My mom, Clida, taught my four brothers and me about her father's work to organize black voters in rural Louisiana in the 1950s. We carried her dad's legacy of activism with us. The Civil Rights Movement was present in the daily life of my family in Detroit in the 1970s.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of family legacy and activism in shaping identity and social responsibility.
Keith Ellison reflects on the lessons imparted by his mother about the significance of activism and the effort to organize black voters during the Civil Rights Movement. He illustrates how these lessons were not just historical but were lived experiences for his family, instilling a sense of duty to continue this legacy of social justice and activism in their own lives.
In practice
During a speech at a community event advocating for voter registration.
While there are corporal descriptions of what the afterlife is like in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, what's going on there is the finite trying to describe the infinite. If God knows everything, started everything and is the only one who knows how it's going to end, how can any human know what God wants?
We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.
One thing 'not right' on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn't been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.
In the 1930s, the government paid writers to interview 80- and 90-year-old former slaves, and I read those accounts. I came away realizing - not surprisingly - that many slave masters were sadists who spent a lot of time thinking up creative ways of hurting people.
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.
Just by my home is an entrance to the sewers they used in the Warsaw uprising. I grew up knowing people died down there. Warsaw was once a battleground; then it became a morgue. It's a city littered with ghosts. And that never left me.
One day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.