My mom, Clida, taught my four brothers and me about her father's work to organize black voters in rural Louisiana in the 1950s. We carried her dad's legacy of activism with us. The Civil Rights Movement was present in the daily life of my family in Detroit in the 1970s.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of family legacy and activism in shaping identity and social responsibility.
Keith Ellison reflects on the lessons imparted by his mother about the significance of activism and the effort to organize black voters during the Civil Rights Movement. He illustrates how these lessons were not just historical but were lived experiences for his family, instilling a sense of duty to continue this legacy of social justice and activism in their own lives.
In practice
During a speech at a community event advocating for voter registration.
While there are corporal descriptions of what the afterlife is like in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, what's going on there is the finite trying to describe the infinite. If God knows everything, started everything and is the only one who knows how it's going to end, how can any human know what God wants?
[B]inary opposites fit nicely the formulation of history as written, but they do little to capture the messy, inchoate reality of history as lived.
For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren't as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn't care. We used euphemisms like 'sackings' and 'sieges' instead of calling them 'genocides.'
History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.
Thus ended the great American Civil War, which must upon the whole be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record.
History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all.
The Civil War created in this country what had never existed before - a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union; it was the rebirth of the Union.
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