Myths take on a life of their own, supplanting reality and facts within the psyche. Once a myth takes hold, it becomes difficult to eradicate it, and even once one eradicates the myth, the residue remains, spreading over the floor of our minds until we sweep out the final piece of dirt from our psyche. One of the most persistent myths that we tell … Read More The Myth of Poverty
Writing about how their time in Washington D.C. and at Howard University drew to a close in the early 1940s, Pauli Murray reflected on all the work they did, notably the 1943 sit-ins in the nation’s capital and how those sit-ins laid the foundations for the 1960s. Murray thinks about the tensions between their “urge toward kamikaze defiance of Jim Crow and the more … Read More Our Role in the Relay of “Cosmic Composition”
“And I wonder,” Angela Davis asked in a 2013 lecture at Birkbeck University in London, “will we ever truly recognize the collective subject of history that was itself produced by radical organizing?” The narratives we tell ourselves, the myths we construct, obscure the foundations and erase the stories of countless individuals and moments in history. We seek a clear path for our narratives, a … Read More The Voices That Carry Us Forward
Over the past few years, I have thought about various iterations of a Civil Rights memoir course. One example of this is the “Civil Rights Memoir” syllabus I posted about a year ago. Each of these syllabi seek to move students beyond thinking about the movement merely in relation to the “nine-word problem.” As I thought about this course more, I decided to focus it on … Read More Women In the Civil Rights Movement Memoir Syllabus
+ a testament of hope, angela davis, civil rights, i have a dream, martin luther king, jr, nate powell, save it for later
“Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream.” This is the nine-word problem that informs much of our understanding of the Civil Rights Movement. It begins with Rosa Parks in Montgomery in 1955, carries through King during the bus boycotts and into 1963 where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on … Read More Severed History in Nate Powell’s “Save It For Later”: Part IV
Interminable Rambling 