Donld Trump incompetent cabinet includes wrestling diva Linda McMahon as - wait of it!- She is the "Education Secretary" OMG

Echo opinion and essay published in Medium

Linda McMahon had no idea.... by Allison Wiltz 

Tusla Race Massacre: In 1921, one of the nation’s worst race massacres destroyed the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of Black Tulsans, in Oklahoma. The tragic events took countless homes and businesses and led to the destruction of one of the largest, most affluent and prosperous Black communities in America.

Is The (fake❗) Educaiton Secretary Linda McMahon Really Ignorant of Tulsa Race Massacre❓

Linda McMahon, is known as the first lady of pro wrestling, but Donald Trump nominated her to be the Education Secretary❓

When it comes to anti-black racism, some White people claim they “see no evil, hear no evil,” and “speak no evil.” 

This state of incompetence shields them from the social expectation to participate in the conversation in earnest. 

Actually, it’s a strategy of evasion. Take, for instance, the congressional hearing in which U.S. Rep Summer Lee asked Education Secretary Linda McMahon whether lessons about historical events, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre, and figures, such as Ruby Bridges, would be considered “illegal,” given the administration’s anti-DEI mandate. 

Rather than providing clarity, her response only served to muddy waters. McMahon seemed to know very little, if anything, about black history. Were this an official quiz in a class setting, it’s safe to say she would have failed. But it remains unclear whether she was genuinely unfamiliar with the content or feigned ignorance to dodge a discussion about the inclusion of these historical narratives.

Some doubted the Republican Education Secretary was genuinely ignorant of black history. Markus Batchler, the political director for People for the American Way, said, “While pretending not to know who Ruby Bridges was, or the impact of the Tulsa Race Massacre, she is working every day to ban books and curriculum that acknowledge the existence of Ruby Bridges and the Tulsa Race Riots from libraries and classrooms across the nation,” Batchler warned.

In deed, (incompetent) McMahon's public testimony contradicted her actions. Also, if you are removing materials because you claim they’re improper, you should be able to articulate, for the public, the logic underpinning this decision.

And, if you are unaware of black historical events and figures, then it’s implausible for you to have just cause.

During congressional hearings, Lee suggested, “when [you] call for removing equity and inclusion and diversity and accessibility from schools in favor of ‘traditional American values,’ it’s indistinguishable from… post-civil war south advocating to rewrite history with the Lost Cause narrative.” The preference for a favorable narrative over an honest one isn’t new. And yet, modern-day efforts to whitewash history are just as harmful.

Michael Harriot, a columnist and author who typically covers the intersection of race, culture, and politics, asked in his Contraband Camp newsletter, “Are White people dumb?” in his initial response to Education Secretary McMahon’s testimony.


Harriot wasn’t buying into pseudoscience that portrays one race as more intelligent than another. Instead, he was shining a light on the absurdity of some White people’s convenient ignorance on the topic of race. With access to articles, books, films, TV series, and the World Wide Web, it’s difficult to fathom how White adults, particularly those in government leadership positions, can say with a straight face that they’ve never heard of The Tulsa (Oklahoma) Race Massacre.❓❗💥

There are numerous incidents like this, such as the 1898, Wilmington Massacre, the 1920, Ocoee Massacre, and the 1923, Rosewood Massacre, each involving racist-driven attacks on black communities. And yet, for some Americans sheltered from the nation’s legacy of systemic racialized violence, these events may sound foreign. One report found that White Republicans are less perceptive of racism compared to White Democrats (Zell & Lesick, 2022). Separate from their political affiliation, those with knowledge of historical racism were more likely to perceive individual racism in the modern era. One study found White Americans’ ignorance of critical race theory predicted their opposition to it (Richmond et al., 2024).

If we’re to take McMahon’s testimony at face value, that she doesn’t know enough about historical events, like the Tulsa Race Massacre, to comment, then it reveals how academically shallow her department’s resistance to these narratives is. 

