Fine Print

Nearly 100 years after formerly enslaved people in Galveston, Texas celebrated the first “Jubilee Day”—the holiday that would eventually become Juneteenth—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sat in a Birmingham jail cell waiting for freedom, having been arrested for protesting segregation in Birmingham in April of 1963.

Mildred Loving never wanted to be famous. She never asked to be remembered forever as half of the couple that struck down bans on interracial marriage. And after her husband Richard’s untimely death, she avoided the limelight. But in 2007, on the 40th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case that bears her name (Loving v. Virginia), she had one more thing she needed to say.

Malcolm never appeared in my school history books, and he wasn’t spoken of when the Civil Rights Movement came up. When I read about him on my own, it wasn’t hard to understand why. He didn’t play by the rules.

This month, Embrace Boston has been highlighting figures like Kivie Kaplan, the Boston businessman and former president of the NAACP whose fierce advocacy for civil rights earned him a place on the 1965 Freedom Plaza.

Malcolm never appeared in my school history books, and he wasn’t spoken of when the Civil Rights Movement came up. When I read about him on my own, it wasn’t hard to understand why. He didn’t play by the rules.

What did you do when Jim Crow came knocking? That’s the question we’re going to have to answer for our children and grandchildren. Not just one day in the far future. Right now.