I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.
Daily Archives: March 18, 2008
Call to Action: Justice for the Angola 3
If racism is truly in the past as the current political climate asks us to believe, then it should be no problem to start correcting past acts of racism.
Via Color of Change
Call on the Dept. of Justice & Louisiana Governor to Investigate
Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox have have endured 35 years of solitary confinement after being framed in a murder that everyone now knows they didn’t commit—locked up for daring to speak out against inhumane conditions in Angola, Louisiana State Penitentiary. They now spend every day in a 6×9 foot cell on the site of a former plantation.As with the Jena 6, we’re seeing another example of Louisiana’s sense of justice—unfair and unaccountable—and funded by our tax dollars. Please join us in demanding a full and fair investigation into the case of the Angola 3 and the Louisiana Prison system.