![]() The heated and divisive political discourse over the past couple of years has brought to the foreground the tense environment around race relations in our nation. Today, Millennials and Generation Z are challenging the systems and structures which have not delivered on social and economic change, at least not at the pace they would like to see. But one cannot help but think how much still needs to change as we watch the daily struggle for justice waged by movements like Black Lives Matter. ![]() Certainly, a lot has changed over the past 50 years-from the time of Jim Crow-era segregation and the Civil Rights movement led by Dr. More importantly, however, the visit made me reflect on the critical role race relations has played in the history of our nation, and continues to play in shaping our history and culture. And I had never heard of an unincorporated town in southern Indiana called Lyles Station, where free blacks settled and worked their own land prior to the Civil War, a remarkable feat considering slavery was still the law of the land in half the country, including in Kentucky just 35 miles to the south. I learned that the struggle for freedom from slavery is much older than I had thought, starting in the seventeenth century. While I was familiar with the role that several European colonial powers played in the slave trade, I did not know that, at one point in time, Portugal controlled 31 percent of the trade. ![]() We could have spent the entire day and more-there is so much to learn, absorb, and to reflect upon.ĭuring the few hours we were at the Museum, I learned new facts about our history. to visit members of our federal delegation and supporters of Western, Uzma and I took advantage of an open afternoon to visit, for the first time, The National Museum of African American History and Culture. “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”ĭuring a recent trip to Washington, D.C.
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