Tuesday, May 02, 2006

"After We March, We Vote!"

For anyone not living in California, click on the header above for a link to Rock the Vote for information on how to register to vote.

Among my most treasured books is a collection of photographs by Charles Moore, "Powerful Days," that contains many of his iconic images when he was an eyewitness to pivotal moments in American history.

If you click on this link to "The Digital Journalist," it will take you to Moore's image entitled "Demonstrators Blasted Against a Doorway, Seventeenth Street, May 3, 1963," ironically almost 43 years to the day from Monday's marches. It was a day when ordinary schoolchildren helped shock a nation out of their complacency and into action.

On the Tonight Show Monday evening, Jay Leno made a crack about schools having to teach "white history." Such glib comments should not go unchallenged: it was not until the 1960s that students in America received anything but white history. It is far from a given today that the true stories of the contributions of --and atrocities against-- all people are acknowledged.

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