1619 - First Slave ship arrives on the American Continent...
Yesterday after watching Al Sharpton urge us to re-read Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech, I decided to do just that. After I wiped the tears from my eyes, I came over to Daily Kos and see the same old fighting over who is more disappointed in our current President.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.
Are we so weak that we would give up?
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.
July 26, 1948
Truman signs Executive Order 9981, which states, "It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin."
May 17, 1954
The Supreme Court rules on the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans., unanimously agreeing that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. The ruling paves the way for large-scale desegregation. The decision overturns the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that sanctioned "separate but equal" segregation of the races, ruling that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
August 1, 1955
Fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till is visiting family in Mississippi when he is kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
Will we sit home and do nothing?
December 1, 1955
(Montgomery, Ala.) NAACP member Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat at the front of the "colored section" of a bus to a white passenger, defying a southern custom of the time
January 1957
Martin Luther King, Charles K. Steele, and Fred L. Shuttlesworth establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, of which King is made the first president. The SCLC becomes a major force in organizing the civil rights movement and bases its principles on nonviolence and civil disobedience.
August 28, 1963
I have a dream...
We cannot walk alone.
And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.
We cannot turn back.
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?"
"No, no..we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."
You can say that you lack enthusiasm because you are not getting what you were promised.
But others are willing to fight on.
September 15, 1963
(Birmingham, Ala.) Four young girls (Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins) attending Sunday school are killed when a bomb explodes at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a popular location for civil rights meetings. Riots erupt in Birmingham, leading to the deaths of two more black youths.
Because they know they can not quit until justice is done.
August 10, 1965
Congress passes the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making it easier for Southern blacks to register to vote. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and other such requirements that were used to restrict black voting are made illegal.
Sept. 24, 1965
Asserting that civil rights laws alone are not enough to remedy discrimination, President Johnson issues Executive Order 11246, which enforces affirmative action for the first time. It requires government contractors to "take affirmative action" toward prospective minority employees in all aspects of hiring and employment.
Did they declare victory and go home?
April 29, 1992
(Los Angeles, Calif.) The first race riots in decades erupt in south-central Los Angeles after a jury acquits four white police officers for the videotaped beating of African American Rodney King.
Did you think we were done?
January 2008
Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) introduces the Civil Rights Act of 2008. Some of the proposed provisions include ensuring that federal funds are not used to subsidize discrimination, holding employers accountable for age discrimination, and improving accountability for other violations of civil rights and workers' rights.
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One thing I have learned in this life is that you will never have it all your way. You can choose to give up because it is hard, or you can continue to work with what you have. You may not like the tools you are given. But, they are what you have.
Will you lay them down and walk away? Will you look to the sky and lament that it is not a perfect tool? Will you shake your fist at your neighbor because somehow it should be his fault? Or will you pick up that tool you are given and use it?
Will you continue on even though you will suffer defeat virtually every day. Or will you lay down and die, right there, by the side of the road that curves on up into the distance?
Others before you have traveled that same road. They still have not found the end, and they accept that they may never reach it. But they are willing to keep moving one foot forward every moment that they can, because they know what they are doing is right.