Now I want to entice you to read my sometime-soon-to-be-published book that I’ve been working on ever since I retired ten years ago.
Something important was about to happen. You could feel it in the air and I was right in the middle of the 1968 political bonfire. I taught summer school to Latino and Black youth. Mayor Daley’s Peace Corps program was intended to provide the tools of empowerment to this group of inner-city kids through learning about the political system and the way to effect peaceful change. Chicago would host the Democratic National Convention and summer became politically heated. It was the Corp’s young teachers and pastors’ turn for learning about empowerment and political discontent. Trying to make peace and justice work in tandem was adventurous and risky and many of the careful strategies never worked out as planned. The business of the sixties is still unfinished, but our legacy, “How to protest war” and “How to do peace,” remains a good foundation for the co-existence of peace and justice. We were just regular young people, but we heralded change by creating new paths toward equality in race relationships and doing peacemaking throughout the world.