Tag / Obama

by Vickii Howell

2012 Election Season Reveals Racial “Insanity”

I’m not saying that all people who dislike the President and genuinely disagree with his decisions are doing so because they hate the fact that he’s African American. But I am not naïve, either.

Before I left my house to walk to my polling spot this November Election Day, I put on this button that says, “Birmingham 1963 Foot Soldiers Reunion: Inspired by What We Did for Ourselves – And the World.”

I rode a bus to President Barack Obama’s Inauguration in 2009 with some of those ordinary but heroic men and women called Foot Soldiers, who as children had taken part in the 1963 demonstrations during the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.

The button reminds me that they, and thousands of others I don’t know, paid a heavy price just so that they and I — we — had basic civil rights, including the right to vote. After 50 years, it sounds bizarre that people who looked like me were denied the voting right and other rights due to any U.S. citizen, particularly in the larger Southern society, just because of skin pigmentation. Continue reading →

by Vickii Howell

Amid the Rubble, A Beautiful Spirit Shines Through

I’ve dreamt of tornadoes before. But none of my dreams was ever like the one I had about two weeks ago. In it, the tornado funnels seemed to fall out of a blustery sky toward the ground, one after another, several at a time, two or three funnels in a swirling mass of dark gray clouds.

Another scene in this dream sequence that’s too ghastly for me to repeat here. It was terrible enough to make me wake up. I shoved those scenes deep into a mental corner as I would any bad dream and tried to forget them.

I wish I could wake up from the living nightmare that struck our state last week.To my great discomfort and sorrow, it was not a dream.  Continue reading →