Why Voters Should Approve the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative

Along with Ralph Ellison, Robert Hayden achieved the deepest insight into what it means to be a human being, an American, a citizen of Michigan, an understanding that still rings true today, decades after his passing. I can’t believe for a single moment that Robert Hayden would ever have approved of what racial preferences have become, a coercive, deceptive, corrupt, separatist system of discrimination, opposed to the hardwon academic excellence of young people, supposedly for a higher good, while lowering intellectual standards to justify injustice.

Robert Hayden. 1913-1980. Born and raised in Paradise Valley, Detroit
Professor at Fisk University, University of Michigan
Consultant in Poetry to The Library of Congress, 1976-1977

EXCERPT FROM “Words in the Mourning Time”

“We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.

Reclaim now, now renew the vision of
a human world where godliness
is possible and man
is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kike

but man

permitted to be man.”

FROM Robert Earl Hayden’s Collected Poems. Edited by Frederick Glaysher. New York: Liveright, 1985.

Frederick Glaysher
Why Voters Should Approve the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative MCRI
http://www.fglaysher.com/MCRI/

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 6:08 am and is filed under Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.