Waking life

摘要

In A corner of the immaculate lawn of Mt Nebo Missionary Baptist Church, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, lies a long tombstone adorned with fresh flowers. Nobody is buried there; the stone is a memorial to James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three young men who came to Neshoba County, of which Philadelphia is the seat, in the summer of 1964 to register black voters. On June 21st Klans-men allied with the county police stopped their car, shot all three at close range, and buried them under a dam. Ten months before his death, on August 28th 1963, Goodman, then a student at Queens College in his native New York, heard the state where he would die described by Martin Luther King as "sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression". He was one of hundreds of thousands who joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the greatest demonstration of America's civil-rights era, and heard King's "I have a dream" speech delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.