How is it possible that someone is unaware of major historical events to somehow be qualified to determine which should be included in the curriculum❓ That would be like saying one car is more dangerous than another without identifying which safety features make it so. And whenever someone asks for more information, you claim you’ll have to get back to them. For instance, what makes a lesson about the 1780 Battle of Camden, where 1,050 American and 314 British soldiers died on the battlefield during the American Revolution, more appropriate for high school students than the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, where historians estimate hundreds were killed during the Jim Crow era? If mass casualty events were deemed inappropriate for class discussions across the board, they’d both be excluded. But it’s clear their criteria are race-based. It determines which class materials receive a gold star of approval from the administration and which are tossed into the reject pile. Claiming not to know about the Tulsa Race Massacre ensures discussions of this nature never bubble up to the surface.

While people often think of ignorance as harmless, when it is weaponized, it can become a frightful weapon. Indeed, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” In this case, some White Americans oppose the inclusion of black history without taking the time to understand it. As a result, their resistance is rooted in faulty logic. How can you say a narrative is dangerous when you cannot describe it? To dispel misinformation, here’s a summary: In the summer of 1921, White Tulsa residents destroyed 35 blocks of Black Wall Street, leaving between 100 and 300 dead, at least 8,000 homeless, and many more injured. This tragedy began with a lie, that a Black teenager, 19-year-old Dick Rowland assaulted a White teenager, 17-year-old Sarah Page. 

During Jim Crow, it was common for lynchings to follow false accusations, often targeting Black men. In this case, local law enforcement deputized 500 White men and boys, enabling them to wreak havoc on an entire town of people. One reason this narrative should be discussed is so that history does not repeat itself. So citizens acknowledge the harm of racist presumptions.

At times, the denial of racism is a strategy to inflict harm by dampening resistance that would otherwise arise. In Ryan Coogler’s film, “Sinners,” a White character, Hogwood, sells property to the Black twin brothers, Elijah “Smoke” Moore and Elias “Stack” Moore. During their brief negotiation, the twins expressed concerns that members of the Klan would trespass on their property. Hogwood denied the existence of the organization in the region, referring to it in the past tense. Yet, he was the Grand Dragon, their local leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Hogwood’s goal was to make the new Black owners of the property feel comfortable making the sale and reassured that local racists wouldn’t attack them. Of course, this was a set-up, as the Klan planned to do just that. Not to give too much away, but luckily, the twins weren’t assuaged so easily. While this narrative is fictional, the phenomenon is all too real. White people who perpetrate racism often claim they do not know about the topic. They claim to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. And yet, their actions often reflect the racism and bias they swear isn’t there.

Ironically, McMahon, the Education Secretary’s lack of knowledge, whether genuine or not, highlights another reason why these narratives should be included in the classroom curriculum. The fact that some White people are unaware of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 only affirms the relevance of such lessons. It’s a travesty that the persecution of Black Americans, while well-documented, may be considered inappropriate under the Trump administration’s anti-DEI mandate. Knowledge of historical racism is tied to racial attitudes in the modern era. So, if we want our future to be more equitable, it starts with the battle over what content makes it into the classroom. According to Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz of Columbia University, “racial literacy in English classrooms is the ability to read, discuss, and write about situations that involve race or racism.” However, laws and policies that discourage the inclusion of the topic impede efforts to expand this competency. For students and the public at large to enhance their racial literacy, they need to have safe spaces to develop these skills, to ask questions, and engage with others. Silencing this reflective process impedes social progress. As LaGarrett J. King noted in Social Education, “our teaching should center on how Black history improves our understanding of contemporary circumstances, and how it can stimulate us to improve our democracy.”

