We have been here before
We may be shocked by our country’s regression, but James Baldwin reminds us that this is our history.
All posts tagged: Civil Rights
A mother’s helping hand
A mother’s lessons for this Mother’s Day in 2022.
Honoring Fannie Lou Hamer
“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
Rest in Peace, John Lewis
America just lost one of its most clear-eyed, moral leaders. John Lewis — civil rights hero on the front lines from lunch-counter desegregation in Nashville to Freedom Rides through a hostile South, the last remaining speaker from the August 1963 March on Washington, U.S. Congressman for 34 years, an activist to the end, and conscience for a nation — passed away Friday night after a six-month battle with pancreatic cancer. Representative Lewis was a hero to many because in this age of nonstop blathering nonsense, he spoke plainly about the hope for an America that — as Langston Hughes wrote — is the America that the dreamers dreamed. And he not only spoke, but he walked the talk, most famously when his skull was cracked more than fifty years ago while trying to walk across an Alabama bridge working for justice. There are many wonderful tributes to John Lewis pouring in. I recommend the statement of President Obama, who — when given a ticket to his history-making inauguration as the nation’s first Black American president …
Forgiveness is the Result of a Long Journey
St. Alban’s Parish was blessed this morning with the presence and witness of Ruby Sales, a civil rights activist whose life was saved 50 years ago by the actions of Jonathan Daniels. Michael Ruane, writing in the Washington Post, explains: By all rights, Ruby Sales should have been killed on Friday, Aug. 20, 1965. She should have been hit by the shotgun blast fired by the enraged white man on the porch of the general store in rural Alabama. Her life should have ended at 17, an African American college student and civil rights worker, gunned down under a Coca-Cola sign in the fight for freedom and justice. But there she was Sunday morning, age 67, in St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Northwest Washington, given a half-century of life by a white seminarian named Jonathan Myrick Daniels who pushed her aside and died in her place. She sat in an ornate wooden chair in the chancel of the church, the decades having taken a toll on her eyesight and her knees, and called herself “a remnant” …
More to Come... 