Following Tuesday's mass shooting at a Texas elementary school, which left 19 students and two teachers dead, many religious people are searching for answers and deeper meaning in heartbreak.
it seems to me. and i have to believe that we can. yeah. sometimes, those fairy tales, those sometimes, those things that we talk about, as a country, eddie, moving toward a more perfect union, that we hold these truths to be self-evident. that all are created equal. written by a slaveholder. those words, those aspirations, used by people like frederick douglass, to martin luther king. to barack obama. to other leaders who have moved us along. and i m just wondering, when you look at this, i m wondering do you look at something much like the bombing of the 16th street baptist church that actually shook people out of this
lethargy. shook people that martin luther king jr. called the moderates that shook people because people were awakened from their sleep. yeah, we tell the story of the 16th street baptist, we don t tell the story that birmingham exploded after that. that there was in fact a riot, quote-unquote. black folks anger spilled over at that moment but you have to go through the fire in order to get to the other side. oftentimes, joe, part of the difficulty is we don t want to grapple with the intimacy of our hatreds, right. folks knew this boy, just like the folks knew the people who tied the rope around emmett
americans at a supermarket in buffalo. i m not really seeing any sort of positive reaction against that hatred. what i m seeing are republican leaders and talk show hosts on other networks actually dive into it even deeper. where are we as a nation? you know, i think it s fascinating to me you d use the civil rights movement as an example. i was thinking all weekend you know, i wasn t around in 1961 when there were pictures of the freedom riders bus. went around the world. they d been firebombed. i wasn t around for the death of the four young women at the 16th street baptist church. the murder of the civil rights workers in philadelphia and mississippi. but all these images we look back on and we think, how could
chief white house correspondent for the white house peter baker. at vanderbilt university, jon meacham. jon, in the past, we ve had tragedies. oklahoma city, of course. the 16th street baptist church bombings. there was a revulsion by american citizenry. tha reaction to it, the tragedy of the 16th street baptist church, those bombings actually helped drive the civil rights movement forward. it woke up a lot of, as martin luther king would call them, moderate white americans. i m curious, it seems we have one shooting after another, whether it s the targeting of jews at a synagogue in pittsburgh, the targeting of hispanics at a walmart in el paso, the targeting of black