​​References

Bender, M. C. (2025, April 3). Trump administration threatens to withhold funds from public schools — The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/us/politics/public-school-funding-trump-dei.html

Gaynor, G. K. (2025, June 5). Education Secretary Linda McMahon doesn’t appear to know what the Tulsa Race Massacre is during the House hearing. TheGrio. https://thegrio.com/2025/06/04/education-secretary-linda-mcmahon-doesnt-appear-to-know-what-tulsa-race-massacre-is-during-house-hearing/

Harriot, M. (2025, June 6). Are white people dumb?. ContrabandCamp. https://www.contrabandcamp.com/p/are-white-people-dumb?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Jones, J. (2025, June 4). Education secretary Linda McMahon flubs basic facts in Senate hearing. MSNBC. https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/linda-mcmahon-senate-math-facts-kennedy-reed-murphy-rcna210946

King, L. J. (2016). Teaching black history as a racial literacy project. Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 19(6), 1303–1318. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2016.1150822

King, LaGarrett J. (2017). The status of Black History in U.S. schools and Society. https://www.socialstudies.org/system/files/publications/articles/se_810117014.pdf

Nelson, J. C., Adams, G., & Salter, P. S. (2013). The Marley hypothesis: denial of racism reflects ignorance of history. Psychological science, 24(2), 213–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612451466

Richmond, B. S., Toosi, N. R., Wellman, J. D., & Wilkins, C. L. (2024). Ignorance of critical race theory predicts White Americans’ opposition to it. Journal of Social Issues, 80(1), 240–271. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12601

Sealey-Ruiz, Y. (2020). Racial literacy. https://ncte.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SquireOfficePolicyBrief_RacialLiteracy_April2021.pdf

Zell, E., & Lesick, T. L. (2022). Ignorance of History and Political Differences in Perception of Racism in the United States. Social Psychological and Personality Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506211056493

Slavery revisionism failure to accurately describe a terrible episode in American history

Opinion Echo published in Politico | Why Was It So Hard for Nikki Haley to Say ‘Slavery’? History Has the Answer

Presidential candidate Nikki Haley's recent (and swiftly qualified) comments about the Civil War helped to spread a myth that has warped American history for over a century.

Civil War 1881-1865

In William Faulkner’s novel, Sartoris (1929), someone asks the title character, Colonel John Sartoris, why he had fought for the Confederacy so many decades before. “Damned if I ever did know,” replied the aging veteran, now a pillar of his community in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

Of course, we know why Colonel Sartoris raised arms against the United States. So does anyone with a high school diploma — assuming they used up-to-date textbooks. And so did Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, who in 1861 famously asserted that the “cornerstone” of the new Southern nation rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

The Civil War profoundly shaped the United States as we know it today.

All of which makes it disappointing, though not surprising, that at this late date — almost 160 years after the Civil War — Nikki Haley, a leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination, shares Colonel Sartoris’ selective amnesia on the topic. When asked a softball question this week about the causes of the Civil War, Haley, a former South Carolina governor, flubbed the answer, calling it a “difficult” question and mumbling on about “basically how government was going to run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

Haley qualified the comment on a radio show called “The Pulse of New Hampshire,” and followed the clean-up job with a press release, stating: “Of course the Civil War was about slavery. We know that. That’s unquestioned, always the case. We know the Civil War was about slavery. But it was also more than that. It was about the freedoms of every individual. It was about the role of government.”

Civil War 1861 Currier and Ives print "The Lexington of 1861" depicting the attack on the 6th Massachusetts"

But as Haley must know — after all, as governor of South Carolina, she presided over the removal of Confederate flags from the Statehouse — many Americans do question the fundamental fact that slavery precipitated the Civil War, and her equivocation played into a long-standing agenda to rewrite American history. Haley was effectively parroting the Lost Cause mythology, a revisionist school of thought born in the war’s immediate aftermath, which whitewashed the Confederacy’s cornerstone interest in raising arms to preserve slavery. Instead, a generation of Lost Cause mythologists chalked the war up to a battle over political abstractions like states’ rights.

With red states doing battle with American history, seeking to erase the legacy of violence and inequality that counterbalance the great good also inherent in our national story, it’s worth revisiting the rise of the Lost Cause, not just to remember how damaging it was, but to confront just how damaging it still is.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the work of interpreting the rebellion fell to a small group of unreconstructed rebels. The pioneers of Confederate revisionism included wealthy and influential veterans of the Confederacy like Jubal Early, B. T. Johnson, Fitz Lee and W. P. Johnson, who helped formulate the Lost Cause myth that would take hold by the 1880s.

