Songs and Stories From Home

Fifty-six years ago the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party sent delegates to represent their state at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The Civil Rights Act had become reality a month earlier. The Voting Rights Act still a year away from becoming the law of the land.

If I take a moment and close my eyes in some combination of memory and imagination, I can conjure a moment at the end of the summer of 1954. I have just started second grade. I’m standing by my desk with my hand over my heart and as Paul Simon says, in his song “My Little Town,” I’m pledging allegiance to the wall.

Our country is having a moment where we are deciding if we can discover together a reservoir of goodness if we are together going to help bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice. We are having a moment.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared the March on Washington in August of 1963 the greatest demonstration of freedom in the history of the United States.

This Black Lives Matter moment in 2020 America is different in some significant ways from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s beginning with the contrast in the role of the Federal Government.

In the Spring of 1963, I turned sixteen years old while thousands of students my age were taking to the streets in Birmingham, Alabama to protest institutional racism in their city.

As a nation we are looking again at ideas and ideals found in the scriptures and embedded in our founding documents. Beginning with the proposition that we are all created equal, and in the eyes of the creator are all equally precious.

George Santayana famously wrote that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

As someone who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s it is inspiring to me on many levels to watch the youth of this country demanding we form a more perfect union, a more just and equitable America.

As I share this Podcast in June of 2020, we are at a moment in our nation’s history when we have a chance to take another step forward and make more real the ideal of what this country is founded on. That is the idea that we are all created equal and in the eyes of the creator are all equally precious.