The story is narrative nonfiction describing what might have been said during the encounters at the children’s civil rights march for desegregation in Birmingham, Ala.
One of the earliest assaults on segregated transit in the South occurred in Louisville, Ky., in 1870-71. There, the city’s black community organized a successful protest that relied on nonviolent direct action, a tactic that would give shape to the modern civil rights movement nearly a century later.
In Boston, widely regarded as the center of the abolitionist movement, black leaders called on citizens to resist the newly passed Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 in order “to make Massachusetts a battlefield in defense of liberty.”
“When Mormons settled in Missouri in the 1830s, local residents found Mormon beliefs and practices not simply strange, but wrong. … The Mormons, the Missouri governor declared, must be removed—if not by expulsion, then by extermination.”
“The Irish and the English share a long legacy of conflict.” And this conflict extended across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World as a wave of Catholic immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1820s.
In his essay, Bacon provides some high-level insights into the past of America’s deaf, as well as the current culture and some potential challenges that lie ahead.
These images are from The Negro Motorist Green Book 1940 edition. The Green Book, published from 1936 – 1964, served as a guide for African Americans traveling around the country during the Jim Crow segregation era. To explore the complete issues visit the New York Public Library Digital Collections at https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-green-book#/?tab=ab…