Visual history: We are living in a time when, if we do not look back, we cannot move forward

History teaches -- if we are willing to listen.

The few, brief words delivered by a beleaguered president on a January day in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863 were almost inaudible according to those who were there. And to at least one half a split nation they fell on deaf ears anyway.

Abraham Lincoln's words now echo in our ears as we Americans insist on our liberties and all but take for granted the rights and protections we have today that once cost thousands of our ancestors, Northerners and Southerners, Yankees and Rebels, in blue jackets and gray jackets and sometimes without uniforms, their lives, limbs, families, friends, lands and other unspeakable sacrifices.

But over time and through much strife, the principles of the Emancipation Proclamation were enacted, and from the bonds of slavery this nation slipped free, rubbed its raw wrists and ankles, and blinked out into uncertainty and wondered, "What now?"

It is a question we still, unfortunately, have to ask ourselves. The strides forward and steps backward we have taken toward and away from true liberty in promise and in practice have been well documented. Although not all of us have been exposed to the documentation. Having relied on parsed-down historical accounts crammed into U.S. history books to learn about our roots as a nation has left us a largely uninformed bunch all these years removed from the real-life and despicable conditions of slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and even the not-so-distant civil rights era.

Old black and white photos and grainy documentary film footage of dogs and water cannons being unleashed on our fellow citizens once felt -- to those who hadn't lived it -- almost impossible to conceptualize as live, in color and tangible events going on in the world around us.

In recent years, at least at certain times, however, it has seemed we are reliving one of those darker chapters of our past and recording it all the while for future generations to look at in disbelief and wonder.

But the facts -- not the passed down biases or geographically and politically imposed barriers to the true story of how and why and when these pockets of imbalance and unrest came to be -- are the only testament to how repeating that sad history can be avoided.

That is why the traveling exhibition coming to Wayne Country Day School next month is so important.

"Emancipation and its Legacies," we are told, traces the roots of the Civil War up through the battles, into Emancipation and beyond, right up until the civil rights movement of the mid-1960s.

These visual lessons need to be in our schools to lend our most impressionable minds perspective to some of what they are seeing unfold today on television and in the newspapers and sometimes in their own communities.

If we have made any progress as a nation, it has been generationally, forged incrementally by each new group of young fresh minds willing to test boundaries, push back against accepted norms and to understand what came before only endured through inaction and willful ignorance.

A changed mind must first be informed. And history teaches us, when we are willing to listen.

Published in Editorials on December 28, 2017 10:00 PM