A summer of reflection — and fears of history repeating itself

Featured at Roll Call

It is a striking image, a fearless visage staring at the camera while holding a sign with booking number “7053” chest high. “Beautiful rebel” are the words used to describe Rosa Parks on the coaster that I’ve decided will never cushion a bottle or glass.

Another mugshot has made the news this summer though I don’t think even his supporters would label the subject “beautiful.” “Defiant” is the better adjective for the Donald Trump that looks out from the photo taken when he was booked in Fulton County, Ga., the first mug shot of an American president. Controversial? Yes. But after being charged with a litany of felonies that stem from his and his allies’ alleged efforts to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia, was there a choice?

While it has been impossible to escape the image now gracing X, formerly known as Twitter, T-shirts and more, the first — the quiet, determined woman — has been stripped of its radical origins, if it’s remembered at all by those who praise the former president’s close-up.

When and if children learn about Rosa Parks and her role in the civil rights movement, the lesson is usually recounted through a gauzy lens that portrays her as a respectable seamstress who just got tired one day instead of the tireless NAACP activist whose refusal to move to the back of the bus was an inevitable and deliberate part of a movement, the continuing fight against the social order of segregation, white supremacy and police brutality that ruled the day.

It wasn’t only Parks in the fight. She has been elevated because of America’s tendency to flatten and simplify, to spoon-feed harsh historical truths in a narrative of happily-ever-afters. In fact, the famous Parks mugshot was taken, not in 1955 during her initial arrest, but in February 1956, when Parks and many other activists were targeted by the city in an attempt to break the back of a boycott that was getting results and making Montgomery leaders “uncomfortable.”

Discomfort, though, was part of the rebellion — the only way to change the status quo.

The ceramic square is a souvenir collected during my visit to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, one stop in my summer of visits to civil rights museums, the chance to broaden my own education about American history.

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Sep062023 TAGS: , , , , , , ,

America’s future depends on a truthful reckoning with its past

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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

It’s a quote that in some form has been attributed to many and uttered by many more, perhaps because it is so wise and has proven itself again and again.

Unfortunately, anyone who revived the slogan in 2023 would be labeled “woke” in a nanosecond by politicians looking to score points and their followers who prefer to live by another oft-used mantra — “ignorance is bliss.”

The truth is, all the folks attempting to bury the past or slather a cheery coat of Barbie pink over it, the better to hide any unpleasantness, need to go back to school — and fast. And I’m talking real school, not one with Florida’s “why torture, whippings and having your children sold away wasn’t all THAT bad” curriculum.

Taking a seat in the front row should be Republican Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona, who was not even original in his cluelessness during a debate over an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. Insisting on the elimination of any kind of diversity training before authorizing the release of needed funding, Crane said: “The military was never intended to be, you know, inclusive. Its strength is not its diversity, its strength is its standards.”

Besides his racist assumption that diversity and standards are, you know, mutually exclusive, Crane, whether he realized it or not, also repeated the same argument used by those opposed to the integration of the military in 1948. At the time, Army Secretary Kenneth Royall said the Army was not meant to be “an instrument for social evolution,” and sympathized with the Southern white troops who would be forced to fight for democracy next to Americans of a different race.

That did not stop President Harry S. Truman from signing Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, mandating the desegregation of the U.S. military. Truman was appalled by the treatment of members of the military who fought Nazis and fascism in World War II, only to face violence and discrimination in the country they served. The case of Sgt. Isaac Woodard, beaten and blinded by law enforcement in South Carolina in 1946, particularly moved Truman, a World War I veteran.

Then and now, Royall and Crane insulted Americans of every race who have served with distinction, patriotism and pride, even when the military constructed barriers to impede their ambitions.

Crane’s assignment — forgive the self-promotion — is to listen to the latest episode of my CQ Roll Call podcast “Equal Time,” an interview with retired Adm. Michelle Howard, the first woman to become a four-star officer in the U.S. Navy, the first Black woman to captain a U.S. naval ship and the first woman graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy to become an admiral.

And that’s just for starters.

Truman’s order and subsequent policies opened a path for the talented and dedicated, like Howard. She is part of a program marking the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9981 this week in Washington at the Truman Library Institute.

