My specific proposal is to include explicit curriculum in our schools to teach the truth of our past.
Seventy-seven years ago, civil rights activist and poet Langston Hughes wrote his chilling poem “Kids Who Die” to illuminate the horrors of lynchings during the Jim Crow era. Now at the one year mark of Michael Brown’s death and the Ferguson uprising that sparked a movement, let us listen to Hughes’ words with new ears. Video from Color of Change.
When will it be enough? Another horrible tragedy, self-confessed to be an act of terror and white supremacy has occurred. It isn’t a new phenomenon by any means, but we are seeing a more accurate record of these acts because of the available technology so many people now have in hand.
And most observers are appalled to see them, police shooting unarmed black men in the back as they run away[1], a policeman abusing a young black girl at a junior high school pool party[2], and nine murders in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina[3], followed by the burning of six more African American churches across the south, three of which have been unmistakably identified as arson.[4]
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