And because every single person whose voice I've featured in quotations today is a white middle-class male--like me--while the voices we most desperately need to hear today as a human community, if we want a bright future for all of us, are the voices of women, and of people from the socioeconomic and racial margins of society, a video of one of the most powerful and humane voices of the 20th century. A video featuring a woman of color who happens to be a lesbian. This is Audre Lorde reading her poem "1984"in Berlin not long before her death later in 1992.
The new civil rights movement we need so desperately at this point in history, to continue the brave work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and others in the 20th century, has not only to include but to provide leadership roles to people like Audre Lorde, in my view. And James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin.
Not to mention Chelsea Manning.