Obámanos Open Thread

There's a good discussion going on in zkg's Diary A toast to those who should have lived to have seen Tuesday.

The list of those who ought to be there but can't is long. Martin Luther King Jr. would be 80 now if he hadn't been gunned down. Medgar Evers would be 84 if he hadn't been gunned down. William L. Moore would be 81 if he hadn't been gunned down. Viola Liuzzo would be 83 if she hadn't been gunned down. Herbert Lee would be 98 if he hadn't been gunned down. ONeal Moore would be 78 if he hadn't been gunned down. The Rev. James Reeb would be 82 if he hadn't been beaten to death. Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson would be 59, and Denise McNair and Cynthia Wesley would be 56 if they hadn't been blown up in church. Fred Hampton would be 60 if he hadn't been gunned down. The Rev. Bruce Klunder would be 72 if he hadn't been run over by a bulldozer.

Those who I wish had lived to see this day are Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. As I have written previously, I didn't know these three. Indeed, by the time I first heard their names in June 1964 when I arrived in Jackson, Mississippi, as part of Freedom Summer's voter registration project, they were already dead, although nobody but their Klan murderers knew that yet.

I may have met one of them when we were trained in Ohio for our task, but I didn't remember. Their photos soon appeared everywhere, and none of their faces rang a bell for me. All I and other civil rights workers knew at that time is that they had disappeared mysteriously. The same had happened to other civil rights workers previously, but without national publicity. We hoped for a miracle. But most of us believed they were dead. In six weeks, we found out for sure.

I wish those three brave men were in Washington today to see how far we've come, how far they and thousands of martyrs like them have brought us. Not yet all the way to freedom and equality, but farther down the road than we've ever been.