Who Is "We"?

In a recent column Leonard Pitts noted Glenn Beck's statement that "this is a moment that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement. . . . We will take that movement, because we were the people that did it in the first place!" Pitts continued, "Beck was part of the 'we' who founded the civil rights movement!? No. Here's who 'we' is.""

"'We' is Emmett Till, tied to a cotton gin fan in the murky waters of the Tallahatchie River. 'We' is Rosa Parks telling the bus driver no. 'We' is Dianne Nash on a sleepless night waiting for missing Freedom Riders to check in. 'We' is Charles Sherrod, husband of Shirley, gingerly testing desegregation compliance in an Albany, Ga., bus station. 'We' is a sharecropper making his X on a form held by a white college student from the North. 'We' is celebrities like Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando and Pernell Roberts of Bonanza, lending their names, their wealth and their labor to the cause of freedom."