Civil Rights
Within the context of just peace theory, Walter Cronkite was and remains an important figure. Truth. Respect. Security. We know the truth through the hard work of scholars doing the difficult and necessary research into the past and present to help us understand the facts of any conflict. Politicians and policy makers ought to make decisions based on a careful interpretation of the facts.
What lessons do we take away from the Jena 6 story? Six young men won't be dragging a felony conviction into adult life. That's reason for rejoicing, but as this saga approaches its third birthday, it's fair to ask if we have learned anything.
It was hard to miss me on the lava-rocked streets of Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, while I was working for a locally led organization, HEAL Africa. I lacked the grace of Congolese women who glided across the tumultuous terrain in high heels while I tripped over the ubiquitous black rocks.
I'll be honest. I get timid writing these kind of posts. I'm scared of being labeled an angry or bitter Asian. I'm scared of the emails that come in. I'm scared of being de-invited for speaking gigs
Action alerts make a difference. Our call for the Department of Justice to investigate Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio has succeeded!
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I grew up in Bakersfield, California, where my father was a rabbi and my mother was a teacher. I went to Harvard in 1960, in part because it was about as far as I could get from Bakersfield, which was the terminus of the dust bowl migration that John Steinbeck made famous in The Grapes of Wrath.
I got my real education, however, when I left Harvard to work in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. I went to Mississippi because, among other things, my father had served as an Army chaplain in Germany right after World War II. His work was with Holocaust survivors, and as a child the Holocaust became a reality in our home. The Holocaust was interpreted to me as a consequence of racism, that racism is an evil, that racism kills. I made a choice to go to Mississippi.
I also was raised on years of Passover Seders. There’s a part in the Passover Seder when they point to the kids and say, “You were a slave in Egypt.” I finally realized the point was to recognize that we were all slaves in Egypt and in our time that same struggle from slavery to freedom is always going on, that you have to choose where you stand in that. The civil rights movement was clearly about that struggle. It was in Mississippi that I learned to be an organizer and about movement-building.
I went to Mississippi because it was a movement of young people, and there’s something very particular about young people, not just that they have time. Walter Brueggemann writes in The Prophetic Imagination about the two elements of prophetic vision. One is criticality, recognition of the world’s pain. Second is hope, recognition of the world’s possibilities. Young people come of age with a critical eye and a hopeful heart. It’s that combination of critical eye and hopeful heart that brings change. That’s one reason why so many young people were and are involved in movements for social change.
With the bicentennials of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin the subject of numerous conferences, articles, and television shows this month, we also should remember another important commemoration in 2009: the centennial of the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
It's a better country than I thought it was. I honestly wouldn't have thought this possible. I guess I would have agreed with the older generation of African Americans in my neighborhood: This day would never come in our lifetimes-but here it is.