The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History

by Sharon McMahon

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

The text of the Preamble imagined America at its finest: Just. Peaceful. Good. And free.

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.

Sumner believed allowing for popular sovereignty was the recipe for allowing new states and territories to morph into “a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”[7]

But other thinkers at the time, like W. E. B. Du Bois, vehemently disagreed. They criticized Booker T. Washington for accommodating white supremacy, for begging for money from robber barons, for refusing to fight for civil rights, and for sacrificing true equality on the altar of industrial education and job opportunities.

We revolt against the slavery in which women are held by the customs of society—the broken health, the aimless lives, the subordinate position, the helpless dependence, the dishonesties and shams of so-called education. The Higher Education of Women is one of the great world battle-cries for freedom; for right against might.”[16]

She was both jealous and suspicious of people who trusted what they were taught about God.

Being at the forefront of progress has always come with a certain amount of fear—you’re asking people to abandon comfort for the sake of growth.

Why not do the unheard-of thing? Why not do what no one else is doing? Why not leave behind the old ways that are no longer serving?

Humans aren’t so much afraid of failure as they are of having people watch them fail.

Progress is usually born out of struggle. But struggle doesn’t always mean progress, does it? What do we need to add to struggle to create progress? The answer is hope. 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.

None of us can do it all. But all of us can do something. And it might as well be the next needed thing.

“Internment” is what happens to citizens of the enemy you are fighting. But the majority of people who were sent to the camps were citizens of the United States by birth. They, by definition, could not be interned. They were imprisoned. Incarcerated without due process. While you may still hear people call them internment camps, every person I have interviewed prefers incarceration or concentration camp, because the term more accurately describes what was happening.

one of the most effective ways to stop cultural change is to create a moral panic around it.

“You know the measure of a person is how much they develop in their life,” she said. “Some people slow down in their growth after they become adults. But you never know when a person’s going to leap forward or change around completely—I’ve seen growth like most people don’t think possible. I can even work with my enemies because I know from experience that they might have a change of heart any minute.”[19]

some states engaged in a movement they deemed “Massive Resistance.” They started by passing state laws that penalized schools that integrated, removed their funding, and closed public schools that dared a desegregation attempt. Some states gave out private school tuition vouchers so white parents who opposed integration could send their child to a private religious school. They established “pupil placement boards” that had the power to force students to attend the school the board decided upon. And they were just getting started.

You’d be mistaken if you thought these facts were never going to see the light of day again, swept under the rug of today’s moral panic, the moral panic of learning about the real, true, beautiful, infuriating, horrific, meaningful history of the United States and calling it by some other boogeyman name like Critical Race Theory (it’s not) or labeling it a divisive concept (it’s only divisive if lies and cover-ups benefit you in some way).