Aug. 28 Has Room for Another Milestone (Washington Post)

[highplainsdem]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/16/AR2008081602111.html?hpid=news-col-blogs

Aug. 28 Has Room for Another Milestone
By Chris Cillizza and Shaiagh Murray
The Washington Post
Sunday, August 17, 2008; Page A09

Sen. Barack Obama's upcoming acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention will further cement Aug. 28 as one of the most significant dates in the American civil rights movement.

As is often noted, Aug. 28, 2008, will be the 45th anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech delivered by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. As King noted in that famous address, "Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning" in the quest for equal treatment of African Americans.

Aug. 28, 1955, was the day that Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago, was brutally killed in the Mississippi Delta town of Money. The acquittal of the white suspects helped to spark the civil rights movement.

Aug. 28, 2005, was the eve of Hurricane Katrina's deadly landfall in southern Louisiana and Mississippi, turning a nation's attention to the wrenching poverty that continued to mark the lives of many African Americans.

"It's a seminal moment," said Brenda Jones, spokeswoman for Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a leading civil rights figure. Although Lewis initially backed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, he will be among the chief celebrants in Denver when Obama walks on stage as the first African American to claim his party's nomination.

-snip-

[predfan]

1. Ironically, exactly 25 years after Emmett Till and 25 years before Katrina

on 8-28-70 the little woman and I were married. That, too, was a seminal moment, but we cleaned it up.

[redstate_democrat]

2. I made that connection a few weeks ago.

It does seem to be providential.