From: David Evans <d...@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 6:01 PM
To: perry.gregg@post.harvard.edu
Dear Alumnae and Alumni,
I'm sure there is much celebration planned for the bicentennial of
Abraham Lincoln's birth in two weeks, but, after watching the news
last night, this hallowed commemoration seems even more relevant.
What could display greater bipartisan cooperation than a vigorous
celebration of Abe Lincoln's meaning to the fundamental values of our
country? It will be instructive and maybe even good for our national
will to learn again how another tall, skilled, idealistic lawyer from
Illinois led our union through a period much more perilous than the
current straitened economic times.
As I'm sure you know, on that same February 12, 2009 the NAACP will
celebrate its centennial. That, too, might help to kindle a national
bipartisan grasp of WHAT WAS, WHAT IS and WHAT CAN BE in America--if
we work together and internalize our country's ideals.
To think, when the NAACP was founded Plessy vs. Ferguson, the infamous
"separate but equal" U. S. Supreme Court decision, was thirteen years
old, the end of Reconstruction approximately thirty-three years in the
past, and the Emancipation Proclamation was forty-six years old.
Think, too, how a sixty year-old African American must have felt about
the whimsicality of black life in this country in 1909.
Best regards,
Dave Evans