Our Native American sisters say that the foolish Anglos think the world is made up of billions and billions of atoms, but they know better. They say, the world is really made up of billions and billions of stories... So, here is a place for ours.

Between (roughly) 1958 and 1968, the City of Cincinnati was incubator, proving ground, and center stage for a remarkable array of leaders, strategies and actions in the interest and service of social justice in America. While the main drama during that period was, of course, the civil rights movement and its unprecedented struggle for racial justice in Cincinnati, in the State of Ohio, and across the country, this thrust necessarily intersected concurrent efforts on behalf of peace, organized labor, alleviating poverty, and nourishing a community in which all persons both extend and enjoy compassion, respect, opportunity, and fairness.

This was an important decade for both Cincinnati and the nation. Yet it is a period that has been virtually "dropped" from our collective memory, with the exception of a handful of events and personalities kept alive by the popular media less to honor and understand and learn from them than to mark reference points for somebody else's story. Those times, however, have remained alive and compelling in the minds and hearts of those who made them, experienced them, grew up in them, and grew wiser from them.

We are beginning to find each other again, and that has resulted in beginning to share our stories, to bring our individual bits and pieces of this history together in both artifacts and remembrance, through which, eventually, our collective Story will emerge. Most of us feel this is worth doing. This site is where we will do it. -

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Fellowship House
CORE
NAACP
Women's Strike for Peace
Avondale Community Council
Community Church of Cincinnati
Cincinnati Friends Meeting
AFL-CIO Labor Council
Cincinnati Reform Party
 

--DLouis Jan/00