The narrative strains were simple. They painted a picture of Southern chivalry — mint juleps, magnolias and moonlight — that stood in sharp contrast with the North, a region marked by avarice, grinding capitalism and poverty. The rebellion, by this rendering, had been a legal response to the North’s assault on states’ rights — not a violent insurrection to preserve chattel slavery. Even Confederate veterans like Hunter McGuire knew that to admit the war had been about slavery would “hold us degraded rather than worthy of honor … our children, instead of revering their fathers will be secretly, if not openly, ashamed.”

The myth gained steamed by the end of the century, largely because of the work of organizations like the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), groups that offered a compelling story that people could wrap their minds around — including many Northerners, who were eager to put the war behind them. Because the Lost Cause emphasized heroism and honor over slavery, it venerated military figures like Robert E. Lee and swept politicians like Jefferson Davis under the rug. 

So, it was that in May 1890, over 100,000 citizens gathered in Richmond for the dedication of a statue of Lee.

The decade saw hundreds of towns across the former Confederacy raise similar monuments to their heroes and war dead. These marble and steel memorials were often planted in town squares and by county courthouses to help sanitize not only Confederate memory but the new Jim Crow order. After all, if secession had been a noble thing, so was the separation of the races.

The signs of revisionism ranged from subtle to clear. During the war, for instance, Confederate soldiers had keenly embraced the term “reb,” but the new gatekeepers of Southern memory abandoned the term. “Was your father a Rebel and a Traitor?” asked a typical leaflet. “Did he fight in the service of the Confederacy for the purpose of defeating the Union, or was he a Patriot, fighting for the liberties granted him under the Constitution, in defense of his native land, and for a cause he knew to be right?” Equally important was figuring out what to even call the war. 

It couldn’t be the “Civil War,” which sounded too revolutionary. It couldn’t be “the War of Rebellion” which smacked of treason. In the late 1880s, the UCV and UDC approved resolutions designating the conflict that killed 750,000 Americans the “War Between the States.” The term stuck for generations to come.

It wasn’t just Southerners who suffered willful memory loss in these years. Jaded by the experience of Reconstruction and in the thrall of rising scientific racism, many Northerners were equally eager to remember the war as a brothers’ quarrel over politics rather than a struggle over slavery and Black rights. The jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who began the war as a committed abolitionist, later erased the roots of the conflict and celebrated the battlefield valor of both Union and Confederate troops. “The faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty,” he said, “in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.”

Of course, historians agree that most Union troops did know why they were fighting. So did O.W. Holmes. But years after the fact, he was willing to forget. As were tens of thousands of veterans who attended Blue and Gray reunions well into the 20th century, including a massive camp gathering of 25,000 people who gathered at Crawfish Springs, Georgia, in 1889, near the Chickamauga Battlefield, for a picnic and public speeches. These mass spectacles helped Yankees and Confederates rewrite the history of the 1850s, and 1860s, ostensibly in the service of national reunion and regeneration, but also in a way that fundamentally reinforced the emerging culture and politics of Jim Crow.

The Lost Cause mythology was more than bad history. It provided the intellectual justification for Jim Crow — not just in the former Confederacy, but everywhere systemic racism denied Black citizens equal citizenship and economic rights. Its dismantling began only in the 1960s when historians inspired by the modern Civil Rights Movement revisited the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, adopting the views of earlier Black scholars like W.E.B. DuBois and John Hope Franklin, who always knew what the war was about and had shined a spotlight on the agency of Black and white actors alike.

That’s why the recent retreat to Lost Cause mythos is troubling. One would think that a Republican candidate for the presidency might be proud of the party’s roots as a firmly antislavery organization that dismantled the “Peculiar Institution” and fomented a critical constitutional revolution during Reconstruction — one that truly made the country more free.

With GOP presidential candidates waffling on the Civil War, rejecting history curricula in their states and launching political fusillades against “woke” culture, it remains for the rest of us to reaffirm the wisdom of Frederick Douglass, who in the last years of his life stated: “Death has no power to change moral qualities. What was bad before the war, and during the war, has not been made good since the war. … those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.” Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between tho

Book banning and racism

“The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it,” writes professor Ibram X. Kendi. That is the essence of antiracism: the action that must follow both emotional and intellectual awareness of racism", Ibram X. Kendi, ​Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University.