Extra credit for attendance, Congressman Crane.

GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis continues to earn a failing grade for his support of his state’s revisionist Black history standards. There were echoes of South Carolinian and fellow Yale alum (class of 1804) John C. Calhoun’s defense of slavery as a “positive good” in the Florida governor, whose words judged enslavement as a chance for building character and a resume. Actually, as Gillian Brockell pointed out in The Washington Post, the enslaved weren’t looking for an unpaid internship, but instead, were human beings living full lives before being kidnapped by enslavers anxious to exploit those very skills DeSantis seems to believe they lacked.

Now that he sees doubling down on racism isn’t shoring up his crumbling presidential hopes, DeSantis is dodging accountability, playing the “who, me?” game.

Country singer Jason Aldean picks and chooses when he wants to play that same game, defiant in front of fans when defending his song “Try That in a Small Town,” but playing the innocent when it comes to the backdrop for its incendiary video, Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn., site of a notorious lynching of a Black 18-year-old, Henry Choate, in 1927.

If you take them at their word, the millionaire and his team simply didn’t do their homework.

I have to give them credit, though. They along with the songwriters — a bunch of folks not named Aldean — have certainly learned how to make a mediocre song a hit in a divided America.

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Jul272023 TAGS: , , , , , , , , , ,

What has been deemed legal is not always right

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Sometimes, the court gets it right.

It did in the case of Bridget “Biddy” Mason, who eventually walked more than 2,000 miles before her journey ended in California, where her enslavers, Robert and Rebecca Smith, held Mason and her children captive in the supposedly “free state.” When she learned of the Smiths’ plan to haul them all to the slave state of Texas, Mason sued. And in 1856, after listening to her testimony in chambers, because Blacks could not testify against whites in court, Judge Benjamin Hayes decided in her favor.

Lucky for her, and for California, since Mason went on to success as a midwife, entrepreneur and philanthropist, establishing day-care centers and the First African Methodist Episcopal (FAME) Church in Los Angeles, which is still in operation.

I was spurred to learn more about her story after reading a tribute in the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati during a recent trip there. Hers is a true-life tale that displays strategic intelligence and agency, and the countless ways society benefits when barriers are removed and innovation and imagination allowed to flourish.

The current U.S. Supreme Court, unlike Judge Hayes, in my opinion, got it terribly wrong in a flurry of decisions it issued last week. Each one, delivered in turn like staccato body blows, punctuated the court majority’s agenda to halt progress and move the country backward.

At the Freedom Center, I spent hours studying the exhibits, repelled by the lengths those in power would go to possess human beings they viewed as property, yet inspired by stories of brave patriots of every race who traveled on all sides of the “law” but always on the path of justice.

What has been deemed legal is not always right.

This country’s highest court has acted ignobly, as in the 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that Black people had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”

And it has been the prodding guide for a recalcitrant nation, as in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which it unanimously stated: “The doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Pushback has come from those who call out injustice, as Frederick Douglass did after Dred Scott, when he noted: “The Supreme Court of the United States is not the only power in this world. It is very great, but the Supreme Court of the Almighty is greater.”

And negative resistance has persisted, as well, the hallmark of those who would stand in the way, yelling “stop,” as segregationists proved when they used every tool, including violence, to fight Brown.

It wasn’t a surprise when the Supreme Court knocked down the use of race, but nothing else, as one factor among many for colleges and universities deciding which students to admit. Their reasoning ignores how the Harvard of today chooses a class, saving spaces for children of alumni, faculty and donors, those with talents in music or athletics, or from a state with paltry representation, and with a sprinkling of celebrity names moving to the front of the line.

It ignores that any applicant who makes it past review is qualified, and that no school has ever chosen a class based on test scores alone, lest it leave out too many children of the rich and powerful.

But most of all, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the majority on the court ignore America, where race matters — and has always mattered. Instead, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in brilliant dissent: “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.”

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Jul062023 TAGS: , , ,

Two visions of America’s past — and future

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“I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” And just to make sure everyone in the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference and those watching at home got the message, former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump repeated that last line: “I am your retribution.”

