More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 16 - March 25, 2025
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. They bought more war bonds than any other group.[3] But they would only be allowed to serve in Europe—the Pacific theater was too great a security risk.
The young Nisei, thirty-three hundred of them, reported for duty, their oversize packs dwarfing their average five-foot-five stature. Their training in Mississippi had to be extra rigorous, because the Japanese American men would stand alone in battle, unsupported by other units. They would have their own equipment, their own mechanics, their own medics, all Japanese Americans. They, too, were forced to ride with the window shades drawn when they passed through towns, so as not to scare the white people who might be watching.
They scooped the garbage into sacks and bandanas, until Daniel, horrified, compelled them to stop. “You said we could,” the man said. “You promised. We work.” “No, no! Listen! I’ll get you food! Clean food! Put that garbage back.” The group gripped their sacks tightly to their chests. “Come back at six, and there will be food for you!”[6] From then on, a new rule was implemented: no man would take any food he didn’t fully intend to eat, and any food that wasn’t eaten—a piece of potato or a heel of bread—was set aside in clean containers and given to the starving Italians.
It was April 20, 1945. Word had just reached Dan’s unit that FDR had passed away, and the men took all of their feelings about America losing their commander in chief and channeled it into beating the enemy. They were going to move up in FDR’s honor, come hell or high water.
WHY would they defend the man who made their lives so difficult!?
While Dan recuperated in the hospital, he befriended another soldier who had been seriously injured, a man named Bob Dole, who would later go on to be a senator and the Republican nominee for president. The two became lifelong friends, bonded by the horrors of war. Both had dreamed of being doctors. Both lived out other dreams.
The 442nd, the all-Nisei military unit that had fought to be able to fight, became the most decorated military unit of its size in history. They had ten unit-wide citations and 3,915 individual citations. Seven hundred men from their unit died, and 3,600 more—men like Dan—were wounded in combat.[11]
Republicans wanted to protect property—what we have—but the Democrats wanted to protect people—who we are.[12]
Turns out, prejudice wasn’t eradicated when the Japanese surrendered at the end of the war. He joined his father’s insurance business, but Norm’s true love was politics. He built enough connections in San Jose to get appointed to the city council when a spot became available, and eventually Norm won election to the mayor’s office. His win became international news, and represented a giant step for mankind: voters had elected an Asian American mayor of a major city.[3]
“I tried to depoliticize my cabinet. I didn’t want people in there serving the Republican Party, I wanted people in there serving their country. There is no better servant for America than Norm Mineta,” Bush recalled.[14]
The head of the FAA said he would give the order, but would leave some room for pilot discretion. “F*** PILOT DISCRETION. GET THOSE G**D*** PLANES ON THE GROUND!” Norm shouted at him.[16] All told, 4,546 civilian aircraft were grounded, a feat that took more than 2.5 hours. Many pilots weren’t even told what was going on, just that there was a security incident. Pilots who did know largely didn’t tell their passengers.[17]
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”
Norm influenced presidential policy post-9/11. Bush said that “one of the important things about Norm’s experience is that it reminds us that sometimes we lose our soul as a nation. That the notion of all equal under God sometimes disappears. And 9/11 certainly challenged that premise. I didn’t want our country to do to others what had happened to Norm.”[19]
Daniel Inouye was President Obama’s senator when Obama was growing up in Hawaii. Obama said, “For him, freedom and dignity were not abstractions.
“Get up!” the driver barked at her. I’m done doing that, she thought. But instead of arguing, Claudette sat silently, resolutely. Had she known the work of Lin-Manuel Miranda, she might have thought of the lyric, “History has its eyes on you,” but instead what she felt were the guiding forces of her community of ancestors,
“How did white people come to dominate the South?”[2] Adults often told her that Black people were cursed.
And in order to keep the system of white supremacy humming like a well-oiled machine, it was important that everyone participate in it. “You can come back at the end of the day,” the receptionist told them. “After the last white patient has left.”
Claudette was on the cusp of adolescence when her little sister died of polio. Delphine had been the one constant in her life, and Claudette didn’t know how she was supposed to continue just…going to school? Getting dressed every day?
Rage bubbled in Claudette’s chest. Nothing about this was okay, and she was being asked to pretend that it was.
Claudette recalled, “My mother and grandmother told me never to go anywhere with a white man no matter what. I grew up hearing horror story after horror story about Black girls who were raped by white men, and how they never got justice either. When a white man raped a Black girl—something that happened all the time—it was just his word against hers, and no one would ever believe her.
“I was tired of adults complaining about how badly they were treated and not doing anything about it. I’d had enough of just feeling angry about Jeremiah Reeves. I was tired of hoping for justice. When my moment came, I was ready,” she said years later.[7]
“Get up and move,” the officer repeated. “You have to get up.” One of Claudette’s classmates, a girl named Margaret, yelled from the back of the bus, “She ain’t got to do nothing but stay Black and die!”
So the bus driver moved the bus a few blocks up the street and flagged down some Montgomery police officers. One officer looked at Claudette and said, “I’ve had trouble with that thing before.”[9] Thing? Claudette thought. THING?
Claudette was handcuffed and put in the back of a police car. She pressed her knees tightly together. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, she thought. I will fear no evil.
Claudette didn’t have some master plan in her mind—she was a teenager. But what she did know is that she was done pretending. She was done pretending all of this—picture Claudette sweeping her arm toward society at large—was fine. Because it wasn’t fine, and what she just had to endure on that bus, in that police car, and in that jail was evidence of that.
Rosa helped raise money for Claudette’s legal defense, baking homemade cookies and selling them after church services on sunny Sunday mornings. She and Claudette became close, and Claudette sat near her, watching as Rosa altered wedding dresses with her tiny, perfect stitches.
