History Lesson

Last night we watched a documentary on the Freedom Summer, an installment of the History Channel’s “Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America” series. Prominently featured, in footage from then and now, was Bob Moses, a brilliant organizer and strategist behind that voting-rights campaign (and a campaign it truly was, with the attendant risk of death for the campaigners).

Moses long ago realized the front lines had shifted, and he continues to fight the good fight.

Meanwhile, today’s African-American leadership in Houston, beneficiaries of the risk-taking by Moses and other early Civil Rights activists, devotes its energies to crying “racism” over the demotion of a wealthy local television news anchor or to defending the indefensible expenditures of taxpayer money by an equally well-compensated university president.

History, it seems, has passed them by …