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?
Momma said that ghosts couldn't move over water. That's why Africans got trapped in the Americas.. They kept moving us over the water, stealing us away from our ghosts and ancestors, who cried salty rivers into the sand. That's where Momma was now, wailing at the water's edge, while her girls were pulled out of sight under white sails that cracked in the wind.
The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact.
It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
Use it, enjoy it, but always handle history with care.
The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones.
I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.
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