OVERCOMER: A Collective autobiography of a Black man growing up in the inner city of Atlanta

My name is Philip Neely, Jr and I was born in Atlanta, Georgia. As a young black man, I grew up with an identity crisis. I hardly had a relationship with my biological father; he was in prison and my mother had passed. My life was therefore pieced together to some normalcy by my grandmother. My grandmother played a key role in my upbringing, but the void of why and how my mother passed stayed a mystery to me during those early and formative years. I then resented people, and I did not have an easy time socializing. As a result, my conflicted internal state of beingness created an external chaotic dispensation that led to many physical fights with other people. No one ever told me my father was in prison. One of the things that I found myself doing from kindergarten to high school was getting into many fights that came from the anger. Like other kids, I too had my social clique; If you jumped one of us, you had to fight all of us.