With civil rights, more mountains left to climb

I am just back from the press opening of Freedom Sisters, a Cincinnati Museum Center exhibit that honors 20 African American women who made enormous contributions to the civil rights cause.

It was an inspiring morning with four of the women at the exhibit in person -- journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, long-time president of the National Council of Negro Women Dorothy Height, poet and educator Sonia Sanchez and former NAACP chairperson and widow of Medgar Evers, Myrlie Evers-Williams.

To a person, they described their own contributions with humility, shared their hopes that young people would be inspired by the exhibit and stressed that there is much work to be done. Hunter-Gault quoted a Haitian proverb to describe the scope of the work: Behind the mountains, more mountains.

Their wisdom and strength was inspiring -- with women like these in the fight, how could our nation not move toward more inclusion and equality?

But as I walked up from the lower-level display into Museum Center's rotunda -- literally crawling with students on field trips -- I was struck by how much isolation still exists. The students were settled at tables with their classmates and almost every table was filled entirely with students of one race. Clearly, very few of the schools represented at the center today had any racial diversity.