Affirmative action, which takes race into consideration in college admissions and other contexts, sounds unfair and unamerican. But having just finished a remarkable oral history (recorded in 1969) called “All God’s Dangers,” that recounts the story of an illiterate black tenant farmer in Alabama whose entire life was bedeviled and burdened by the Southern white power structure, I ask my fellow Americans: how do we right these historical wrongs?
Just walk away from the enduring legacy of racial apartheid in this county?
Ellen Sward
Vancouver
