past that could not be fixed; and taught him to leverage the past to heal himself and look toward the days when he would be King; and pass it on to others.

Parker continues to strive to give his 200-percent into the community around him by pushing the motivation in the music and providing the inspiration that we need to keep us moving ever forward. Rightfully and graciously, after more than 10 years ‘underground’, he earned the title “The Nelson Mandela of Rap” from BURN: Black University Radio Network.

Hats off to M-Positive, and to his Mom, on this precious Mother’s Day 2014 for instilling the values in him that allow him to see and work toward the greater good of others.

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MarcusParker.com

Marcus Parker’s Pride Rock (The Student-Operated Press, October 2005)