The issue, perhaps, boils down to one of how perceptions or misperceptions of racial difference impact various 'individuals', or groups of 'individuals', experience of freedom in America. Some would argue that it goes beyond hampering their "pursuit of happiness" to outright obliterating it.

As history has demonstrated many times over, change may arrive slowly or quickly but it is the one constant, in one form or another, on which we can all count.

Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.

Like a Passover Poet gliding from house to house and from trembling soul to trembling soul the wind scribbled sonnets of first time love and weeping haikus of last hours on earth.

On faith’s battered back calm eyes etch prayers that cool a nation’s hot rage.

The Emancipation Proclamation...can remind us in 2013 of all the mistakes we never want to commit again but it can also motivate us to fulfill to an ever greater degree the definitive freedom-sustaining and life-enhancing principles of democracy in living action.

Upon the lips of babes asleep I saw light embracing light and so allowed my syllables to rest there as a prayer they might sing in their dreams.