Charles Blow: Race, History, a President, a Bridge (pic)

[cal04]

Last edited Sun Mar 8, 2015, 11:29 PM - Edit history (1)

Obama and Selma: The Meaning of ‘Bloody Sunday’
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/09/opinion/charles-blow-obama-and-selma-the-meaning-of-bloody-sunday.html?_r=0

As our van in the presidential motorcade reached the crest of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., and began the descent toward the thousands of waiting faces and waving arms of those who had come to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the gravity of that place seized me, pushing out the breath and rousing the wonder.

The mind imagines the horror of that distant day: the scrum of bodies and the cloud of gas, the coughing and trampling, the screaming and wailing, the batons colliding with bones, the opening of flesh, the running down of blood.

In that moment I understood what was necessary in President Obama’s address: to balance celebration and solemnity, to honor the heroes of the past but also to motivate the activists of the moment, to acknowledge how much work had been done but to remind the nation that that work was not complete.

(I, along with a small group of other journalists, had been invited by the White House to accompany the president to Selma and have a discussion with him during the flight there.)

more at link



Asking a question of the president during journalists roundtable on Air Force One.
https://twitter.com/CharlesMBlow

[Number23]

1. Nice read. K&R

[Hekate]

2. Charles Blow is so good. Further quote....

Now, we must look at the hundred years following the movement to understand that another inflection point is coming, one that again threatens traditional power: the browning of America.

According to the Census Bureau, “The U.S. is projected to become a majority-minority nation for the first time in 2043,” with minorities projected to be 57 percent of the population in 2060.

In response, fear and restrictive laws are creeping back into our culture and our politics — not always explicitly or violently, but in ways whose effects are similarly racially arrayed. Structural inequities — economic, educational — are becoming more rigid, and systemic biases harder to eradicate. But this time the threat isn’t regional and racially binary but national and multifaceted.

So, we must fight our fights anew.

As the president told a crowd in South Carolina on Friday, “Selma is not just about commemorating the past.” He continued, “Selma is now.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/09/opinion/charles-blow-obama-and-selma-the-meaning-of-bloody-sunday.html?_r=1

[Cha]

3. Compelling article from Charles Blow, cal.. mahalo~ Selma~Then & Now..

deray mckesson @deray Follow
Selma. Now and Then. #Selma50

9:30 AM - 8 Mar 2015 4,905 Retweets 4,163 favorites

http://theobamadiary.com/2015/03/08/a-tweet-or-two-229/