To the Faculty:

Our role in the university is never as passive recipients of action, nor merely as responders to the work of others. We also are initiators of the work that makes a university what it must be.

-- from "Simple, Non-Threatening, Courageous Acts"

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Why We Must Teach What We Know

My friend Alan Bean, one of the first activists to break the story of the Jena 6, has written a story about the struggle to continue to teach the Civil Rights Movement and civil rights advances in a generation which cannot remember how significant the small steps were in this struggle. In his article, "The Face of White Supremacy," Bean describes an actual argument going on in the development of history courses for public education. Old prejudices die slowly, even when people hardly ever say them out loud anymore. Those who remember must tell the story.

Mike Broadway

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