Today was a holiday, but I made the boys do a few lesson anyway. I'm so mean.
For history, we jumped forward in our book and read the chapter on the Civil Rights act, and then watched Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. It's very moving.
It was very interesting to me to listen to the comments the boys made as we read of Rosa Parks and the Jim Crow Laws and Elizabeth Eckford (the black high school student who tried to enter a white high school and was turned away by National Guardsmen under orders of Arkansas Governor Faubus).
I'm so grateful to live in a country at a time in which my kids have no experience with racism and have absolutely no reference point for understanding how people ever could have treated other human beings as less than themselves.
I know there are vestiges of racism left in this country, but the very idea of it is utterly foreign to my boys, and for that I am very grateful to Martin Luther King Jr.
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For all the ways our country has deteriorated in recent years, I do believe we are improving in at least this one big way -- racism is disappearing and I am so glad. Eva and I listed to MLK tonight too -- he was a master of oratory. There is no one to match him today. I know he had his problems in his personal life, but he was a great man who changed the world. He deserves a day to celebrate his life.
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