John Lewis's speech at the March on Washington

A new history podcast has ten episodes that are well worth listening to.

"It Was Said is a limited documentary podcast series looking back on some of the most powerful, impactful and timeless speeches in American history. 

Written and narrated by Pulitzer Prize winning and best-selling author-historian Jon Meacham, and created, directed and produced by Peabody-nominated C13Originals Studios in association with HISTORY Channel, this series takes you through 10 speeches for the inaugural season. 

Meacham offers expert insight and analysis into their origins, the orator, the context of the times they were given, why they are still relevant today, and the importance of never forgetting them. 

Each episode of this documentary podcast series also brings together some of the top historians, authors and journalists relevant to each respective speech and figure."

Ep 9: John Lewis, We Want Our Freedom Now

https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vaXQtd2FzLXNhaWQ&ep=14&episode=MWM1MGE1MzgtZTdlMS0xMWVhLTk1ZDYtOTM3OGRmNmJkNDQ2

The text of John Lewis' speech at the March on Washington

https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/lewis-speech-at-the-march-on-washington-speech-text/

YouTube Video of the full speech  https://youtu.be/tFs1eTsokJg

Student first amendment case coming to Supreme Court

In one of the first cases the Supreme Court will hear after the holiday break:

It was a Saturday in the spring of 2017, and a ninth-grade student in Pennsylvania was having a bad day. She had just learned that she had failed to make the varsity cheerleading squad and would remain on junior varsity.

The student expressed her frustration on social media, sending a message on Snapchat to about 250 friends. The message included an image of the student and a friend with their middle fingers raised, along with text expressing a similar sentiment. Using a curse word four times, the student expressed her dissatisfaction with “school,” “softball,” “cheer” and “everything.”

Though Snapchat messages are ephemeral by design, another student took a screenshot of this one and showed it to her mother, a coach. The school suspended the student from cheerleading for a year, saying the punishment was needed to “avoid chaos” and maintain a “teamlike environment.”

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/us/supreme-court-schools-free-speech.html

Nikki Giovanni: "We find the song in the darkest days"

From the New York Times:

"Over the course of her 52-year career, Nikki Giovanni has written 12 children’s books and eight nonfiction books, and she has released 10 spoken word albums. But the genre for which she is best known is poetry.

When you flip through a stack of her 19 collections (it’s a tall stack), you find her face, still radiant and smiling at 77, staring back at you from the covers. This is an unusual choice for the jacket of a poetry book, but Giovanni is the rare poet whom a good number of people will actually recognize — a distinction that is all the more noteworthy considering how long it has been true.

She was name-checked in the 1980 Teena Marie song “Square Biz,” featured in the Afropunk Festival in Brooklyn in 2016, and both seen and heard reading her poem “Dream” last fall in a campaign ad for Joseph R. Biden Jr. It was 1972 when Ebony magazine first called her “a personality, a star.” Her staying power over half a century comes from a stream of acclaimed work, her proclivity for a punishing schedule of tours and readings, and a fearlessness born of not caring what foolish people think.

“The best thing you can do for yourself is to not pay attention,” Giovanni said during a video interview from her home in Christiansburg, Va."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/books/nikki-giovanni-make-me-rain.html

Listen to a wonderful interview with Nikki Giovanni and Neil Pasricha   https://www.3books.co/chapters/65

On this Day in 1963 : "I Have A Dream" - Martin Luther King Jr.

 "I Have a Dream" is a public speech that was delivered by American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in which he called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States. Delivered to over 250,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the speech was a defining moment of the civil rights movement and among the most iconic speeches in American history

From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_a_Dream

Video link = https://youtu.be/smEqnnklfYs