Let justice roll down like water, righteousness like a mighty stream.
For our grandsons and granddaughters remember to remember the dream
Welcome to Songs and Stories from Home as we continue to Remember the Dream. This week Freedom Summer.
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. On Flag Day at the start of that summer, Congress added the words “under God” to what we were pledging. I had no idea at the time what the final six words truly meant or didn’t mean, with liberty and justice for all.
Ten years later as I was getting ready for my senior year in high school in my not so big town there were a thousand volunteers, most of them young and white, all of whom had made out their wills, joining thousands of mostly blacks in Mississippi for what was being called Freedom Summer. The goal was to make those half a dozen words, with liberty and justice for all, more true and more real for everyone.
Fifty-six summers later the streets are alive with people who think it’s time, actually long past time, for this country to keep its promise and its pledge and for those six words to be meaningful for everyone who recites them, whether standing proudly or kneeling humbly. A pledge worth making, a promise worth keeping, a dream worth remembering.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Let justice roll down like water, righteousness like a mighty stream.
For our grandsons and granddaughters remember to remember the dream
