I asked Mr. Lewis how he felt then, four and half decades after being bludgeoned by state troopers. He replied with one word: “Grateful.”

He was the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists, a group led by Martin Luther King Jr. that had the greatest impact on the movement.

“Religious orders rarely look at their own participation in a racist culture.”

Flannery O’Connor was, like many people of her time, “a walking contradiction when it came to matters of race.” 

Structural racism must be addressed as a collective, not only an individual, responsibility. A new project at Boston College tackles this challenge. Its inaugural director, Vincent Rougeau, explains.

Today all white Christians need to fix our gaze on the suffering Christ in the wounds of our Black brothers and sisters.