Sarah Lewis Instagram – On March 31, 1968, days before he would be assassinated, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral. It was not his prophetic “Mountaintop” speech. That day, King spoke from the cathedral’s pulpit ahead of his Poor People’s Campaign, pressing the conscience of the congregation with the moral outrage of poverty. It was his final Sunday sermon. On April 5, just a week later, more than 4,000 mourners would come to the cathedral for his memorial service.
In the summer of 2022, I went to the cathedral and found myself just feet from President Woodrow Wilson’s tomb and memorial. Along with others, I had been invited to speak about the new commission that the church had just unveiled: stained-glass windows and tablets by artist Kerry James Marshall and poet Elizabeth Alexander to replace those dedicated to Confederate generals Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee. The Confederates’ stained-glass windows had remained in the church for nearly 70 years, erected through a gift from the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). The tomb of Wilson, the first Southerner elected president after the Civil War, had been deliberately installed beneath these stained glass windows…
We are in the midst of a crisis of regard in the United States, amid our triumphs. Our persistent unwillingness to see one another has put pressure on the operation of vision itself. We have shaped our own self-portrait through omissions and negations. We have had debates about monuments and markers — even stained glass windows — because we know the facts of what they were meant to do.…
To examine this history is to expose how we have learned not to see the fictions that legitimate racial injustice and inequity. The work of revision — of re-seeing — must continue. For where we once blocked our rightful view of one another, we now have the means to build windows. We can see the story tied to the representation all around us. The question is whether we still have the will.“
Excerpt from Washington Post piece out today in print tomorrow. Thank you, Amanda Katz! 💫🙏🏾 | Posted on 15/Jan/2024 00:09:56
