There are those who want America to forget about its past. They claim it is unpatriotic for students to learn about the failures our nation has endured, or the mistreatment it has inflicted.
These people insist that we stop referring to the act of sailing ships across an ocean, abducting people from their homes, and selling off those who manage to survive the journey, as the slave trade.
Call it the triangle trade instead. Maybe a fresh coat of paint will help cover the guilt.
And they don’t want us to discuss the discriminatory laws that have created lasting racial repercussions or the inequalities people of color face every single day. Because that reality diminishes the accomplishments of those born with an unfair advantage.
Does that mean we should also hide from the forced death marches on the Trail of Tears?
And how after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, American citizens were rounded up and thrown into internment camps? They were loyal, they loved our country, but their heritage was deemed untrustworthy. Should we ignore that too?
Or how women did not have the right to vote, did not have equal access to jobs, to education. Did not even have the right to determine what happens with their own bodies. A right that is under attack at this very moment.
Maybe we shouldn’t discuss the propaganda spread about the gay disease. And how the infected were banned from serving in the military and the government. So much for equal representation.
All of these events are tragically misguided times from our history. Yet this is not why they fear our past.
They fear Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks. Black women who used acts of peaceful civil disobedience to cast a spotlight on the racial injustice across our nation.
They fear Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and all the women of the suffrage movement who stood up to their government, who insisted on being heard, and who demanded their unalienable rights.
They fear Harvey Milk, a gay man determined to make a difference at a time of severe and violent homophobia. A life that was taken too soon.
They fear those who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, linked arm in arm.
The 250,000 people who marched on Washington and heard Martin Luther King’s dream.
The native Americans who occupied Alcatraz.
They fear those who sound the rally cry of change. For progress means that power is taken from the privileged and given to the unheard and the overlooked.
All it takes is one person to stand up. One person to start a movement. To know America’s story is to know that anything is possible.
Our Past Directs Our Future