Sublime

Every religion professes the sacredness of human rights, but Catholic officials rationalized their discrimination “for fear of alienating souls.”

I thought back on the sit-ins, the protestors with their stoic faces, the ones I’d once scorned for hurling their bodies at the worst things in life. Perhaps

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Those two books archive the big idea of U.S. history: the subjugation of people of color by a succession of social systems, from the genocide of Indigenous people to slavery to mass incarceration.

If some spark does set the keg afire, it will be a senseless tragedy of ignorant against ignorant, injustice answering injustice - a holocaust that will drag down the innocent and right-thinking masses of human beings. Then we will all pay for not having cried for justice long ago.

Through the movement’s heyday, and as the mainstream period of the civil rights era waned, Highlander continued. From the 1970s onward, they organized against strip mining, toxic dumping, and pollution, advocating for workers, including the undocumented. Threats came from the state over the years, but Highlander lived on, even after Horton’s death

“the Other.”

The fact that the young Obama was dazzled by this grisly sight revealed a remarkable degree of emotional detachment.

the gracious Southerner, the wise Southerner, the kind Southerner was nowhere visible. I knew that if I were white, I would find him easily, for his other face is there for whites to see. It is not a false face; it is simply different from the one the Negro sees.

The (seemingly regular) deaths of unarmed