It didn’t take long for the judge to consider the testimony of whites and weigh it against the testimony of Blacks, and to find Claudette guilty of all the charges. He declared her a ward of the state, sentenced her to probation, and sent her home with her parents. Spectators in the courtroom brushed away their own tears, listening to the anguished sobs of the teenage girl who had just been wrongfully convicted.
under constant surveillance by the FBI for their “subversive” work on behalf of the Black community in Montgomery and across the South. Virginia had attended Wellesley, where Katharine Bates taught years before, and credited her time there as transformational. She befriended Rosa Parks.
Since then, moral panics have been used as a tool to subvert and dismantle movements that the dominant caste views as a threat. And this included civil rights.
And then at the end, I would come back to Septima’s message. I would repeat the hope that she did not feel, but that she chose.
What we need, Septima argued, was Citizenship School. Classes for adults who couldn’t read that would teach them literacy AND how to access the polls. How to order from the Sears catalog AND how to write a letter to your congressman. The first Citizenship School, a collaboration between Septima, Myles Horton, Septima’s cousin Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins, a political organizer, was set up on Johns Island, where Septima had taught so long ago.[20]
By 1968, Citizenship Schools had helped move tens of thousands of Black voters onto the voter rolls, and most of the leaders of the civil rights movement had been trained by Septima, Bernice, or other Highlander teachers. And this momentum, this ever-rising tide of Black voters? The people intent on preserving white supremacy and the status quo of the South just couldn’t handle it. They stepped up the moral panic rhetoric. The FBI and the state of Tennessee created reports that were picked up by news stations around the country that painted Highlander as a hotbed of communism. They revoked
...more
During the Cold War, the period in which Claudette’s story unfolds, 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. But the evidence is copious. Hitler emulated America’s westward expansion in his annexation of territory in Europe, and its treatment of Native Americans in his programs to remove Jews from places he felt should be occupied by Aryans. According to historian James Q. Whitman, “The Nazis took a sustained, significant, and sometimes even eager interest in the American example in race law”—racial segregation laws like the ones present all over the South.[1] In other words,
...more
The dominant narrative surrounding Brown v. Board of Education is that it integrated schools. Separate but equal was unacceptable. The Supreme Court said it, the schools did it. Black students were equal to white students.
Did segregated schools rush to integrate? Did they create comprehensive plans to make sure that all children had equal educational opportunities? The simple answer is absolutely not. The Little Rock Nine—Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo—the students who publicly attempted to integrate Central High School in 1957, were very prominent, visible members of this quest for school equality and integration.
Attorney Thurgood Marshall argued the case in front of the Supreme Court in 1952, and before the Supreme Court could release their opinion, the chief justice died. Eisenhower appointed a new chief justice, the governor of California, Earl Warren. Warren decided to order that the case be reheard so he could listen to the oral arguments.
While the KKK openly supported Prohibition, Becker was engaged in one of the largest graft operations in the country. Liquor still operators paid off Becker’s deputies. But if they refused to pay up, Becker would raid them, making the public think he was cracking down on crime.
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. Facts don’t require our personal approval for them to be facts.
But that’s not what with all deliberate speed meant to segregationists. Deliberate in this context meant slowly and carefully. To them, “With all deliberate speed” meant integrate schools at a snail’s pace.
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.
But to some segregationists, there was no distant future in which integration would occur, because they decided to close schools entirely. Led by Virginia senator Harry Byrd, 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.
Faubus became a symbol of either what was right or what was wrong with America, depending on your perspective. Even though Brown v. Brown of Education II was decided in 1955, by 1957, Arkansas had failed to integrate its schools. Determined to make headway on school integration, the NAACP had been working hard to select and prepare nine students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock by that September.
They glared at me with a mean look, and I was very frightened and didn’t know what to do. I turned around and the crowd came toward me. They moved closer and closer. Somebody started yelling ‘drag her over this tree, let’s take care of that n****r!’ ”[2] These were ordinary white Arkansans whose vitriol was such that they were suggesting that a child seeking an education deserved to be lynched.
Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the students from entering, all the while making wild accusations claiming he was being persecuted by the federal government.
Eisenhower’s presidential diary said that he understood that moving forward, Faubus knew what his assignment was, and would follow the law.[4] One guess what happened next. Just one. Congratulations, you win our fabulous prize package! Faubus did not follow through and integrate schools. Another court hearing occurred, during which all of the lawyers representing Faubus got up and walked out. “Now begins the crucifixion,” Faubus seethed. “There will be no cross-examination, no evidence presented for the other side.”[5]
Mann told Eisenhower that the violent uprisings were preplanned, and that Faubus was in on it.[6] Eisenhower issued a proclamation. It said, “Whereas, the obstruction of justice constitutes a denial of the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution of the United States and impedes the course of justice under those laws…”[7] But what it meant was: “If y’all don’t stop this immediately, I’m going to do what I need to do.”
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.
The morning of September 25, 1957, dawned, and again, the Nine got ready for school, impeccably grooming themselves, steeling their nerves against the fact that what they represented was so hated that the president had to send a thousand soldiers to their school to quell the violence.
Faubus smoldered. At the end of the school year, he could stand it no more, and decided to take matters into his own hands. A sign appeared outside the high school with the lie: this school closed by order of the federal government.[11] The high schools in Little Rock would be closed altogether the following school year. Rather than having troops at the school every day, Faubus decided that they just wouldn’t have school. Closing school for everyone was better than sharing the white schools with Black children, he reasoned. (Except football—that was allowed.)
Other private religious schools for whites only popped up—locals called them “segregation academies.” Many of the United States’ private religious schools in the South were founded during this time, for exactly this purpose: providing a haven for white parents to protect their children from students of other races.