Trump revisited his “American carnage” 2017 inauguration speech to again paint a picture of an angry and divided America — with a promise to lead a charge into battle if elected.

On the same weekend, President Joe Biden traveled to Selma, Ala., to commemorate the 58th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, that day on March 7, 1965, when marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge heading to the capital city of Montgomery for voting rights and for justice in the name of civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson — who was killed by an Alabama state trooper — were met with violence from law enforcement as the world watched.

The result of the marchers’ resolve and sacrifice was the Voting Rights Act, signed by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson on Aug. 6, 1965.

“No matter how hard some people try, we can’t just choose to learn what we want to know and not what we should know,” Biden said Sunday. “We should learn everything — the good, the bad, the truth — of who we are as a nation.”

And, after renewing his call to strengthen those same voting rights citizens had demanded that day in 1965, Biden concluded: “My fellow Americans, on this Sunday of our time, we know where we’ve been and we know, more importantly, where we have to go: forward together.”

At CPAC at National Harbor, Md., last week, the speaker’s list included Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, whose followers attacked his country’s capital city after his loss; and Kari Lake, still in election denial about her own November defeat in Arizona’s gubernatorial race. Notice the theme?

Attendees could choose between sessions on “Finish the Wall, Build the Dome” or “No Chinese Balloon Above Tennessee,” but there was no room for a lesson on the American history made on that Selma bridge 58 years ago.

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Mar092023 TAGS: , , , , , , , ,

It’s about more than one dinner and a man named Trump

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A now 19-year-old white man who targeted shoppers in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket in May simply because they were Black, according to authorities, this week pleaded guilty to murder charges and one charge of domestic terrorism motivated by hate. In his not even 20 years on this earth, this gunman, who casts serious doubt on the onetime hope of optimists that young people would save us, was nurtured by racist lies and fueled by conspiracies of “replacement.”

The white supremacist (and I won’t say his name), who murdered 10 human beings and wounded three others, was on a mission, and he seemed proud to livestream his heinous actions. He can live his life, something he denied his victims, and if spared the death penalty on federal charges, he will spend the rest of it in prison.

His beliefs, however, are not going anywhere. In fact, they are having a moment.

White supremacy, antisemitism, misogyny and all kinds of hate are being lifted up by some of those who want to lead the country and ignored or dismissed by others who, at the very least, are afraid of alienating the haters — people who would destroy everything America is supposed to stand for. After all, they could be voters.

It’s not a shock that former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump welcomed Kanye West, Nick Fuentes and a dude named Jamal to his Mar-a-Lago dinner table. Nor is it surprising that the few Republicans who have spoken out, at times tepidly, against Trump’s supper are being praised as heroes, proving the definition of that word has diminished over time.

In a dreary reminder that there is no bottom to GOP delusions, the usual suspects have continued to infantilize a 76-year-old man, blaming those around Trump rather than the man himself, as though what transpired at his Florida compound was a lapse in judgment, just a faux pas.

I know white guys are given the benefit of the doubt well past their sell-by date; they pretty much originated the term “youthful indiscretion” as a ready-made excuse. But to ask anyone to ignore Trump’s well-documented history, his both-sides wink at the deadly Charlottesville, Va., “Unite the Right” rally and his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol (both of which were graced with Fuentes’ presence), should be a step too far, even for the former president’s No. 1 apologist, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Remember, once upon a time, Trump also claimed he didn’t know who former Klan grand wizard David Duke was.

Knowing all that, it’s not that hard to imagine the conversation at Trump’s dinner from hell.

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Dec012022 TAGS: , , , ,

CB Bowman: Courage to Leap and Lead (Part 2)

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This is part one of a two-part episode. Tune in next week for part 2 with the wonderful Mary C. Curtis.

Mary C. Curtis, a columnist at Roll Call, is an award-winning journalist and educator based in Charlotte, N.C., and Washington, D.C. She has contributed to NBC News, NPR, The Washington Post, The Root, ESPN’s The Undefeated, and talks politics on WCCB-TV and NPR-affiliate WFAE in Charlotte. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, the Charlotte Observer, the Baltimore Sun, and the Associated Press, and was a national correspondent for AOL’s Politics Daily.

