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April 18 - May 6, 2025
because, of course, one’s appearance was of great importance in such trying times.
(There’s no question that Bert from Sesame Street would be proud of the U.S. Pigeon Intelligence Service.)
justice and freedom—suffrage—was not granted, it was seized. Suffrage was not a gift bestowed, delivered in a basket on a doorstep. Suffrage was the hard-won harvest of seventy years of toil.
Penn started calling the area—he hadn’t even been there yet—“Sylvania,” which means “forest” in Latin, and King Charles II added the Penn in front of it, which is how we got the name Pennsylvania.
He described this new utopian community in Pennsylvania, where everyone would be free to practice their religion as they saw fit, and no one was going to be imprisoned in a tower for not taking off their hat. The promise of this freedom appealed to many Quaker families and also to religious minorities like the Amish and Mennonites in Germany.
the Quaker belief about the Divine Immanence, sometimes called an Inner Light, a Divine Spark, or the Light of Christ, puts all humans on equal footing—people of all colors, races, and genders.
that Black men be among the primary determiners of how the money that was to benefit their community be used.
They were having discussions about how to help educate the children and grandchildren of formerly enslaved people, but they were not advocating for full racial equality in public life.
The system continued to uphold white supremacy AND they thought this was the path toward changing that. From their perspective, what was the alternative? Should they not educate these children?
How could they raise a generation of children to help change the system if the children couldn’t read because their parents couldn’t read?
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]
Booker spoke of how any inferiority of Blacks was not intrinsic but came from the fact that they had been enslaved for two hundred fifty years and had no education.
And so while the schools were not equal or integrated, many of the leaders of the civil rights movement were educated in Rosenwald schools. Without their ability to become educated, integration and equality under the law would not have occurred.
He came by his money by chance, by virtue of proximity, and the least he could do, he believed, was use it to improve the condition of another.
“You fools!” his father screamed at the planes. “FOOLS!”[14] The singular pain of the country of his ancestry attacking the country of his heart twisted his face.
Why? Fear is the simple and all-encompassing answer.
FDR initially called them concentration camps, because that’s what they were doing—concentrating people into one confined place.[24] But as word of the German concentration camps spread, the U.S. government stopped using the term publicly.
“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.
It wasn’t removing people for their own safety, it was imprisoning them so that white people would be less afraid.
their lives and livelihoods forever disrupted by the stroke of a president’s pen.
Eighty percent of eligible Japanese Americans volunteered for military service.
Dan saw the name Thomas Jefferson Smith, and realized the blood he was receiving came not from the men of the 442nd, but from the all-Black 92nd, serving nearby.
he thought that the Republicans wanted to protect property—what we have—but the Democrats wanted to protect people—who we are.[12]
Does our Constitution indeed protect all of us, regardless of race or culture?
I didn’t want people in there serving the Republican Party, I wanted people in there serving their country.
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.
She was done pretending all of this—picture Claudette sweeping her arm toward society at large—was fine. Because it wasn’t fine,
Mexicans called it Flower of the Holy Night, but when Poinsett brought it to South Carolina, it became known as the poinsettia.[2]
What was the point of carrying on, if carrying on meant leaving her baby girl behind?
Education wasn’t only liberation, she came to realize; education was self-sufficiency.
Then, and now, one of the most effective ways to stop cultural change is to create a moral panic around it.
government officials and historians tap-danced as fast as they could to distance the United States from the Nazis, downplaying exactly how much inspiration the United States’ racial segregation laws provided to the Third Reich.
In other words, the Nazis looked to our racial discrimination policies and liked what they saw.
It’s not that Oliver Brown didn’t think Linda could learn at the all-Black school; it’s that he didn’t think she should have to.
Warren’s version of good government was one that was efficient, transparent, and nonpartisan.
“We unanimously believe that it does,” Warren answered.[8]
School integration was an affront to their religious and moral beliefs. For centuries, many white Christians believed that God made the races different, and that it was only natural that some should be subservient to others.
Listen, y’all don’t need to write to me saying, “That’s not true Christianity.” I’m not asking you to believe it is. But these were not fringe beliefs in many of the evangelical churches in the South. This was how most white Christians at that time and in that place interpreted the scriptures. It was what they heard from their pulpits, and what they wanted taught in schools. White supremacy and white Christian identity are inextricably linked in American history.
One lawyer, exasperated, basically asked school officials, “Well, what do you think would be a reasonable timeframe?” The other lawyers came back with: “2020.” This was in 1955. 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.
what they represented was so hated that the president had to send a thousand soldiers to their school to quell the violence.
calling the segregationists “demagogic extremists.”
Closing school for everyone was better than sharing the white schools with Black children, he reasoned.
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).
It wasn’t that she was tired from Christmas shopping or a long day at work. It was decades of organizing, of investigating rapes, of baking cookies to sell for someone’s legal defense. It was witnessing violence against people she knew and loved, it was a lifetime of feeling threatened and humiliated.
America at her best is just. She is peaceful. She is good. And she is free. And it is us, the small and the mighty, who make America great.
