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Tag: Martin Luther King Jr.

When Your Racist Beliefs are Challenged….

When I was in the 7th grade, I went on a weekend trip with a new friend. Drew was Jewish and, as she explained, because her grandmother was with us on that Passover, we would be observing. We went to what I, a young girl newly minted from Mississippi, called the coast, and they called the beach. I remember it as a remote island. I’m sure it...

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#MLK50: No Neat Bow

I spent yesterday at two different events. One was a service at Calvary Episcopal Church to dedicate a new marker on the site of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s slave market. The old marker referred to Forrest’s time in Memphis where his “business enterprises made him wealthy.” The old marker did not identify Forrest’s business as human trafficking—selling...

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#MLK50: The Beloved Community

“It is impossible for white Americans to grasp the depths and dimensions of the Negro’s dilemma without understanding what it means to be a Negro in America. Of course it is not easy to perform this act of empathy. Putting oneself in another person’s place is always fraught with difficulties. Over and over again it is said in...

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#MLK50: A Hostile Land

In reading Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, I was struck by Dr. King’s repeated point that, following the Civil War, the country released the formerly enslaved into the land of their oppressors. These men and women found themselves  in the “territory of their enemies.” In their new life, they were financially dependent...

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