CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

November 30, 2012_CHANGING HISTORY

November 30, 2012: If you could have personally witnessed one event in history, what would you want to have seen?





I would like to return to April 14, 1865, to Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. , to earlier in the day than the performance put on that evening.





No, I don’t wish to witness Lincoln’s assassination; I would like to be the kind of time traveler who ignores the “grandfather paradox” and changes history, by preventing the assassination from occurring.





As far as I am concerned, Abraham Lincoln was America’s greatest president, and I think much of the ugliness of Reconstruction, the horrors during the backlash of the Civil Rights Movement, the decades upon decades of lynchings and murders, could have been prevented if Mr. Lincoln had remained alive, and in office; and later, as an elder statesman advising later Presidents





As for an event I could only witness, but not alter: I wish I could have been present at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech. I believe that was unforgettable.