Brigadier General Charles Edward McGee, one of the last living Tuskegee Airmen, turns 101-year-old, where he celebrated in Bethesda Maryland, waving the American flag as well-wishers drove by while some celebrated, cheering from a distance. The event even had a surprise fly-over of a P-51 aircraft, the same plane he flew in the war.
During the civil rights phase of the Black Freedom Movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) chose as its motto: “To Save the Soul of America.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., SCLC’s principal theorist and social philosopher, explained that it was really to reaffirm that “America would never be free or saved from itself” until African Americans are freed “completely from the shackles they still wear.” He said it was a question of concern for the integrity and life of America. And as I read it, it is a question concerning the very life and death of the people of America, caught up, at that time, in a monstrously immoral war against the Vietnamese people and wasting lives and resources better spent on the well-being of the American people.
“First, when you have a foreign government helping one of the parties, that’s a major problem, and it makes it more difficult,” Dean stated. “What Vladimir Putin is trying to do is not so much to support a person, but he’s really trying to eliminate any idea of truth. He’s attacking the country in a very clear and more dangerous way. He’s gone further than they even did during the Cold War. So, these are pretty big problems that we have to figure out how to overcome.”
As mandated by the U.S. Constitution, a census is conducted every 10 years to count the number of people living in the nation and its five territories. Census Day kicks-off on April 1, 2020, and every home will receive an invitation to participate in a short questionnaire by phone, mail and for the first time, online.
“I can remember at a NAMAD banquet there were two tables, maybe three at a conference of minority dealers,” he said. “But I watched it grow to the level that it is today with many and, to be in a position within General Motors and to assist the industry and see it grow, has been gratifying,” he said.
In these uncertain and unsettling times of the self-silencing of the lambs, the fearful and fatigued surrender of summer soldiers, and the out-of-control hate-filled howling of ice age winter wolves, lessons and models of struggle and resistance from the sacred narrative of our history are both appropriate and compelling.