Justice Brown Speaks to the Need to Teach History, Warts and All
...Even if it makes some "uncomfortable"
Today marks the 60th anniversary of a dark day in American history. On this date in 1963 Klansmen bombed a church in Birmingham, AL, killing four young girls.
This is an event that I am sure Governor DeSantis would not allow to be taught in FL schools. He’s not alone. This is an event that many would whitewash, as it is not complimentary to our history…an occurrence that might make some “uncomfortable” to hear about.
But it is a story that MUST be told. If we are to advance as a society, we need to be confronted with our flaws, so we can try to improve.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown visited the 16th Street Baptist Church today to commemorate this tragedy. Here’s some of what she said:
”The work of our time is maintaining that hard-won freedom and to do that we are going to need the truth, the whole truth about our past…If we are going to continue to move forward as a nation, we cannot allow concerns about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth or history. It is certainly the case that parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about…Yes, our past is filled with too much violence, too much hatred, too much prejudice, but can we really say that we are not confronting those same evils now? We have to own even the darkest parts of our past, understand them and vow never to repeat them.”
“It has been 60 years in the making. Dr. Martin Luther King said that these girls would not have died in vain and our speaker, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is the personification of that today. She is that hope,” former U.S. Sen. Doug Jones said.
More than twenty years ago, as a weekly columnist for the Bennington (VT) Banner, I addressed this topic after justice had finally been done. That column is presented below….
Collared Klansman recalls a dark side of U.S. History
A couple of weeks ago, a man in his seventies named Bobby Frank Cherry was sent to jail after a trial that took place in Birmingham, Alabama. Almost forty years after he should've.
He was convicted of making and placing the bomb that killed four young girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham one April Sunday in 1963. He was a suspect almost immediately, but somehow neither J. Edgar Hoover's FBI nor local authorities could seem to put the case together.
Why did he do it? Why did it take so long to put him on trial? How could a nation let this crime -- and many others like it -- go unsolved and unpunished for so long? And as a citizen, how do I feel about that?
These are the kinds of questions our kids need to be faced with as they study history. It was always a favorite subject of mine, but I have heard from teachers that the attitude of lots of students nowadays is, "why do we need to learn about things that happened so long ago?" Knowing about this will not help them find a job, cope with daily life, or impress their friends. But it is crucial to advancing our civilization, and if they ask you why history is important, that's what I hope you will tell them.
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The generation that grew up in "the sixties," saw a lot of history in the making. Actually, it seems like more happened in "the sixties" than could possibly fit into a decade. That's not only because it was a time of tremendous social ferment, but also because "the sixties" was a period that really was more than 10 years long. The time we call "the sixties" probably began in 1957 with the riots in Little Rock, Arkansas, with Gov. Faubus trying to prevent the integration of Little Rock's schools...Took the world to the brink of nuclear war with the Cuban missle crisis in October of 1961...Saw the heroism of the "freedom riders" -- black and white -- who traveled through the south to protest the segregation of bus stations...and in 1963 alone brought Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham jail," Gov. Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door, the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, a massive civil rights March on Washington and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. And then the 16th Street Baptist Church and the murder of President Kennedy.
The sixties saw three young men -- Michael Schwerner (24), Andrew Goodman (20), and James Chaney (21) brutally murdered in Mississippi during the summer of '64 by the Ku Klux Klan with the help of Mississippi law enforcement because they dared to try to register black folk to vote...the tragedy of Viet Nam; the murders of Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the subsequent riots in our cities. The sixties brought peace rallies and the anti-war movement. An underdog Presidential campaign (Eugene McCarthy's) fueled by college students, leading to the decision not to seek re-election by a President (Johnson) who stepped aside rather than tear the country apart over Viet Nam....Amidst all this, Americans landed on the moon.
In the early 'seventies, "the sixties" continued with the shootings at Kent State and Spiro Agnew's repressive rhetoric...and the first Earth Day and environmental laws. "The sixties" may have climaxed with Nixon's attempt to steal the government with serial abuses of power collectively known as "Watergate." Opinions vary on when "the sixties" came to a close. I think it was when the last helicopter left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon. Whew, it was a busy time. No wonder Forrest Gump was such a long movie.
The lesson here is that our history is not always proud, but we need to know as much about its dark side as we do the heroic stories. In fact, maybe moreso, because we need to understand grievances and injustices if we are ever going to be motivated to set them right and become a more just society.
Why learn history? The philosopher George Santayana said : "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I would say, "Because you kinda need to understand where you came from to understand why you are the way you are and what you need to do to get better."
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I will close this piece with some oral history involving the Ku Klux Klan that came from my Irish grandmother many years ago. She grew up about 30 miles up the Hudson from New York City, in what was then the sleepy hamlet of Peekskill. It was the early 1900s and she lived in an Irish immigrant enclave. From time to time, they were harassed by a local Klaven of Klansman. The Irish were "foreign" and they were Catholic, and both of these characteristics were suspect.
Most of the menfolk were quarry workers, and most of the harassment took place while the men were at work, particularly if their stone-cutting jobs took them away from home for a couple of days. After one particularly egregious episode of harassment, my forbears cooked up a scheme. They leaked word that the men would be leaving on a job that would keep them away overnight for a day or two.
Sure enough, that night the Klan showed up in full regalia, in white robes with burning torches. Weren't they surprised when from out of the closets, basements, and barns rushed the quarrymen to make them pay.
My grandmother said, " After that the Klan never came back." Now that's a piece of history I can savor!
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