This speech by George E. Curry, Editor-in-Chief, National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) and BlackPressUSA.com
was taken from the Region VII Conference at the Westin Oaks Hotel in Houston, Texas on March 13, 2004.

Civil Rights leaders liked to tell the joke about a Chicago seminary student who was suddenly awakened at 3 A.M. by a voice imploring him: Go to Mississippi! Go to Mississippi!! Go to Mississippi!!! The student said, "Lord, you said that you will be with me always, even until the end of the earth. If I go to Mississippi, will you go with me?" The heavenly voice replied, "I’ll go as far as Memphis."

The idea, of course, was that if God was afraid to go to Mississippi, mortals had no chance of surviving.

I was sitting here listening to Jeff [Cohen, editor of the Houston Chronicle] talk about how he grew up in Houston, went to the University of Texas, and came back to become editor of his hometown newspaper. I couldn’t help but contrast that with my own experience. The first Black didn’t graduate from the University of Alabama in my hometown until 1963, when I was a sophomore in high school. I could get a job at Sports Illustrated directly out of college, but couldn’t get a job at my hometown newspaper because they didn’t hire Blacks.

We’ve come a long way since then. Or have we?

This year, we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the 40th anniversary of the Mississippi Summer Project, known as Freedom Summer, and what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King’s 75th birthday.

Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University and former president of the American Historical Association, observed: "In a country whose economic growth and territorial expansion required appropriating the land of one nonwhite group (Native Americans), exploiting the labor of another (slaves), and annexing much of a nation defined as non-white (Mexico), it was inevitable that nationhood would acquire a powerful racial dimension."
[quote taken from Foner’s "Expert Report" in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, 2003. It is also to good overview of race in America. See comments at http://www.umich.edu/~urel/admissions/legal/expert/foner.html.

Bill Bradley put it another way. He said, "Slavery was America’s original sin and racism remains its unresolved dilemma." From its inception, this country has struggled to have its ideals match its professed principles and ideals. We fought a war over slavery and what was called "the race question" still was not resolved.

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