Feeling nervous for the march tomorrow. This is a first for me. I was seven years old in my hometown in Georgia during the Albany Civil Rights Movement when teenagers wrote their last will and testaments on the eve of protests.
And now, here I am. My march buddy, Lucy, and I are ready: we painted our slogans on umbrellas. My daughter and her friends are making ready for the Los Angeles march. I’m drinking water and trying to relax.
Scroll down for a Bill Moyers video that traces history and shows how Donald Trump was no accident —a truth we need to face. Excellent pep rally for tomorrow.
In this web exclusive, Bill Moyers and four historians dissect the big lie Trump rode to power: the Birther lie. Nell Painter, historian and Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School; Christopher Lebron, assistant professor of African-American studies and philosophy at Yale University; and Philip Klinkner, James S. Sherman Professor of Government, Hamilton College discuss the fertile ground on which the birther lie was sown: our nation’s history of white supremacy.
Credits: Gail Ablow, Producer; Sikay Tang, Editor
Keep going: video is at bottom…
Donald Trump did us a favor, because he shows us how active and significant white supremacy is in this country. I mean, we needed to know it. We needed to see it. We needed to punch a hole in the mythology of post-racialism, because we need to deal with it. I mean, we think about an oncologist — we don’t want our oncologist telling us a little lie that we don’t really have cancer. ~ Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Harvard Kennedy School
Anita, I don’t know about the Albany kids writing out wills before marching. I do know that Diane Nash (later Diane Nash Bevel) talked about the Freedom Riders doing it.
The reason that history repeats itself is because there are those who don’t learn and they don’t learn because they don’t want to and they don’t want to learn because of hate and they hate because they are fearful of what is not like them and they fear difference because they are ignorant of what is not like them because they have built a wall to keep out what they don’t know. How we break down this wall other than to not descend to their depths is to continue to rise in who we are as people of color, as women, as human beings until they can not not un-see us or until they have destroyed themselves with their hate. My question is have we done enough in our rise and is Trump their weapon of their own self destruction . . . where are we in this vicious cycle?