Historian Howard Zinn, my political example at
Boston University upon whose every word I hung always said to us that
it did not matter how difficult the fight or how entrenched the
opposition was who was advocating
for racist, inhumane and even cruel policy one must simply keep on
keeping on to oppose those who want to cement hate through law. One
hopes to realize that the arc of the moral universe will be on one's
side.
The
slain civil rights workers in Mississippi, Cheney, Goodwin and
Schwerner, the bludgeoning of the black youth Emmett Till by white
racists accusing him of merely looking or whistling at a white woman and
the explosion of a bomb by the Ku Klux Klan on September 15, 1963, at
the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama killing four young girls:
Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14) and
Carol Denise McNair (11) are all examples that seemed impossible to
confront. They were all gruesome murders.
Zinn said you never give up even when the things for which you are fighting are beset with seemingly intractable opposition of zero character and even less moral fiber. It did not matter. He said you march ahead with confidence in the rightness of your cause and simply never give up. Even If it takes another 50 or a 100 years one passes the baton to the next generation when your day is done to keep your humanitarian principles alive so that you know in the end, as Dr. King said, that the arc of your moral universe will bend ultimately toward justice.
The murderers of all three Black men -- George Floyd, Ahmed Aubury, and Dante Wright, were found guilty by a preponderance of white jurors. Those verdicts convicting white officers and white civilians just 20 or even 10 years ago would have seemed impossible. And so we trod on hoping one day that the myriad of voter suppression laws Republicans in state legislatures have unconscionably enacted to stymie Black and other minority voters will one day be overturned so that we can say as John Kennedy would have said God's work on earth is truly our own.