Curtis is a Senior Leader with The OpEd Project, at Yale University, Cornell University, and the Ford Foundation, and at the Aspen New Voices Fellowship in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Kiplinger Fellow, in social media, at Ohio State.

Mary was chosen to be included in The HistoryMakers, the single largest archival collection of its kind in the world designed to promote and celebrate the successes and to document movements, events, and organizations that are important to the African American community and to American society; it is available digitally and permanently archived in the Library of Congress.

Her honors include Clarion Awards from the Association for Women in Communications, awards from the National Headliners and the Society of Professional Journalists, three first-place awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, and the Thomas Wolfe Award for an examination of Confederate heritage groups. Curtis has contributed to several books, including an essay in “Love Her, Love Her Not: The Hillary Paradox.”

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Sep192022 TAGS: , , ,

CB Bowman: Courage to Leap and Lead

Featured at CB Bowman Courage to Leap and Lead

This is part one of a two-part episode. Tune in next week for part 2 with the wonderful Mary C. Curtis.

Mary C. Curtis, a columnist at Roll Call, is an award-winning journalist and educator based in Charlotte, N.C., and Washington, D.C. She has contributed to NBC News, NPR, The Washington Post, The Root, ESPN’s The Undefeated, and talks politics on WCCB-TV and NPR-affiliate WFAE in Charlotte. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, the Charlotte Observer, the Baltimore Sun, and the Associated Press, and was a national correspondent for AOL’s Politics Daily.

Curtis is a Senior Leader with The OpEd Project, at Yale University, Cornell University, and the Ford Foundation, and at the Aspen New Voices Fellowship in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Kiplinger Fellow, in social media, at Ohio State.

Mary was chosen to be included in The HistoryMakers, the single largest archival collection of its kind in the world designed to promote and celebrate the successes and to document movements, events, and organizations that are important to the African American community and to American society; it is available digitally and permanently archived in the Library of Congress.

Her honors include Clarion Awards from the Association for Women in Communications, awards from the National Headliners and the Society of Professional Journalists, three first-place awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, and the Thomas Wolfe Award for an examination of Confederate heritage groups. Curtis has contributed to several books, including an essay in “Love Her, Love Her Not: The Hillary Paradox.”

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Sep192022 TAGS: , , ,

Two systems of justice? Bet on it

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You can be sure the FBI and the Department of Justice dotted every “i” and crossed every “t” on the search warrant before they went looking for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the home of the former president of the United States, and hit the jackpot. Though I wasn’t there, I’m confident that no agent busted down doors or shot around corners.

According to reports, though not to the hysterical hyperbole employed by Donald Trump on the campaign trail, this was a professional operation, approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the federal judiciary.

Still, thanks to Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a special master must sort through and review 13,000 documents and items seized from Mar-a Lago before the investigation can continue. The ruling came after even Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr — who judged Cannon’s ruling “deeply flawed” — eventually came to the conclusion that the federal government had no choice but to act in the face of Trump’s defiance.

More delay, more court review, it seems, before the public gets any closer to finding out why a private citizen who used to be president took classified government documents to his private club or what national, perhaps damaging secrets Trump and company held on to despite entreaties to do the right thing.

I get it, though. I understand why the former president and his followers — the crowd current President Joe Biden accurately labels “MAGA Republicans” — believe that the rules apply only to some, while others get to make them up as they go along. Just look at the excuses they make for his behavior, and the twists and turns of spine and morality necessary to turn violent Capitol rioters into “patriots.”

To realize there really are different and inequitable systems of justice in a country that swears it isn’t so, look no further than the case of a woman who was given none of the protections or attention that those with wealth and power take for granted.

Breonna Taylor was defenseless. In fact, as we’ve found out from a guilty plea by someone tasked with enforcing the law, the search that ended in Taylor’s death was based on lies.

Former Louisville detective Kelly Goodlett late last month pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge, admitting she helped falsify the warrant and conspired with another officer to concoct a cover story when the March 2020 killing of this young Black woman belatedly made national news.

