"Now, it may not have come under his observation . . ."

Fresh from our Easter weekend with a solemn then joyous sunrise service observing death and resurrection, I came across this reference to a site, Neglected Voices created and maintained by Professor Peggy Cooper Davis of the New York University School of Law, that has collected the biographies and some of the speeches of sixteen African Americans serving in Congress during Reconstruction. I draw attention to this site for a couple of reasons. There is of course just the seasonality - we are at the start of spring, the time of renewal and resurrection. Faulty as it was and as many missteps as were taken, that decade after the Civil War was similarly an era in which we as a country attempted to restart our national effort to hold ourselves true to the fundamental principles gifted to us from the Age of Enlightenment.

More pertinently, while our focus at Through the Magic Door is on creating an environment where children will develop the love of and habit of enthusiastic reading, we also seek to bring attention to overlooked stories and tales from years gone by that are likely to grab children's attention. While these speeches were not intended as speeches to children, they are fresh and accessible to them and touch on issues that are very real in a way that sometimes seems to get lost in text books.

Another reason for drawing attention to these gentlemen and their speeches is continuity of issues over the years and generations. Seven score years and six generations along, Richard Cain's (Republican Representative from South Carolina 1873-75 and 1877-79) words are eerily contemporary.

Spare us our liberties; give us peace; give us a chance to live; give us an honest chance in the race of life; place no obstruction in our way; oppress us not; give us an equal chance; and we ask no more of the American people.

Representative Cain sounds as if he would be right at home at any Tea Party rally.

Yet a further reason is the articulateness of the speeches, at least those that I have read - there are many available at the site. The clarity of thought, logic, and argument would put the overwhelming majority of the members of the current Congress to shame.

Then there are the nitty-gritty realities that so often and easily get air-brushed from history. Here is Richard Cain again, this time in a speech in support of the Civil Rights Bill of 1875 contesting a point raised by one of the other legislators:

Sir, the gentleman states that in the State of North Carolina the colored people enjoy all their rights as far as the highways are concerned; that in the hotels, and in the railroad cars, and in the various public places of resort, they have all the rights and all the immunities accorded to any other class of citizens of the United States. Now, it may not have come under his observation, but it has under mine, that such really is not the case; and the reason why I know and feel it more than he does is because my face is painted black and his is painted white. We who have the color--I may say the objectionable color--know and feel all this. A few days ago, in passing from South Carolina to this city, I entered a place of public resort where hungry men are fed, but I did no dare--I could not without trouble--sit down to the table. I could not sit down at Wilmington or at Weldon without entering into a contest, which I did not desire to do. My colleague, the gentleman who so eloquently spoke on this subject the other day, [Mr. ELLIOTT,] a few months ago entered a restaurant at Wilmington and sat down to be served, and while there a gentleman stepped up to him and said, "You cannot eat here." All the other gentlemen upon the railroad as passengers were eating there; he had only twenty minutes, and was compelled to leave the restaurant or have a fight for it. He showed fight, however, and got his dinner; but he has never been back there since. Coming here last week I felt we did not desire to draw revolvers and present the bold front of warriors, and therefore we ordered our dinners to be brought into the cars, but even there we found the existence of this feeling; for, although we had paid a dollar a piece for our meals, to be brought by the servants into the cars, still there was objection on the part of the railroad people to our eating our meals in the cars, because they said we were putting on airs. They refused us in the restaurant, and then did not desire that we should eat our meals in the cars, although we paid for them. Yet this was in the noble State of North Carolina.

And then there are the complexities. We want out history to be clean and clear and it is not. The entry for Robert C. DeLarge describes him as "Born in Aiken, South Carolina, the son of a slave-holding free black tailor and a mother of Haitian ancestry." It is so easy to overlook how different the world was.

Finally, there is the simple power of their words. They told stories and made arguments that still ring clear and true today. There is a concreteness to their experiences and the tales they tell that too easily goes missing in dry history texts. These speeches, and the issues they raise and seek to address, are easily accessible to a middle schooler.

These men lived in momentous times, sometimes did momentous things and sometimes were all too frail and human in their weaknesses. But looking at their brief biographies and reading their words, it is hard not to connect with them these many years later.