Combining Church and State in state and federal regulations and as the Speaker of the House of Representatives is not what our Forefathers set up for the United States of America.
Freedom is freedom, not censorship, nor male domination. It is time to pull off the systemic racism bandage covering the infected national wound masking as a difference of opinion. Blaming religion and religion’s quasi-moral and racist views as the reason for political motivations not only goes against the separation of church and state, but it also foments and mutates into a self-sabotaging mash.
Banning books in schools and libraries based on religious ideology is not to be combined in any government process in the USA. History must not be censored so that human history, including slavery and the holocaust of Nazi Germany, gets buried. It is necessary for truth to be told for the betterment of future human history.
I was living in Pleasant Grove, Mississippi in 1964. My mother, my new Mississippi father, my baby sister and I were living in the homestead home with my new extended family. It would not surprise me if the house in the movie THE HELP, was the same house in which I lived.
I remember discussions of both segregation and desegregation both for the school bus I rode on as well as for the elementary school I attended. These talks upset me greatly because one of my friends was a black girl who was my age. She was the daughter of Pearl, the black women my aunt hired to do the laundry and ironing. My mother and I felt the same way, people are people regardless of color, gender, age, race, creed, or any other label we place on people to make sure our division of humanity is counted.
I tell of being allowed to visit my black friend in her home to eat dinner and later play after dinner, with my grammar school friend now published in my new book on Kindle presently, and out in paperback on November 3, IN THEIR IMAGE AND LIKENESS, subtitled, Universal Wisdom.
I only mention that my friend was black because in that home I lived in then included other family members who were horrified that I went to this friend’s house to share a meal and play. For the “good” of family peace, I was not allowed to visit at her home anymore.
Also in 1964, I was entering third grade, the same year a third-grade black student, Annette Gordon-Reed, was allowed to be the first black student in Jim Crow Conroe, Texas to go to an all-white grammar school. Breaking with prejudiced norms all over the USA was taking place.
June 19, Juneteenth, is the African American holiday finally celebrated for the second year in a row, thankfully. Hiding black and indigenous human history, especially USA human history, is blatant, ignorant racism, bigotry in action.
Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor. She is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and a professor of history in the university’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences. She is formerly the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Annette is noted for changing scholarship on Thomas Jefferson regarding his relationship with Sally Hemings and her children. Annette is the author of The Hemingses of Monticello, exposing the truth behind the racist culture of that time.
Her latest book is On Juneteenth, a poignant book for this year’s personal reading list.
She graduated from Dartmouth College in 1981 and Harvard Law School in 1984, where she was a member of the Harvard Law Review.
She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Award for Nonfiction and 15 other prizes in 2009 for her work on the Hemings family of Monticello.
In 2010, she received the National Humanities Medal and a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2018, she has served as a trustee of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, NC. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. She is also a Trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
God Bless Everyone Everywhere