Following is an echo essay published in The Washington Post written by Robert Cohen is a professor of history and social studies education at NYU.

Politicians dictating what teachers can say about racism will prove to be dangerous, as evidenced in the information reported in this essay.

College student essays from 1961, underscore why our current trajectory could be devastating.

The reactionary nostalgia evoked by TFG, Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan has taken on a new dimension: a push to censor what gets taught in America’s history classrooms.

New laws in red states — and even some purple states — aim to ban the teaching of critical race theory, and one district in Tennessee has even banned a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust.

As one student wrote 30 years after finishing his segregated education in Georgia, from elementary school through high school, “there was not a single instance — not one — in which any of the teachers initiated, even allowed a discussion about racism.” Instead, teachers and textbooks presented U.S. history as the triumph of democracy. Any serious engagement with slavery, Jim Crow or even the Black experience got excluded from what historian Nathan Huggins has termed America’s “master narrative.”
But without these discussions, White students never bothered to ask themselves why their towns had separate Black and White water fountains, waiting rooms, bus stations and more. Instead, they saw bigotry, in the words of one of those students decades later, as “just the way things were, and would always be.”

Civil rights demonstration in a NAACP Detroit branch PARADE FOR VICTORY, 1944. Six African American men in top haps and tails, carry a coffin with the sign, HERE LIES JIM CROW. During World War II, African Americans fought for their 'Double Victory,' one abroad and one at home.

This lack of knowledge about Jim Crow* policies, racism and the South’s past left children and young adults with skewed perceptions. Nowhere was this clearer than in 35 essays written by White undergraduates at UGA less than a week after a segregationist riot erupted Jan. 11, 1961, outside the dormitory of Charlayne Hunter, one of two Black students to desegregate the university and the first to live on campus. These essays came from a surprising place: A calculus professor, who was one of the faculty members who belatedly stood up to the campus’s belligerent segregationists after witnessing their racist violence, asked his students to reflect on the riot and UGA’s desegregation crisis.

These moves are a throwback to the right wing’s idea of an educational golden age — the period before the civil rights movement transformed American education. That period reminds us that such political actions can have a chilling effect on teachers’ willingness to teach about race and racism. And a lack of education on these topics can have devastating consequences, something that was on display at the University of Georgia in 1961.

What did education look like on the White side of the color line in the Jim Crow South?

As one student wrote 30 years after finishing his segregated education in Georgia, from elementary school through high school, “there was not a single instance — not one — in which any of the teachers initiated, even allowed a discussion about racism.” Instead, teachers and textbooks presented U.S. history as the triumph of democracy. Any serious engagement with slavery, Jim Crow or even the Black experience got excluded from what historian Nathan Huggins has termed America’s “master narrative.”

But without these discussions, White students never bothered to ask themselves why their towns had separate Black and White water fountains, waiting rooms, bus stations and more. Instead, they saw bigotry, in the words of one of those students decades later, as “just the way things were, and would always be.”

This lack of knowledge about Jim Crow policies, racism and the South’s past left children and young adults with skewed perceptions. Nowhere was this clearer than in 35 essays written by White undergraduates at UGA, less than a week after a segregationist riot erupted Jan. 11, 1961, outside the dormitory of Charlayne Hunter, one of two Black students to desegregate the university and the first to live on campus. These essays came from a surprising place: A calculus professor, who was one of the faculty members who belatedly stood up to the campus’s belligerent segregationists after witnessing their racist violence, asked his students to reflect on the riot and UGA’s desegregation crisis.

The essays confirmed that students lacked a formal education on issues related to race — only two of them mentioned any educational institution influencing their ideas on the topic.

The substance of the essays also made clear that most White UGA students had learned nothing in school to challenge white-supremacist assumptions based in myths and falsehoods. 

