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Joan Trumpauer Mullholland

I was just reading about Joan Trumpauer Mullholland who, at 19, was arrested in Virginia for protesting segregation. She was tested for mental illness, because law enforcement couldn't understand any other reason why she would fight for black people's rights.

 The story isn't about Virginia or law enforcement, but about how we've somehow lost sight of the fact that the Civil Rights Movement was so recent, most of our parents were adults during it. Slavery was during our great grandparents lifetime.

 The article/post I just read was to make the point that many white people today say that if they were alive back then, they'd be like Ms. Mullholland or others earlier on who helped free slaves, but then poses this very simple thought. If you'd be these people then, what are you doing now? These stories are not about characters in a play or a movie, but real-life people who couldn't hang up their costumes at the end of the day. This is the very privilege we all take for granted.

 What I took away, completely separate from what I just read, was based on one line about "how history is taught," and while this writing explained that we're taught to believe this happened a long time ago, it made me think about my own personal education and how upon my graduation in 1988, I could tell you everything you needed to know about the Byzantine Empire and Ancient Greece, but almost nothing about slavery and segregation in this country. What's worse, both were covered as if they were equally eras of our past.

 I do not know what I can do, other than speak out and speak often, annoy those who think racism and segregation are tools for "greatness," but I do know the United States public school system is failing all of us and if white teachers and parents don't start fighting for their own kids to be educated and to evolve, then what chance will black (or any other minority that has been marginalized throughout this country's brief, very brief history) have to succeed, when they are living under the cloud of secrecy about a system that has and always will hold them back, degrade them, and often kill them.

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