Can our nation ever really change?

James Baldwin was an African-American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet and social critic who I began to read in the late 1980s. In Nobody Knows My Name, published in 1961, he wrote: “Now, this country is going to be transformed. It will not be transformed by an act of God, but by all of us, by you and me. I don’t believe any longer that we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hands. We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.” We are still waiting for that transformation, just as Charlie Sifford and all those in the civil rights movement of the 1960s waited. As Thomas Jefferson said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

#charliesifford