Most of the younger generations knew nothing of the Movement. For my part, during the sixties I lived in California, busy with raising four you pre-schoolers. While I was conscious of the events of the Civil Rights Movement, they are far away and did not touch my life very much. It was only in the eighties when the PBS series Eyes on the Prize was aired that I began understanding how momentous these events had been, and how easily forgotten or bypassed they could be. And yet, we cannot ignore these events that bear witness to both the amazing resilience of the human spirit as well as the wrongs a society can justify.
Pictures are sometimes more effective than words.
They tug at our hearts and souls. We may even have seen the orderly lines of Blacks, two by two, lining up to register to vote, or marching on the highway from Selma to Montgomery. These are pictures of success, and we should celebrate them. But there are other haunting pictures we cannot ignore. What we do not see unless we look at a special documentary are the pictures of violence.