Podcast - Songs & Stories From Home

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.

At this moment the killing of George Floyd has put people back on the streets and the struggle for racial equality back on the front page. Perhaps this can be the time when our country with its long history of racism finally rises to the challenge and begins to create a system based on racial justice that will include social justice, economic justice, earth justice, and restorative justice.

This great American Story, the story of the Civil Rights Movement, is about making the American Dream more real for all Americans. It’s about the continued desire for true economic justice and meaningful racial justice. 

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 60’s needs to be studied and celebrated and remembered by all Americans because as much as any time in our history that moment helped bring us closer to who, I believe, we were meant to be...

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 60’s became part of the American consciousness 55 years ago when a 14-year-old boy, Emmett Till, was kidnapped, tortured, and killed by two white men.