My father-in-law participated in the March from Selma to Montgomery. We figured out tonight that my husband was actually in-utero at the time.....His dad had known AD King (MLK, Jr.) when he (Bob) was in seminary at Emery. The story always told is that MLK, Jr. held Ron's older sister when she was an infant....
In reading about all the events today, I wished I could have been there. I wrote my thesis about the involvement of Methodist students at Duke and UNC in the civil rights movement. I was motivated to study that when I heard a story from the Senior Pastor with whom I was working. Here's the story....
During the 1960s, he was a Campus Minister at Harvard. He brought groups of students to NC to do voter registration. When he returned to NC to finish out his ministry, over 25 years later, there were pastors who remembered what he had done and would not speak to him....
This got me to thinking: Why did he have to bring students from out of state to North Carolina? What were the students who lived there doing?
So, that's what I researched and wrote my thesis on when I did my ThM....the most interesting thing I found out from that is that often the newspaper articles that I found had the story wrong. They didn't accurately report was was happening. Often the articles conflicted with the stories that I heard from people who had participated in events! I'm not sure though if some of the misreporting wasn't done on purpose...
If you're interested in learning more about Civil Rights here in Birmingham, I would recommend the book Carry Me Home. Written by a woman who grew up in Birmingham, she has interspersed her own remembrances with research.
"We fought for the soul of our country, on the streets of this city."
I heard Robert Eggers (founder and Director of DC Central Kitchen) say that last week and I thought it was meaningful. He then went on to say that we have spent 40 years in the wilderness.....That in 2008, it will be 40 years since MLK, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. He said, "and we didn't deal with it. We just moved on." His hope seems to be that in 2008, we'll come out of the wilderness. Could it be???
But, I do have to stay...now that I live in this city, it's as if there's a large group of white people who simply chose to "move on" here as well and have never dealt with any of the seismic changes that happened in the 60s...the racism just went underground...
My last thought....
Why weren't there any Republicans there?
In reading about all the events today, I wished I could have been there. I wrote my thesis about the involvement of Methodist students at Duke and UNC in the civil rights movement. I was motivated to study that when I heard a story from the Senior Pastor with whom I was working. Here's the story....
During the 1960s, he was a Campus Minister at Harvard. He brought groups of students to NC to do voter registration. When he returned to NC to finish out his ministry, over 25 years later, there were pastors who remembered what he had done and would not speak to him....
This got me to thinking: Why did he have to bring students from out of state to North Carolina? What were the students who lived there doing?
So, that's what I researched and wrote my thesis on when I did my ThM....the most interesting thing I found out from that is that often the newspaper articles that I found had the story wrong. They didn't accurately report was was happening. Often the articles conflicted with the stories that I heard from people who had participated in events! I'm not sure though if some of the misreporting wasn't done on purpose...
If you're interested in learning more about Civil Rights here in Birmingham, I would recommend the book Carry Me Home. Written by a woman who grew up in Birmingham, she has interspersed her own remembrances with research.
"We fought for the soul of our country, on the streets of this city."
I heard Robert Eggers (founder and Director of DC Central Kitchen) say that last week and I thought it was meaningful. He then went on to say that we have spent 40 years in the wilderness.....That in 2008, it will be 40 years since MLK, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. He said, "and we didn't deal with it. We just moved on." His hope seems to be that in 2008, we'll come out of the wilderness. Could it be???
But, I do have to stay...now that I live in this city, it's as if there's a large group of white people who simply chose to "move on" here as well and have never dealt with any of the seismic changes that happened in the 60s...the racism just went underground...
My last thought....
Why weren't there any Republicans there?
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