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COPYRIGHT 1985
BY JULIAN BOND

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This collection of anniversaries and celebrations - Martin Luther King's birthday in January, Black History Month in February - gives us the ocasion to look backward at what we were and forward at what we might become. That is history's lesson, if we care to learn it. For too many Americans today - the young, who cannot remember what they did not see, and their elders, who want to forget what they did not fight enough against, the past is easily forgotten and dismissed.

But we need to remember what was. Let me let the words of Martin Luther King put you back in that place, not even a lifetime ago.

In his letter from a Birmingham jail, he wrote:

"When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you

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