Gregory Meeks: “I was born in 1953. Brown v. Board of Education had not been decided. The Civil Rights Act was not yet law, and the…”

“I was born in 1953. Brown v. Board of Education had not been decided. The Civil Rights Act was not yet law, and the Voting Rights Act was more than a decade away. African Americans could be denied sitting on a bus, a room at a hotel, entry into a school, solely because of the color of their skin. For my three daughters, such a time is still somewhat unimaginable to them. They cannot fathom being refused entry into a restaurant or being legally barred from living in a neighborhood, because the laws on the books said it was the right thing to do. These are the realities of my generation, for I recall getting off a train and seeing ``colored'' and ``white.'' But it is not the realities for my daughters. But they do know about a world where Black men and women can be stopped by a police officer on the flimsiest of pretexts, and they understand the pain of seeing unarmed Black men and women shot, choked, and kneeled upon until they take their last breath. I now also have a one-year-old granddaughter. She does not know about mass incarceration. She has not seen videos of Black men being murdered by those that are supposed to protect the law. I do hope she learns about these incidents, like the murder of George Floyd or Eric Garner or Sean Bell, but in the same way my daughter has learned about segregation: Through books and movies and history and classes. I hope she views our current failings as unimaginable problems from an era far passed.…”