Reflections/Jonathan Gramling
Too Many Martyrs
For the first time in 20 years, I’m sharing my precious Reflections space with the five school superintendents who wrote the op ed below. Our public schools are so important to our future and long-term quality of life. These superintendents make an important case for the state legislature and the governor to keep their promises to Wisconsin’s children. Please read and act.
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History seems to be repeating itself. Back in 1963, four young Black girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. And while there was outraged — and countless Black people were murdered or hung for their civil rights activism — it wasn’t until folks like Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife from Detroit, Michigan helping with the Selma to Montgomery march were getting murdered by the KKK that a lot of national movement and empathy for civil rights occurred.
It seems to be playing out in Minneapolis today. While there have been immigrants murdered by ICE — I am so tired of them being called “domestic terrorists — it seems that national outrage is coming to a peak now that Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, two white demonstrators and observers of the ICE raids, have been killed. They have become symbolic martyrs for the anti-ICE movement.
Trump, realizing he is losing control of the national narrative about immigrants, has started to make perhaps cosmetic changes to ICE’s approach to rounding up immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. And he is cutting off Kristi Noem and his other minions at the knees so that he can appear to be the peacemaker of the Minneapolis crisis.
Like the 1960s, it is unfortunate that it takes white martyrs to get people outraged and begin to turn the tide against Trump’s inhumane immigration policies. We had already had too many martyrs.
Just as in the 1960s, the white supremacists hardly had a change of heart as it related to Blacks and other people of color. But the political tide changed and they scurried out of the political limelight. We can only pray that is the case today.
