A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true. Martin Luther King Jr., Selma March 8, 1965

These words were spoken the day after Bloody Sunday when civil rights protesters were attacked and beaten on the Edmund Pettis Bridge, a terrible day before many of us were born. For some of us new to the world of political activism, until recent years these words were good moral guidance to do the right thing; but not necessarily deeply impactful to our day to day lives. I say this based on my own experience, even though I recognized the continuing inequities in our society. Even while I recognized the risk to my African American son and nephews and nieces. And yet wasn’t the dawning of the Obama era the evidence that we’d achieved a milestone? That we’d traveled beyond the midpoint on the path to justice? Hadn’t we reached that point where most of us didn’t have to face the choice to stand up or die?