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 week or so, I have seen multiple people on my social media feeds post this timeline. I don’t know who originated it, or who wrote it. However, I do know that almost every semester I construct my own timeline and break it down in class, usually going back to the end of the Civil War. When doing this, I break it … Read More We Are Not Removed from Our Past
Our existence, from our physical birth till our physical death, is finite. It has a beginning and an end. With this limited time, we constantly make decisions about what we choose to learn and remember. We may hear about, say, the Civil Rights Movement during our P-12 education, and remember a few words: “Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream.” Once we … Read More We Must Never Stop Learning
Anne Moody ends Coming of Age in Mississippi on 1964 as she and a group of activists head to Washington D.C. to participate in a hearing about the Council of Federated Organization’s (COFO) work in Mississippi to register African Americans to vote. By this point, as Moody puts it, she had experienced both personal and national violence: “the Taplin burning, the Birmingham Church bombing, Medgar Evers’ murder, the … Read More Have We Experienced Progress? “I really WONDER”
Interminable Rambling 