Our Quiet Growing Time

After the sit-in, all I could think of was how sick Mississippi whites were. They believed so much in the segregated Southern way of life, they would kill to preserve it. I sat there in the NAACP office and thought of how many times they had killed when this way of life was threatened. I knew that the killing had just begun... Before the sit-in, I had always hated the whites in Mississippi. Now I knew it was impossible for me to hate sickness. The whites had a disease, an incurable disease in its final stages. What were our chances against such a disease?  Martin Luther King, Jr. is the face most commonly associated with the Civil Rights movement. He was an idealist, an optimist, a dreamer, a preacher. He preached a message of hope and faith, not despair. Anne Moody, the author of Coming of Age in Mississippi , is a very different personality from the idealistic Reverend King. In her memoir, she frequently comes across as bitter and angry and pessimistic. Relationally, she's s...

On one of the hottest days last summer, Nathan and I went on an excursion to Gettysburg National Military Park. Despite the 90-degree-plus temperatures, I remember getting goosebumps when we stood at the marker denoting the location of the Union line when thousands of Confederates pl unged across a mile-wide field in the infamous Pickett's Charge. When I closed my eyes, I could imagine a sea of bedraggled gray rushing across the bare field to almost certain death. I wish I had written down the quotation that was on the plaque at that spot, spoken by one of the Union soldiers who survived the battle; this is the best that I can reconstruct it: "Watching those soldiers cross that field, I couldn't help but be proud that these brave men--rebels or not--were my countrymen." Goosebumps! For this reason alone--that countryman fought countryman--the Civil War will never cease to fascinate. But there are other reasons--some subtle, some obvious--why the Civil War ...