Some said their deaths marked the end of an era. Others said it was the beginning of a new one.
“With each passing, the torch is being passed, ’ Dorie Ladner, 78, who helped register Blacks to vote in her native Mississippi, told me recently. “We’re mindful of the fact that there is so much work to do for the next generations to come.”
Thousands of “foot soldiers’’ challenged segregation in the Deep South and across the country during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s.
Over the years, I ve interviewed countless veterans, including some who worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality. Some were well-known and have a place in history books. Many weren’t featured in articles or chapters on the Civil Rights Movement. They nonetheless played critical roles, making lunch for activists, housing them and even hiding them. Cameras weren’t there when they refused to get up from all-white lunch counters. Nobody recorde
Opinions | Black Catholic women like Amanda Gorman are forgotten prophets of American democracy Shannen Williams Amanda Gorman, the first national youth poet laureate, speaks during the inauguration of President Biden and Vice President Harris on Jan. 20. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images) On Jan. 6, a mostly White mob attacked the nation’s Capitol in a violent attempt to overturn the election of the nation’s second Catholic president and first female, Black and Asian American vice president. Two weeks later, 22-year-old Amanda Gorman took the stage at the Biden-Harris inauguration in front of the same Capitol, and delivered a sermon on equality and hope in the face of lethal resistance with her poem, “The Hill We Climb.”
NationofChange
Meet the trailblazing nuns who took on the patriarchy of the church in the 1960s
A new documentary tells the story of the Los Angeles nuns who stood up for the people and faith they served, paying a high price for change.
Image Credit: NYU Press
Big white signs with the phrase “I Like God” flapped on a spring
afternoon. Other people carried “God Likes Me” signs. There were
guitars, flowers, bare feet and a general vibe of hippie love, but also
lots of nuns and political statements.
“What does Mary patient, Virgin Mary have to do with revolution?
The Unfulfilled Promise of Julian Bond
How could someone so telegenic, so witty, and skilled in politics have missed out on higher office?
James Palmer/AP/Shutterstock
Three years before he died at 75 in 2015, Julian Bond sat down for an interview on his life and work. Asked how he would like to be remembered, Bond replied, with his characteristic alloy of amiable candor and laconic wit:
I want a double-sided headstone. On one side, I want it to say, “Race Man” and that means a man who doesn’t dislike other races, but who’s proud of his own and wants to lift it up. The other side is going to say, “Easily Amused.”