The speaker who addressed the nearly 200 people at Saturday 34th Annual NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet Saturday gave a lesson in both her history and their own.

"This is my birthplace,"author Dannellia Gladden-Green told the Scotland County group. "The Tar Heel soil is what spilled me out. The income from cotton fields and tobacco road is what clothed and fed me.

"I am ever so reminded that I am not just home in North Carolina, I am home in Scotland County. Some of you may know that my paternal grandmother, Minnie McNair, was born and raised in Scotland County."

Gladden-Green is the author of "Speak Life: Poems of Application and Inspiration", and "Unconventional Wisdom: Grandpa June's Admonitions to 'Stink Mo.'" She is also the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate degree in Materials, Science and Engineering from NCSU.

"I remember one time when there was a program at school I was going to be speaking on," Gladden-Green said. "I was going to wear this dress that one of my aunts had given me. You know about hand-me-downs."

The only problem was the dress was too long.

She asked her mother to take the dress up for her. She grew impatient waiting for her mom to take the dress up, so she asked her grandmother, then her aunt.

The night before she needed the dress, she tried it on.

"I put on the dress, only to discover the dress was above my knees, way above my knees," Gladden-Green said "So I started screaming and I said, I can't wear this dress, it is messed up. My grandmother came down the hall and said 'What is all the commotion?' She looked at my dress and she was startled too. She looked at me and said, 'Unless you grew all them inches, I only took off two inches.'"

It turned out that her mom, aunt and grandmother had each taken her dress up a few inches.

"I learned a very important lesson that day," Gladden-Green said. "When you have something to do and you need help with it, ask the one person who is able and focused on making sure you are successful and trust that they will do what you ask them to do."

Gladden-Green said her local roots gave her a history lesson, something she said refocused herself to overcoming obstacles relating to race.

"I had an opportunity to go back and visit today the plantations where my forefathers served out their slave servitude. I also walked through the burial ground for some of my ancestors.

"We cannot just remember history without acting on it in a positive way because truly that is what our ancestors did. They dreamed, they acted and they believed.

You can think about someone who is a little bit closer to us. You can think of a few people who were persecuted just for having melanin in their skin."

"President Obama is probably the shining example of the fact that being black in America to some people means you are still not good enough. Yet we cannot let those realities hold us back, keep us down, because we are a people that have been called for a purpose. So we have to have that remembrance of our ancestors."

Saturday's banquet was held at the Fellowship Hall of Bright Hopewell Baptist Church in Laurinburg.

Rev. Garland Pierce, president of the Scotland County branch of the NAACP, said he was enthused about Gladden-Green's recounting of racial prejudice, reminding NAACP members of the organization's continued purpose a century after its founding.

"We were really excited with the attendance," Pierce said. "The speaker gave us a really good history lesson."