Crude stereotypes of Black inferiority pervaded the most strongly segregationist essays: “The Negro has a lack of ambition. He does not have the desire to work and better himself,” read one essay. It also claimed that African Americans did not have “the morals we have,” nor were they “as physically clean as whites.”

Another student noted, “I personally do not desire to associate” with Blacks because they “have a low moral standard.” The student’s “evidence” to support this claim? Stereotypes about how Black Americans had “their brand new Cadillac standing in the yard of their one room tennant [sic] home (neither paid for yet).” The student also cited purported criminality among African Americans to justify their view.

Students also invoked pseudoscience — picked up from racist family members, friends and the rhetoric of white-supremacist organizations and politicians — to support segregation. One student did not want integration because, they claimed, “the Negroid race” was “inferior to the Caucasian race … The Negro has an average one eighth more bone thickness on his skull. This leads one to believe that the Negro has not come as far through evolution as the White Man.”

Finally, the students trafficked in sexual stereotypes that had long been a staple of white-supremacist propaganda. As one student put it: “In college I feel that women will be protected better if they don’t have to dodge colored boys.” Such racist fears of Black men as sexual predators had deep roots in the South, and white supremacists had used them to justify horrific vigilantism, lynchings and the enactment of anti-miscegenation laws.

The students also lacked even a rudimentary knowledge of the civil rights movement, which was barely mentioned in their high school history textbooks. Collectively, the 35 essays cited only one civil rights organization: the NAACP.

Even the students who mentioned the NAACP fretted that the organization was “communist infiltrated” and part of a communist plot to “break up the United States.” These fears had no basis in fact. The NAACP was a legalistic organization that was far more moderate tactically than the direct action-oriented wings of the civil rights movement that were growing in prominence in 1961. Instead, these claims parroted the propaganda of segregationist politicians trying to discredit the civil rights movement. The students proved historically illiterate about the movement’s leadership as well: Not one of the essays mentioned a single civil rights movement leader or named any African American.

All 35 essays displayed a racially bound parochialism. Even students who were not overtly racist displayed a total inability to understand, even to care, about how those on the Black side of the color line experienced life. The essays displayed an unmistakable lack of empathy when the students wrote about UGA’s desegregation crisis.

White student mobs had hung effigies of Black students, marched behind a banner deploying a racial slur to tell Hunter and Hamilton Holmes — the university’s other pioneering Black student — to “go home” and rioted. Yet the student essay writers depicted themselves as the victims of the situation. As one essayist explained, “Many students, parents, and Georgians feel hurt because our federal government has shown that it … can force people to do things which we dislike.” The student thought that UGA students “as citizens should have a right to go to segregated schools.”

“I am mad,” another student wrote, that an integrationist “federal government took away state’s rights.” The student thought the decision “does not make up a democracy [sic].”

Such rhetoric echoed that of segregationist politicians, whose pious phrases about federalism and states’ rights (for White people) obfuscated state wrongs, namely the reality that the Jim Crow system of legally ordained racial discrimination reduced Blacks to second-class citizens. Media interviews with White UGA students about the crisis led Bruce Galphin of the Atlanta Constitution to complain that UGA’s faculty had not challenged the white-supremacist misconceptions that their students had brought with them to college: He wondered what the students “have been studying at the university” because their “only tutors in political science” appeared to have been “extremist politicians.” The students kept “spewing up” clichés and buzzwords like “judicial tyranny” and “socialism.”

Even Galphin, however, did not mention, the reason even liberal professors and teachers avoided challenging such segregationist assumptions in their Georgia classrooms. They lacked the academic freedom to teach about racial integration. It was, as one UGA professor put it, “dangerous” to discuss the issue because doing so put their jobs at risk. That was clear after Georgia’s governor attacked and fired UGA’s education school dean “for just hinting that one day integration would come to the South.”

These efforts parallel some of the most extreme situations in 2022.

In some states, teachers have lost their jobs for even dabbling in anti-racist education, and Virginia’s new Republican governor recently established a hotline for turning in teachers who promote “divisive practices.”

