Stories of resistance must be told to our children, and our lives must reflect them. We must oppose what is wrong in the world and offer our children reasons to resist coupled with true examples of men and women of the past who struggled against the injustices of their respective times and places, even to the point of paying the ultimate price for their beliefs gaining the martyr's death. For Americans in particular, the stories of men and women such as Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King in our own time, and Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Ida B. Wells of the not too distant past, should be well-known to our young and old.We must tell their stories so that their lives and their struggles were not in vain and so that their courageous efforts and the principles they lived and died for are not reduced to a baseball cap, a tee-shirt, or a commercial to sell more computers in a "Think Different" ad campaign. We must teach our children that there are truths worth living for but also worth dying for, and the stories we tell them must be lifelong antidotes for the cynicism and complacency of those who gave up long ago only to live out their lives in quiet, or not so quiet, despair and desperation.
-pg. 31 of "Stories That Harm; Stories That Heal" by Hamza Yusuf Hanson in Forgotten Roots
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