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I've rewatched the series Eyes on the Prize. I've spent so much time over the years trying to help children understand what it was really all about, that it's a good idea to spend some time reflecting. This is actually a lot harder to explain than people would imagine, but for good reasons. Children today really don't understand why people would fill a swimming pool with cement rather than share it with dark skinned people. The racial hatred that caused so much misery and death within living memory is completely alien to them. Make fun of diversity all you want, it's worked, at least around here.

Something that dawned on me, watching this was that I don't get it either. Not even a little bit. I was born in 1969, the year of assassinations and riots, as well as the moon landing. This was real and immediate stuff when I was born. I remember all the debate over busing when I was a kid. I still can't grasp why anyone thought it was okay to bomb churches and kill children to stop citizens from voting. Why it was okay to murder a boy for saying hello to a white woman. Why people could feel self righteous about shooting a man in the back for protecting his mother. Why a crowd of idiots would beat a clergyman to death for wanting to walk from Selma to Montgomery. Why it would even by considered illegal to walk for Selma to Montgomery. It seems so completely insane to me.

This is a kind of success, isn't it? That two generations can grow up since the death of Martin Luther King, with the majority opinion that those Southerners were crazy. Scary, incomprehensibly crazy.

Yes, we need to learn this and not forget. It is terrifying to me that these things could have happened in my country until recently. I know racism is still out there. I know we should be vigilant. At the same time? We have come a long way in the space of one life.