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March 23 - March 28, 2025
The best Americans are not the critics, they are the doers. They are the people who went for broke when everyone else yelled to turn back. They are those who know that one becomes great because of who they lift up, not who they put down. I have learned that no one reaches their final moments of mortal existence and whispers to their loved ones, “I wish I had gotten in some more sick burns in the comments section on Facebook.”
This promise is now a hallmark of any democracy—the protections of civil liberties under the law, and a limiting of the power of the government so people are shielded from an overreaching and authoritarian regime—something Gouverneur Morris said Hamilton feared until the very end.
America has been just, and it has perpetuated injustice. We have been peaceful, and we have perpetrated acts of violence. We have been—and are—good. And we have done terrible things to people who didn’t deserve them. It has been the land of the free while simultaneously sanctioning oppression. Such is often the experience of any government run by fallible human beings.
Sometimes we surprise ourselves in our capacity for greatness, and sometimes the weight of regret wraps around us like a chain.
Revere wasn’t even the only one who rode a horse to warn troops in the distance that the British were coming. A teenage girl did it, too, and she rode twice as far, in the rain. She got a personal thanks from George Washington.
But quiet lives can sometimes leave the loudest echoes.
Anna’s bequest was one of the first times that a northern philanthropist insisted that the board of governors of a fund be of mixed race, and that Black men be among the primary determiners of how the money that was to benefit their community be used. Anna believed that people could decide for themselves what their community needed, and that people of all races should have equal seats at the table.
But another, influenced by hate and prejudice, tried to make it seem like the Jeanes teacher had done something egregious. They asked, “What did you do, get into in an argument on that bus with a white woman?” In recounting her story, the teacher said, “The real lesson to be learned is that beneath the surface of remarks similar to those made by the second person lurks a psychosis capable of building or destroying a nation.”[18]
Hope, which attorney and author Bryan Stevenson told me is not a feeling but an orientation of the spirit. Hope is a choice that we make each morning, and we do not have the luxury of hopelessness if we want to see progress.
Over the next nearly two decades, Julius Rosenwald, in partnership with the Tuskegee Institute and thousands of Black communities, built nearly five thousand schools in the United States. Five thousand schools. And not just schools: Houses for teachers. Buses for students. Gymnasiums. Cafeterias. Libraries.
A man once asked JR, “Why are you doing so much to help the Negro?” “I am interested in America,” he said. “I do not see how America can go ahead if part of its people are left behind.”[23]
another address, JR said, “We whites of America must begin to realize that Booker T. Washington was right when he said it was impossible to hold a man in the gutter without staying there with him, because if you get up, he will get up. We do not want to remain in the gutter. We, therefore, must help the Negro to rise.”[24]
Schools were de facto segregated in Hawaii. In 1853, 97 percent of Hawaii’s population was native. By 1923, only 16 percent of Hawaii was native, with massive influxes of foreign laborers brought from Japan, China, the Philippines, Portugal, and Korea.[6]
Technically, the public schools were open to all and weren’t segregated by race, but instead, children were weeded out by language. These “English Standard” schools had admissions requirements, and children were expected to speak near-perfect English in order to attend.[7]
Maybe you’ve heard them called internment camps, but FDR initially called them concentration camps, because that’s what they were doing—concentrating people into one confined place.[24]
If they were being forced to stay here for their own protection, as they were told, why were the guns pointed at them?
Most other Japanese families didn’t have the same good fortune, their lives and livelihoods forever disrupted by the stroke of a president’s pen.
Finally, in March 1943, President Roosevelt agreed to form a segregated military unit of Nisei. Eighty percent of eligible Japanese Americans volunteered for military service.
He ignored the advice of people who said he’d never get elected as a Democrat and insisted that the reason he wanted to be a Democrat was that he thought that the Republicans wanted to protect property—what we have—but the Democrats wanted to protect people—who we are.[12]
He thought back to that moment, at age ten, when his baseball bat and puppy were taken from him and his family was imprisoned without due process because of the sound of their name and the appearance of their faces. He refused to do that to anyone else. So he sent a letter to all U.S. airlines saying they were forbidden from using racial profiling or subjecting Muslim or Middle Eastern passengers to extra scrutiny. He said it was the “right and constitutional thing” based on his own experience as someone who had lost the most basic human rights during his childhood incarceration.
Biden said, “I’m here to tell you that his physical courage was matched by his moral courage. I don’t know of anybody else I can say that of. He was, in my thirty-six years in the Senate, more trusted by his colleagues than any man or woman I ever served with. No one ever doubted that Danny Inouye had such integrity at his core that he would meet any obligation thrust upon him with absolute steadiness and objectivity. With the exception of my father, there are few people I have ever looked at and said, ‘I wish I could be more like that man.’
Obama said, “For him, freedom and dignity were not abstractions. They were values that he had bled for. Ideas he had sacrificed for. He taught so many of us, including a young boy growing up in Hawaii, that America has a place for all of us. May God bless Daniel Inouye. And may God grant us more souls like his.”[21]
In a letter dated the day of his death, Inouye wrote to the governor of Hawaii, saying, “People have asked me how I want to be remembered and I say very simply that I represented the people honestly and to the best of my abilities. I think I did okay.” His last word was “Aloha.”[24]
What will history remember with kindness? The leader with the most cunning tweets? The one with the most self-aggrandizing speeches and the biggest audiences? No, it’s not the cynics who emerge the heroes, but the people who spent their lives in service to others. It’s those that fight for justice for someone whose reflection they don’t see in the mirror.
“History kept me stuck to my seat,” she recalled. “I felt the hand of Harriet Tubman pushing down on one shoulder, and Sojourner Truth pushing down on the other.”[1] In this moment, getting up felt like giving up. And Claudette? She was done with that.
According to historian Katherine Mellon Charron, South Carolina schools, on average, spent $48.59 per year educating a white student and $.95 educating a Black student. Only 5 percent of Black South Carolinians entered high school, and even though there were eighteen thousand more Black students than white, schools that served Black students made up only 9 percent of school properties.[4]
Then, and now, one of the most effective ways to stop cultural change is to create a moral panic around it. Moral panics have been around since this country’s inception, with the Salem witch trials being among the first widely publicized (and deadly) panics.
In other words, the Nazis looked to our racial discrimination policies and liked what they saw.
White supremacy and white Christian identity are inextricably linked in American history. Facts don’t require our personal approval for them to be facts.
Segregationists proposed integrating schools in 2020. That’s what with all deliberate speed meant to them.
These were ordinary white Arkansans whose vitriol was such that they were suggesting that a child seeking an education deserved to be lynched.
So, just to make it crystal clear: the president of the United States, a man in charge of the entire U.S. invasion at Normandy, realized that some Americans, including members of the military, had such an intense commitment to white supremacy they were likely to disobey his lawful, direct order. Just like they had been disobeying the orders of federal courts. Orders to allow Black children to receive the same education as their white peers.
