Dear Editor:

There is an important aspect to Black history that we all can learn from, and it is more important now than ever. It is not just the tragic story of the systematic enslavement of people of color, but how they have resisted the authoritarian oppression they suffered and eventually triumphed with the passage of the civil rights legislation.

From Frederick Douglas, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and James Baldwin, we learn how to speak about authoritarian oppression.

From Ida B. Wells, one of the founders of the NAACP, we learn the value of documenting the abuses of power as her documentation of lynchings made more Americans aware of what back people endured in the Jim Crow South.

From Harriet Tubman we learn the importance of building resistance networks as she, along with William Still, were instrumental in creating the “underground railroad” that helped over 200,000 enslaved people escape to freedom. Mainers should be proud to know Maine played as a significant part of this and is now memorialized with the “Portland Freedom Trail.”

The Black Panther Party teaches us about building community and support networks, or as they put it, a “Survival Program” including a very successful free breakfast program feeding over 75,000 children a year that not only addressed the pervasive hunger in impoverished neighborhoods, it also provided education.

From civil rights leaders Philip Randolph and Bard Rustin we learn about the power of a labor strike and why the labor movement is so critical in its role of protecting democracy.

Other black luminaries whose courageous leadership that built the civil right movement are John Lewis, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, James Farmer, of the Congress on Racial Equality and Whitney Young, of the National Urban League. These were Key institutions promoting civil rights in the 1960s.

For their efforts they were labeled as seditious, unpatriotic, communist and Marxist, just as those who criticize the current regime are today. It took civil rights legislation to recognize that we are all Americans here.

The struggle of black people is the very same as our own struggle against the erosion of our rights and freedoms. We should study closely Black history because, under the current administration, their past is becoming our present.

Fred W. Nehring

Boothbay