Black people must be aware of their heritage in bondage, the audience was told at a Martin Luther King Jr. memorial program Monday night, and apply it to improving their lives today.

Dr. Charles K. Chiplin told about 150 people at Vicksburg Municipal Auditorium that slaveowners had pitted, for example, old slaves against young, and that such divisions remain among blacks.

&#8220We still have the slave mentality,” Chiplin said, citing the large proportion of crime that is black-on-black.

&#8220I say to young folks: If you’ve got good enough minds to grow marijuana, maybe you ought to be a florist.

&#8220If you’ve got a good enough mind to be a drug dealer, maybe you ought to go into business for yourself.

&#8220If you’ve got good enough hands to cut up somebody out there on the street with your razor, maybe you should’ve been a surgeon.

&#8220If you’re going to argue and cuss on the street corner, maybe you should’ve considered going into law.

&#8220If your mind’s good enough to hotwire a car, maybe you should’ve been an electrician.

&#8220If you are good enough to swipe a car and take the parts off of it in 10 minutes – strip it down – maybe you should’ve been a mechanic.”

Chiplin, 59, is the author of the book &#8220Roads from the Bottom: A Survival Journal for America’s Black Community,” more than 55 stage plays, nine screenplays and scores of poems, short stories and essays.

Chiplin’s parents, Rosa and James Chiplin, owned a grocery store on Halls Ferry Road in Marcus Bottom and housed civil-rights volunteers during the summer of 1964, known as Freedom Summer.

&#8220As a result, threats were made on their lives, and their grocery store was bombed,” a transcript of an interview with Chiplin from a civil-rights documentation project in the Tougaloo College archives says. &#8220In 1971, Chiplin was involved in a second round of civil rights activity in Vicksburg, picketing and boycotting for better jobs for African-Americans.”

Chiplin attended the former Rosa A. Temple High School.

&#8220He was student president of the Vicksburg Council of Federated Organizations,” the transcript says. &#8220In 1964, when he was 17, he went to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., and was there when the Freedom Democratic Party delegates attempted to unseat the Mississippi party regulars.”

Chiplin has also served as an associate pastor of Mount Carmel M.B. Church in Vicksburg and as organist and associate pastor of Greater Mount Calvary M.B. Church in Jackson.

Chiplin is now a deputy with the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department, serving as director of correctional programs and the Second Chance Inmate Choir. He also works as a psychologist for the Center for Family Life Extension and is an instructor of English at Jackson State University.

Chiplin told his audience 40 million black people had been enslaved worldwide, including 4 million in the United States and 437,000 in Mississippi. He noted that black people in Mississippi were forbidden to learn to read or write, with severe penalties for those who were caught trying. He has also noted efforts by white people to prevent blacks from voting, such as poll taxes and literacy tests.

&#8220It is important that you know these things,” Chiplin told his audience.

&#8220Throughout the annals of history there has been a rejection of blacks, of Africans.”

Among those who also participated in the program were: