Under the baobab: We must help each other rise ... again

“I have a dream ...” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, 1963

The road to universal freedom, justice and equality is not smooth and paved. It is bumpy and circuitous, twisting back on itself, strewn with the mangled bodies of martyrs. We cannot avoid tripping. Fallen we must seek ways to rise up.

In 1963, three weeks after Rev. King made his triumphant speech in Washington, white racists planted a bomb in a Birmingham church. Four little girls attending Sunday school were killed. Less than three months after that, the young pro-civil rights president, John Kennedy, was gunned down in Dallas. Five years later, in 1968, the dreamer was killed in Memphis but the dream survived.

ln 1964 more than a thousand young people, Black and white, volunteered to go to Mississippi to register African Americans to vote. White supremacists kidnapped and lynched three of those volunteers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner. The remaining freedom fighters could have chosen to leave Mississippi, abandoning the struggle. They didn’t. They stayed and kept up the fight. Their persistence led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In 1965 only 2% of Selma, Alabama’s eligible Black voters were registered to vote. People decided to march to the Capitol to protest. John Lewis was nearly killed trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He could have quit. He and others stood back up, patched their wounds and dusted themselves off. A few weeks later they successfully completed their march to Montgomery. President Johnson, inspired by their courage and tenacity, marshaled the Voting Rights Bill through Congress.

During the HIV/AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, the public ignored the epidemic. President Reagan refused to even mention it, while thousands of mostly gay men died from the disease. At the time many considered being gay shameful. In some parts of the country, it was considered criminal. The Gay Men’s Health Crisis began to fight back. They organized and educated. They raised the public consciousness. Today though there is still no cure, it is possible for those infected with the disease to survive. In 2015 the U.S. Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment required all states to grant same-sex marriages and to recognize same-sex marriages granted in other states.

In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress. In 1972 she became the first African American to run for president on a major party ticket. Her campaign was primarily symbolic, as were Jesse Jackson’s campaigns in 1984 and 1988. But, they sparked a consciousness. Twenty years later in 2008, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.

Brothers and sisters, we as a people are coming through a pandemic. Over a million of our fellow Americans have died. The voting rights that people died for are being threatened. Plagued with wars and rumors of wars, attacked by gun wielding racists, inflicted with inflationary price increases and trampled by other horsemen of the apocalypse, we have been knocked to our knees. We must help each other rise.

The Boalsburg Memorial Day parade and wreath laying returned after the pandemic-imposed absence. It helped lift the spirits of several thousand and reminded all of us that we as a country survived a Civil War that killed over 2% of our country’s population.

After three years, hundreds of volunteers welcomed back thousands of athletes for the Pennsylvania Special Olympics. At the conclusion of the opening ceremony the crowd gave one of our community’s treasures, Sue Paterno, a standing ovation.

On his 50th birthday, State College Mayor Ezra Nanes hosted a block party with music, dancing and pizza for 100 or so neighbors, spreading love as we are all called to do.

We will get through this. We already have.