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February 01, 2005

Beyond Bombs

Thanks to Kevin McCullough, I discovered an interesting tie in Condi's history. It's an interesting time, now Black History Month, to draw connections. It turns out that Rice knew one of the Four Little Girls of Birmbingham Alabama. She says:

I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, before the Civil Rights movement--a place that was once described, with no exaggeration, as the most thoroughly segregated city in the country. I know what it means to hold dreams and aspirations when half your neighbors think you are incapable of, or uninterested in, anything better.

I know what it's like to live with segregation in an atmosphere of hostility, and contempt, and cold stares, and the ever-present threat of violence, a threat that sometimes erupted into the real thing.

I remembered the bombing of that Sunday school at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father's church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of four young girls, including my friend and playmate Denise McNair. The crime was calculated, not random. It was meant to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations, and ensure that old fears would be propelled forward into the next generation.

I've long said that history belongs to the survivors, and there's a huge part of American history that few people want to admit to - the wrong side of the Civil Rights Movement. When you watch Eyes on the Prize, you won't find people pointing with pride to their uncles in the white mob. So there's much moral history written in courage that overwrites the despicable acts, and blackfolks have an upper hand in inheriting that. Doing the right thing in Alabama wasn't easy, but for many it was necessary. We are extarodinarily fortunate that Dr. Rice will never forget.

Today, after Iraqis have voted after a long dark period in their history, it is perhaps overly simplistic to draw parallels between the unpopularity of presidential orders to send troops to 'interfere' in affairs of self-governance. But there are many of us who hold certain Constitutional constants to be universal. If we are to be called 'outside instigators', sobeit.

Posted by mbowen at February 1, 2005 11:26 AM

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Posted by: bombsoverbaghdad at February 1, 2005 04:38 PM