Confronting the Past and Building the Future in Montgomery, Alabama

My daughter, Annie, and I just spent two days in Montgomery at the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum:  From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which covers a small hilltop above Alabama’s capital city. It is an extraordinarily uplifting name for what is, in fact, a heartrending tribute to the more than 4,000 African American victims of lynching in America.  

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Old White Men Clapping

When Harvard president Drew Faust recently told the 50th reunion class of 1967 that “this fall’s freshman class will be the first majority minority class in the college’s history,” the audience applauded. The incoming freshmen will look very different from those who arrived in the fall of 1963, when black students – both African American and African – were only one percent of their number, and men outnumbered women by 4-1. In effect, the audience, which was composed preponderantly of old white men, was applauding its own passing.

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