More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 22, 2019 - October 30, 2020
Negro women and men could barely go to the next state without worrying about predatory police, restaurants that refused to serve them, and service stations that wouldn’t let them buy gas or use the bathroom. Now they wanted to talk about a white man on the Moon? “A rat done bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the Moon,” rapped performer Gil Scott-Heron in a song that stormed the airwaves that year.
On the cusp of the 1970s, as the space program approached its zenith, the civil rights movement—or rather many of the goals it had set out to achieve—were beginning to feel as if they were in a state of suspended animation.
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 pried Jim Crow’s legal grip off
poor and dispossessed in Watts and Detroit and rural Appalachia could barely put food on the table—assuming they had a house to put the table in.
Memorial was actually the explosive dream deferred of Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem.” “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” . . .
G. Johnson, The History Makers, February 6, 2013, http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/katherine-g-johnson-42.
