“O’ freedom, o’ freedom, o’ freedom over me
And before I’d be a slave I’ll be buried in my
grave
And go home to my Lord and be free
No more weepin’, no more weepin’, no more weepin’
over me
And before I’d be a slave I’ll be buried in my
grave
And go home to my Lord and be free.”
“In the town of Trickem, at the Nolan Elementary
School — a small white shack on brick stilts, which had asbestos shingles, a
corrugated-iron roof, six broken windows, and a broken wood floor patched with
automobile license plates — a group of old people and barefoot children rushed
out to embrace Dr. King. They had been waiting four hours.
“‘Will you march with us?’ Dr. King asked an old
man with a cane.
“‘I’ll walk one step, anyway,’ said the man.
‘Because I know for every one step I’ll take you’ll take two.’”
—Renata
Adler, journalist and author, “The Selma March,” The New Yorker, April 1965.
”A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that
which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies
when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.”
—The
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), civil rights leader, in a sermon the day after “Bloody Sunday,” when
marchers were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, March 8,
1965.
• Editorial Comment: We’d better keep marching.
Women’s March, Eureka, CA, 2017
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