In the early 70’s a Black, male friend exiled from South Africa, spoke angrily with me about his impatience for change; he wanted change YESTERDAY!
In the early 70’s a Black man from South Africa spoke with me about the need for patience. Read on…
... written in July, 1995 - filed under On Responsibility.For years and in many different situations I have heard appeals to Justice Harlan’s one-person dissent in the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision of 1896, in which he articulated the idea that the Constitution, and therefore the law of the land is “color blind.” Read on…
... written in December, 1996 - filed under New Additions.She is helping to coordinate plans which a local college is projecting for a summer gathering of people who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement of this century. The intent evidently is to engage some of these “veterans” in dialogue with younger people for whom the Civil Rights Movement is history, sometimes seeming quite ancient and irrelevant. Read on…
... written in March, 1997 - filed under New Additions.The e-mail message conveyed a sense that Jonathan was fearful that his final paper of the semester would not be acceptable because it was not an academic study of the death penalty. Read on…
... written in May, 1998 - filed under New Additions.The title and the probing ideas come from Amy Elizabeth Ansell’s New Right, New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Britain. My explorations follow her lead only as it opens vistas onto what is happening in the United States, since that is where I live and observe. In a detailed and precise way, Ansell outlines the emergence of “new racism” with the advent of “new right” politics during our most recent decades. Read on…
... written in December, 1998 - filed under New Additions.From the beginnings of this nation there was a gradual growth of an economic dependence upon a supply of free labor. That long need was supplied finally in the development of a system of enslavement, Read on…
... written in January, 2000 - filed under New Additions.If free people of color in New England had anticipated enacting their freedom as an entitlement, under the same terms as whites enacted theirs, they soon learned that whites’ understanding of antislavery and Revolutionary rhetoric was quite different from their own. As whites’ eighteenth-century observation that servitude made slaves servile hardened into their nineteenth-century conviction that all people of color were inherently servile ¾ freed slaves perhaps, but free people, never ¾ people of color struggled to adapt their expectations of citizenship to the grim truth of mounting hostility, ridicule, and escalating efforts to control and even eliminate their presence.
Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780-1860 Read on…
... written in March, 2001 - filed under New Additions.Three recent events reported on a news station have encouraged me to venture into a field of discussion which has usually frightened me, always puzzled. Read on…
... written in May, 2001 - filed under New Additions.Now that he is safely dead
Let us praise him
build monuments to his glory
sing hosannas to his name. Read on…
... written in January, 2002 - filed under New Additions.A few days ago I went to the Museum of Our National Heritage in Concord, Massachusetts, to hear a lecture by Dr. David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Read on…
... written in February, 2002 - filed under New Additions.