Tuesday, July 16, 2013

beyond sesquicentennial memory

Remembering fifty (and a hundred plus) years ago....

"The pale history books in Harlem and Birmingham told how the nation had fought a war over slavery. Abraham Lincoln had signed a document that would come to be known as the Emancipation Proclamation. The war had been won but not a just peace. Equality had never arrived. Equality was a hundred years late. 

"The boy and the girl knew more than history. They knew something about current events. ... They knew that, for years, their own lawyers had won great victories in the courts which were not being translated into reality. 

"They were seeing on television, hearing from the radio, reading in the newspapers that this was the one-hundredth birthday of their freedom. ... But freedom had a dull ring, a mocking emptiness...." 

--excerpt(s) from the Introduction in "Why We Can't Wait", Martin Luther King, Jr.

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