Our flag is red, white, and blue, but our nation is a rainbow-red, yellow, brown, black and white-and we're all precious in God's sight. America is not like a blanket-one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture. The same size. America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.
For it is in examining the people like Dr. King, that we can see how yoga can not just make us feel calmer and more peaceful, but can really affect change in a world that is in deep need of healing. By his words, and more importantly his actions, Martin Luther King Jr. showed many of the principles that are central to and deeply embedded in yoga philosophy.
By the mid-1980s, the AIDS epidemic had completely gripped the nation. Its victims, primarily queer men, were dying by the thousands. Fear and misinformation reigned supreme, and our government refused to respond to the crisis. Reverend Charles Angel, a community leader and activist who was living with HIV himself, recognized that queer men of color faced additional disparities due to cultural norms and societal inequities.
On Thursday, Mississippi Today reported that several officials, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, said NPS told them to remove visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument and edit out details about Beckwith. Among the details reportedly flagged for removal: that Evers was found lying in a pool of blood after he was shot. The brochures referred to Beckwith as "a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens' Council."
On March 2, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks' more famous act of defiance, Claudette Colvin, a Black high school student in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger.
She remembers walking with her big brothers down a sidewalk fractured by the roots of old oak trees while children played hopscotch on the playground. She remembers going outside and clapping erasers together so that plumes of chalk dust rose above her head. And she remembers being told that she was attending a school that many white parents had taken their children out of just a few years earlier because they didn't want them sitting in class with Negroes.
If you know anything about the basic origins of Black History Month then you know that we weren't given' anything. The question of who owns and authorizes Black History Month holds particular relevance now, in its centennial year, and at a time when efforts to celebrate, preserve, and acknowledge Black people's past in this country are under attack.
Following presidential custom, Trump issued a National Black History Month proclamation on Feb. 3 that maintained "black history is not distinct from American history - rather, the history of Black Americans is an indispensable chapter in our grand American story." Yes, but: Its rhetoric, critics say, stands in tension with the Trump administration's recent actions, raising questions about whether commemoration without context ultimately obscures more than it honors.