University President Drew G. Faust traveled to Alabama this weekend for the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights March at Selma.
In Friday’s morning prayer service at Memorial Church, Faust, a civil war historian, discussed her own personal involvement in the Civil Rights movement.
{shortcode-92b925f418e2f5d52833cb53ad62140e3235d7bb}
“I had felt the burden of that responsibility from the time I was small—growing up with the privileges of whiteness in the racial hierarchy of 1950s Virginia,” Faust said at the prayer service, adding that as a college freshman, she skipped her midterms to attend the 1965 march.
Invoking the poet Seamus J. Heaney, Faust talked about her previous experience at Selma as an opportunity to make “hope and history rhyme,” and said she planned to return to honor civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr., Hosea L. Williams, James L. Bevel, Diane J. Nash, Andrew J. Young, Jimmie Lee Jackson, and John Lewis.
“No victory is absolute; we have to keep our eyes on the prize to hold on—even to the Voting Rights Act [of 1965] itself, which is being threatened and eroded at the same time we are celebrating its passage,” Faust said.
—Staff writer Theodore R. Delwiche can be reached at theodore.delwiche@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @trdelwic.
—Staff writer Mariel A. Klein can be reached at mariel.klein@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @mariel_klein.
Read more in University News
Supreme Court Will Likely Uphold Affordable Care Act, Law Profs SayRecommended Articles
-
PLAYING IT BY THE RULES, COLONIAL STYLEAs ARCHAEOLOGISTS unearth the trash form the past they'll discover More about the lifestyle of colonial undergraduate. And very old
-
Communists and the CrownF It may be that years of hard living have somewhat soured Britain's taste for the televised fol-de-rol of subversive
-
Torture Under PinochetWe were peeling beans early on a typically hot January morning in Santiago, Chile. I was sitting in the kitchen
-
The Right President? Too Early to KnowIn the past few weeks, we, as Harvard College representatives to the Presidential Search, have fielded many questions about whether
-
Grant To Fund Genocide StudyThe Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has received over two million dollars from
-
Steinberg Renews Jewish Literary Tradition in ‘Prophet’s Wife’It is not every biblical book that opens with God commanding his prophet to go marry a prostitute. But this is exactly what the prophet Hosea is told to do at the outset of his biblical career.
