Edward

If you haven’t already …

Revisado: 04-16-23

… read or listen to, or read and listen to Falling Man! It’s exquisitely beautiful, luminous!!

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Clarifying our past, giving hope for our future

Revisado: 06-18-18

This is an extraordinary book. I recently finished it, and my first impulse was to return to the beginning, and, having arrived again at the end of the epilogue, my impulse is to return to the beginning yet again. We should all listen to this book -- ALL of us -- or read it, or both at once, as the case may be. To do so is to enjoy a fundamentally better understanding of a crucial seam in the social and political fabric of the United States, and of those who wove it. Brown v. Board of Education is "a defining decision in US history," Devlin writes, "but it is time to incorporate the stories of girls and young women who were integral to the school desegregation process" that it reflects, which "would not have happened without their commitment and skills."

Their collective story, she continues, and not just the famed decision that resulted, is "in the twenty-first century, a vital measure of American Democracy" -- of what young girls and women, young people generally, can accomplish, with the support of grown-ups around them and an unwavering moral compass. To read this book is to have one’s faith restored in the arc of history, and in those who will bend it toward justice, even in the face of extreme adversity, and who are, as it turns out, just exactly right in front of us.

And "not least" among its accomplishments, no less than Linda Gordon testifies, "the book is a great read" -- a GREAT read! To strive for intellectually rigorous writing is surely to risk writing that is overly "academic." Not so here, in the least. It is a joy to read, a "page turner" to be sure, with many, many "radio moments" -- in which, arriving here or here, we find ourselves still standing on a train station platform, or sitting in a parked car, anxious to finish reading or listening to this or that bit of the story.

"On the morning of April 13, 1947," the story begins, "fourteen-year-old Marguerite Daisy Carry went with her father to Eliot Junior High School, the white middle school closest to her home in Washington, DC, and attempted to enroll." The process of telling it begins in earnest, Devlin recounts in the "Acknowledgements," when she first reached out to speak with her, in 2008, now Marguerite Carr Stokes. "What took you [historians] so long?," she mused. Now that the wait is over, finally, and we have the full story, finally, we ALL should wait not a moment longer before enjoying and learning from it.

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