In Roquemaure, France at the end of 1843, the church organ had recently been renovated. To celebrate the event, the parish priest persuaded poet Placide Cappeau, a native of the town, to write a Christmas poem. Soon afterwards that same year, Adolphe Adam composed the music. The song was premiered in Roquemaure in 1847 by the opera singer Emily Laurey. Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight, editor of Dwight's Journal of Music, wrote the English version in 1855. This version became popular in the United States, especially in the North, where the third verse resonated with abolitionists, including Dwight himself. The words of the third verse are Truly He taught us to love one another. His law is Love and His gospel is Peace; Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother and in his name all oppression shall cease, Sweet hymns of joy in grateful Chorus raise we; Let all within us praise his Holy name! The wide vocal range of the song makes it one of the more difficult Christmas songs to execute properly, especially for untrained amateurs.
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." As the Union armies advanced through the Confederacy, thousands of slaves were freed each day until nearly all (approximately 3.9 million, according to the 1860 Census) were freed by July 1865. Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, was assassinated by well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, while attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C The assassination occurred only days after the surrender at Appomattox Court House of Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia to Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, which had signalled the effective end of the American Civil War. Lincoln’s death plunged much of the country into despair, and the search for Booth and his accomplices was the largest manhunt in American history to that date.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an African American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the American civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King advanced civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi. He was the son of early civil rights activist Martin Luther King Sr. There are still cases that prove that there is a black problem in this country with many black woman afraid to go out onto the streets at night. There is a culture in America with so many people carrying weapons of shooting first. This was exemplified by a black woman whose car broke down and she knocked on the door of a house to ask for help. The door opened and the householder shot her at point blank range.
White policemen tend to shoot first and treat black people as targets. In July 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement began after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African American teen Trayvon Martin. 17 months earlier in February 2012. The movement became nationally recognized for street demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of two African Americans, that of Michael Brown—resulting in protests and unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, a city near St. Louis—and Eric Garner in New York City.George Perry Floyd Jr. was an African American man murdered by police during an arrest after a store clerk suspected he may have used a counterfeit $20 bill in Minneapolis. Derek Chauvin, one of four police officers who arrived on the scene, knelt on Floyd's neck and back for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. After his death, protests against police brutality, especially towards black people, quickly spread across the United States and globally. As he was dying, he said "I can't breathe" which was used as a rallying cry during subsequent protests. Changes are slow in coming as the right wing in American politics resists any differences to their supremacy.
Friday, 28th May 2021
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