Podcast - Songs & Stories From Home

As I remember them now, 52 years after the facts, the ghastly murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy; two singular events woven together over decades into some once unimaginable bloodstained tapestry, complete with the fraying threads of faith and hope and love.

As this country moves in jerks and starts to define and redefine the meaning of our founding documents it’s important to know where we came from and so better understand where we are now and to give us some sense of where we might want to go from here.

On Sunday the 26th of July in 2020 Representative John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama one last time. His flag-draped casket pulled by a pair of horses rolling atop a carpet of rose petals, his family following on foot for this, his final crossing. 

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. helped define the character and the conscience of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 60’s. One grew up a street kid and the other a preacher’s kid. They both became ministers giving voice to a moment with words that echo down the corridors of time and resonate to this day.

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.