Drick Boyd's Blog
Uncovering the Lie of Democracy While Acting in Hope
As a federal government shutdown looms due to the Republican threats to not pass a budget bill and attempts to de-fund the Affordable Healthcare Act (so-called Obamacare), I am moved to reflect on the role of government in relationship to the poor and marginalized in...
Terrorism by Another Name
Yesterday, we witnessed another mass shooting in which 13 people lost their lives, eleven of them unarmed random victims. The shooter, Aaron Alexis, and a police officer were the only armed persons with a sense of purpose, the former going on a shooting spree,...
The March on Washington, Racism and Education in Philadelphia
The following is an address I gave on Thursday, August 22 at the POWER Forum on "Philadelphia in Crisis: Race,Education and Economics. POWER is a network of 41 congregations in Philadelphia that have come together working on issue of economic justice, immigration and...
From Guns Into Bicycles
On a cold January afternoon four and a half years ago, I was arrested along with seven others for sitting down and blocking the entrance to Colisimo’s Gun Store on Spring Garden Street in Philadelphia. Over the course of two days twelve people in all were arrested for...
School Funding Formulas
Below is the text of a letter to the editor I submitted to the Philadelphia Inquirer in response to an article about the challenges facing suburban public school districts that required them to raise property taxes and cut services. The letter seeks to point out that...
The Strange Career of Jim Crow – 50 Years Later
In my first or second year of college I read C. Vann Woodward's classic history of the segregated South, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. I don't remember what impact it had on me back then, but for some reason I hung on to the book. I recently reread the book as part...
The Verdict – What Does It Mean – Really?
I was stunned as I listened to the verdict being read in the George Zimmerman trial last night – not guilty of any wrong doing in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Really? As I listened to the ABC commentator explain the meaning of the verdict, I realized how many of...
Win One, Lose One …. and a Disturbing Trend
This past week the U.S. Supreme Court rendered two momentous decisions that seem to move in opposite directions when it comes to human rights. On Tuesday, the Court essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 effectively freeing nine Southern states...
Immigration Reform and the Border Surge – A Waste and an Embarrassment
Robert Frost begins his famous poem “Mending Wall” with the words “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” As members of Congress seem to be heading toward an agreement on immigration reform, one of the provisions that will likely be included in...
My New Hero: John Lewis
Several years ago I began collecting pictures for what I call my Hall of Heroes, people through history whose lives and work have inspired me. The idea was to one day put all these pictures into one great big collage. When I started there were some obvious...
Relearning History
During our second to last day of our Civil Rights Tour, we toured Nashville with Mr. Kwame Lillard (pictured below in front of a statue of W.E.B Dubois) who was one of the hundreds of students in the Nashville who occupied lunch counters and called for boycotts of the...
Lessons From Little Rock
Today we visited Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas where in 1957 nine African American students entered the all-white high school to fulfill the dictates of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in schools. It...
Reliving Memphis – The Parallels With Philadelphia
Today (June 11) we visited the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN, which is located on the site of the Lorraine Motel (pictured below) where Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Dr. King was in Memphis to lend his support to black sanitation workers...
We Are Doomed to Repeat History, If We Don’t Know Our History
Today, we visited Selma, AL, the site of a major voting rights campaign in 1964-65. Selma is best known for "Bloody Sunday" when marchers crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge heading out of Selma and were met by a wall of state troopers and local police who beat them back...
Civil Rights Tour – The Struggle that Has Been and Continues
The last Two days (Sunday and Monday) have been spent largely in Atlanta and then Albany, GA. In Atlanta we had the opportunity to visit the ML King Center and the hear Juanita Abernathy (Ralph Abernathy's widow) share her reflections on the Civil Rights battles in...