TPM Reader GR’s tale …
We were at the Mall yesterday but our son was getting cold and shivering so we had decided to give up and go home. As we left the Mall walking up 18th Street we saw that DAR Constitution Hall was open, with a huge screen on stage (and two smaller screens on each side)–a warm place to sit, with real bathrooms.
As we sat among a mostly African-American crowd watching Aretha Franklin begin, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”, an 80-year circle came together–Marion Anderson singing that song at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, after not being allowed to perform in the very hall were were sitting in–Martin Luther King, Jr., on the same Memorial steps, speaking the lyrics of that song and calling for freedom to ring from Stone Mountain in Georgia and Lookout Mountain in Tennessee–and now the daughter of Martin’s friend C.L. Franklin singing, at the other end of the Mall, “from every mountainside, let freedom ring”, just before Barack Hussein Obama was to become President of the United States of America. It was incredible.
