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| Photo by Linda Thomas. |
Please join us in the A quad for a moment of silence - and more - on Thursday, October 8th.
At 10:27 a.m. last Thursday, on October 1, on an ordinary day, on an ordinary community college campus, learning stopped and lives were destroyed.
Join us as we gather around the nine empty chairs and reflect upon this. We will begin at 10:27 and remain through 11:00 AM, the national time of mourning.
"We are not — are we? — at the mercy of our political institutions. If we created them, we are responsible for them. We have the right and the duty to overhaul them, to change them. We are not — are we? — so helpless, to say that the [inaudible] has to stay there forever. Who said so?… It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, “I can’t do anything about it. It’s the government.” The government is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people. And the people are responsible for it. No American has the right to allow the present government to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and shot and beaten all over the Deep South, that there is nothing we can do about it. There must have been a day in this country’s life when the bombing of the children in Sunday School would have created a public uproar … It happened here and there was no public uproar.”
– James Baldwin, from his speech “After the Murder of Four Children” Sept. 25, 1963, ten days after Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls
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