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

by Sharon McMahon

Unlike Jackson, Morris was vocally against slavery, and perhaps he would have used his considerable means to financially support his son’s quest to start a new political party.

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.

So no, America is not “the worst it’s ever been” today, despite what some news anchors might be trying to convince you of, because if they can make you afraid, they can gain your attention and your money. Has anyone been beaten half to death on the floor of the Senate over the topic of whether it’s cool to enslave people this week? No? Okay.

manumission.

Pledge of Allegiance was written especially for the fair, recited by children around a flagpole, designed to be adopted by schools nationwide to promote what some would call patriotism, and others would call a reflection of xenophobia.[2] Francis Bellamy, the author, said he was concerned about all the new immigrants pledging loyalty to their own countries of origin, and this was meant to remind them that they owed their loyalty to America only.

“To have put the expression of the highest and deepest patriotism into the mouths of a hundred million Americans is a monument so noble and enduring that it seems as if no poet could possibly ask or expect anything more complete.”[20]

Inez was a new kind of woman. Audacious. Sure of herself. Intelligent. Under her 1909 Vassar yearbook picture were the words: “Fascinating—but a trifle dangerous for household use.”[2]

most glorious meeting? My favorite line from “Sister Suffragette”—perhaps one of the greatest lyrics written by the Sherman brothers and delivered perfectly by Glynis Johns—is, Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group, they’re rather stuuuuuuupid. The look on Johns’s face, with her huge doe eyes and her stilted vibrato, is priceless.

And though women like Milholland, Catt, and Paul did much for the cause of women’s suffrage, that advocacy didn’t extend to Black women, who were often intentionally excluded from the movement. One reason why so many people, particularly southern Democrats, opposed suffrage for women is because they knew it would give Black women the right to vote, and that, they just couldn’t abide. Giving them the right to vote would upset the entire power dynamic that the United States was founded upon, and the rock upon which it still rested: the supremacy of white men. Many white women went along with it: suffrage was so important to them that they were willing to leave Black women behind in order to gain the right to vote for themselves. Because they knew that a huge part of the country’s opposition to their suffrage was opposition to Black women being enfranchised, white women were often willing to not just look the other way but to intentionally exclude Black women for the purposes of appeasing white men.

The women did not try to conceal their identities, didn’t come armed, didn’t break any glass or invade any private offices. They weren’t there to kidnap members of Congress; no faux gallows waited outside the building. They came peacefully, stayed in the section designated for visitors, and left peacefully, confident that they had made their point.

But quiet lives can sometimes leave the loudest echoes.

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.