America’s greatest danger is not Al Qaeda! Continue reading “America’s Greatest Danger”
A Reflection on Collective Memory
A few days ago I went to the Museum of Our National Heritage in Concord, Massachusetts, to hear a lecture by Dr. David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Continue reading “A Reflection on Collective Memory”
This Inconvenient Hero Rises (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Now that he is safely dead
Let us praise him
build monuments to his glory
sing hosannas to his name. Continue reading “This Inconvenient Hero Rises (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)”
Poverty Is No Puzzle
Three recent events reported on a news station have encouraged me to venture into a field of discussion which has usually frightened me, always puzzled. Continue reading “Poverty Is No Puzzle”
Free..And…Freed
If free people of color in New England had anticipated enacting their freedom as an entitlement, under the same terms as whites enacted theirs, they soon learned that whites’ understanding of antislavery and Revolutionary rhetoric was quite different from their own. As whites’ eighteenth-century observation that servitude made slaves servile hardened into their nineteenth-century conviction that all people of color were inherently servile ¾ freed slaves perhaps, but free people, never ¾ people of color struggled to adapt their expectations of citizenship to the grim truth of mounting hostility, ridicule, and escalating efforts to control and even eliminate their presence.
Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780-1860 Continue reading “Free..And…Freed”