A Jewish Journey to Montgomery
March 15, 2020
Between 1877 and 1950, approximately 4400 African American women and men were lynched in the United States. Billie Holiday sang of them, “strange fruit hanging from the sycamore tree,” in Abel Meeropol’s iconic 1939 song, but it was not until 2018 that civil rights activist and attorney Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative raised enough money to open the commemorative Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
Both sites are intended to acknowledge the racism at the heart of America’s story and address the many ways that the heritage of bigotry continues to fester and poison the body politic.
One comment on “A Jewish Journey to Montgomery”
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Yes! this is a crucial point, and also highlights the rapid erosion of our rights and the rapid erosion of our government into a monocameral unit, with the Senate and the SCOTUS and the Justice Department essentially now working only to support 45 and not represent or defend the People. We are losing our ability to complain and losing people and institutions who used to hear our complaints. The First Amendment includes the guarantee of the right “to petition the government for redress of grievances” but that right is hollow and eviscerated when the Government serves only the chief executive, who is hell-bent on corrupting our nation into a fascist one, on the order of Putin’s Russia and Mao’s China.