What emerges from Time’s unique project is a remarkable portrait of a more diverse, but still vastly unequal, America in the 21st century. It reveals a country riven by deep divisions, yet at the same alive with a resilient spirit of hope, embodied in the efforts of a multitude of communities and individuals determined to make real “the ideal of equality on which the nation was founded.”
And featured prominently among that multitude is the movement of which we all are a part — the fight for Fair Food. The inclusion of the CIW’s Fair Food Program in the feature article “People and Groups Fighting for a More Equal America” is both deeply humbling and invigorating, but most of all it is timely, coming as it does on the eve of next month’s massive mobilization in New York. For three days next month, some of this country’s poorest, least powerful workers will leave the fields of rural Florida to march in the streets of lower Manhattan — in the heart of the financial capital of the world — calling on some of this country’s richest, most powerful people to join them in making this world just a little more equal. Theirs is a humble, yet profound, demand.
The roots of the Fair Food Movement run deep, through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, as the Time article rightly asserts. But they don’t stop there. Its roots run deeper still, through the decades of daily struggle by unknown millions for dignity and survival against the nightmare of Jim Crow, through the aborted advances of Reconstruction, through the valiant battles of the Abolitionists, down to the very promise that “all men are created equal… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
That same promise of universal human rights that animated Dr. King sixty years ago animates those who will be marching next month in New York. And Time Magazine’s special edition, Equality Now, is a timely reminder of that timeless struggle.
In announcing the release of the special issue, Edward Felsenthal of Time wrote, “Our hope is that it will not only change the way we see history, but also help awaken in all of us an understanding of the power of our own voice to have a positive impact on the world.” Join us in New York next month and feel the power of your voice in the growing chorus calling for long-overdue farm labor justice.
Dr. King: “Miles of progress left to be covered”…
In announcing the release of the special issue, the editors of Time wrote:...