I relate much more to Taylor’s plight than Trump’s, having been seen more than once during my growing-up years as more perp than citizen minding my own business by law enforcement patrolling my working-class Black neighborhood. Then again, I would think that most Americans struggling to get through each day would find more similarities with the emergency room technician who wanted to be a nurse than a former president who refuses to accept defeat in a presidential election.

Yet, one search garners the headlines and boiling outrage, while the other earns little more than a mention, unless you’re a friend or family member or anyone interested in an American system of justice that works fairly.

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Sep082022 TAGS: , , , , ,

What hate did to Birmingham

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In the 1950s, Atlanta and Birmingham were about the same size, with about the same population, problems and promise, John Archibald points out in his book “Shaking the Gates of Hell: A Search for Family and Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution.” But then, Atlanta fashioned itself the city “too busy to hate,” while Birmingham, “as the world would learn, was not that busy.”

I told Archibald I would reference that line, crediting him, of course, after he repeated it in a speech during the recent National Society of Newspaper Columnists conference in that Alabama city, his home base, because it was both ruefully funny and soul-crushingly tragic — and most of all, because it provides a too accurate view of a cycle that continues, one you don’t have to travel to Birmingham to observe.

Those at the conference got a chance to witness the roots and results of what hate did to Birmingham, how it labeled the city and hobbled its progress, during a visit to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Unfortunately, those who most need to learn its lessons would never have the sense or the courage to set a foot inside.

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Jun222022 TAGS: , , ,

What happens to America when optimism dies?

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When I interviewed Majority Whip James Clyburn in 2014 about his memoir “Blessed Experiences: Genuinely Southern, Proudly Black,” the South Carolina Democrat was confident in America’s ability to find its way, no matter how extreme the political swings might appear at any given time.

“The country from its inception is like the pendulum on a clock,” the congressman told me. “It goes back and forward. It tops out to the right and starts back to the left — it tops out to the left and starts back to the right.” And remember, he said, it “spends twice as much time in the center.”

I have always appreciated Clyburn’s wisdom, his passion and his commitment to his constituents. But most of all, I have admired the optimism of this child of the South, who grew up hemmed in by Jim Crow’s separate and unequal grip, yet who believed in the innate goodness of America and its people. Clyburn put his own life on the line to drag the country — kicking and screaming — into a more just future.

He was convinced, I believe, that no matter how off balance America might become, the country would eventually right itself.

A lot has changed since that afternoon, when he sat at a long table, signing books and chatting in the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, N.C., right beside his beloved wife. Emily Clyburn, a passionate civil rights activist, died in 2019, though Clyburn often references her wise words.

That optimism, however, has lost its glow.

Clyburn’s worries drove our conversation in July 2021, the second of two times he was a guest on my CQ Roll Call “Equal Time” podcast. The topic was voting rights, and Clyburn had opinions about the Senate procedure that would eventually stall legislation to reform those rights and restore provisions invalidated by a Supreme Court decision in 2013.

“When it comes to the constitutional issues like voting, guaranteed to Blacks by the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution, that should not be filibustered,” he said. And about restrictive laws being passed in states? “I want you to call it what it is. Use the word: nullification. It is voter nullification.”

“This isn’t about just voting; this is about whether or not we will have a democracy or an autocracy.”

With those remarks in the back of my mind, it was still startling to hear Clyburn last week on MSNBC, talking about his GOP House colleagues, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, and their waffling about complying with subpoenas from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.

When asked if the government and Capitol Hill could “be fixed,” Clyburn, known for his philosophical “this too shall pass” mantra, instead replied, “I don’t know.” He talked about threats to undermine democracy and said the country is “teetering on the edge.”

And that was before the shooting in Buffalo that claimed the lives of 10 beautiful Americans doing something as routine as Saturday supermarket shopping. African Americans were targeted by an 18-year-old who wore his “white supremacist” label like a badge of honor in a heavily plagiarized racist screed, a man whose stated goal was to “kill as many blacks as possible.”

Is it any wonder Clyburn’s optimism has been waning in these times?

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May192022 TAGS: , , ,
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