The Voting Rights Act was only signed 55 years ago. Tonight I'm thinking about all the Black folks in Georgia who have lived on both sides of it. Who voted in this election and who remember a time when they wouldn't have been able to. It wasn't that long ago. Not at all.
Rewatching the Freedom Riders documentary, seeing the face of a young John Lewis, and I'm reminded of how so many of the ppl who spit on, cursed at, & assaulted these riders are ppl who are still alive today. Still alive, still voting, still here. None of this was that long ago.
Just so we're clear, there is no way to have an honest conversation about immigration from Central America without talking both about the impact of climate change and about a history of US intervention that politically and economically destabilized many of these countries.
When I think of emancipation, I think of all of the people who fought for freedom but who never got a chance to experience it. The end of slavery did not happen overnight, it came from intergenerational work by those who fought for a better world they knew they might never see