But the UGA student essays underscore the dangers of such practices. Because schools did not address or teach about racism or its history, it freed far-right politicians, parents, families and friends to school even the brightest and most capable young White Georgians in racial bigotry.

While red-state America in 2022, is far different from Georgia in 1961, this history provides a stark warning: When schools cannot encourage candid study, and critical thinking about racism and anti-Blackness, it leads to the propitiation of the bigotry that has long plagued American society.

*Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that whites were the Chosen people, blacks were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that blacks were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to whites. Pro-segregation politicians gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the mongrelization of the white race.

Message to Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginians

US Senate to debate and vote on the Freedom to Vote Act:

Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr. in photographs

Echo editorial message to Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia:

Had Martin Luther King Jr. not been gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, while visiting that city to try and help sanitation workers to obtain a livable wage, he would have turned 93 years old, on January 15th.

His legacy of nonviolent resistance, fighting for civil rights and equality for what he termed “Black and Brown people” is a fight that continues to this day.

One of the key bills he fought for is no longer valid, struck down June 25, 2013, by a right-leaning U.S. Supreme Court in a ruling now commonly referred to as Shelby Co. vs. Holder. In that ruling, the court sent forever to the history books important guardrails that had been created by passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Voting Rights Act required Southern states, that had historically used Jim Crow tactics since the Reconstruction era (Dec 8, 1863- March 31, 1877) to limit Black and Brown citizens’ access to the voting booth, to obtain pre-clearance from the U.S. Justice Department for any changes in their state elections laws.

From left, Ralph Abernathy, James Forman, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Jesse Douglas and John Lewis lead a march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, in a scene from the Paramount documentary “I Am MLK Jr.” photo credit...Steve Schapiro.

With a growing number of misled Americans believing the 2020, presidential election is (false!) invalid, many states have rushed to enact laws that will make it even more difficult for minorities to vote.

In Georgia, for example, its newfangled voting coup allows state officials to go to any of its 159, county elections boards and simply take them over. Georgia officials have done this so far in counties that have majority-minority populations, including Fulton County, the seat of state government.

This is also the same county in which pro-Trump officials accused an elections worker of stealing votes. Since that unfounded accusation, as Reuters reported in December 2021, Ruby Freeman had to go into hiding to save her own life.

“Death threats from angry Trump supporters forced Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman, a 62-year-old grandmother, to flee her home of 20 years. Some messages called for her hanging; one urged people to ‘hunt’ her. Freeman showed hundreds of menacing messages to police and called 911 three times,” according to the report.

Oftentimes, the answer is right in front of our faces.

That answer continues to be, as we have stated on this page before, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Both bills would end “dark money” donations and increase access to voting, which is, after all, the linchpin of American democracy. Lewis was a confidant of King’s and was there with King on many marches and nonviolent actions, including the historic march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the march on Selma, Alabama.

“The Freedom to Vote Act also advances civil rights and racial justice. It restores federal voting rights to returning citizens who have been released from prison after serving their sentences. The bill includes targeted protections to ensure underserved and vulnerable communities, such as those with disabilities and Native Americans, aren’t disenfranchised through no fault of their own,” according to the Brennan Center.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted this week to send the Freedom to Vote Act to the divided U.S. Senate where Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., is one of the bill’s co-sponsors. Manchin even spent hours working on the bill in an attempt to make it bipartisan.

However, since Republicans continue to resist the change by disparaging the bill as a federal takeover of state elections, they continue to fail the voting public. 

Not one Republican has come forward to offer an alternative to the Freedom to Vote Act.

All the public keeps hearing about is protecting Senate rules, which speaks of plain and simple politics, not governing, not advancing America forward, which is every lawmakers’ job. It’s time the conversation shifts to protecting democracy — plain and simple.

What you do, Sen. Manchin, speaks so loudly we cannot hear what you say.

Stand up for America, not some contrived thing called the filibuster.

President Joe Biden visits President Jimmy Carter - sends strong support message to Georgia voters

President Biden will visit President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn in Georgia.  Finally!  A brilliant symbol to the Georgian voters, letting them know that they made the right choice in voting for him and thereby giving him the ability to lead the US with two Democratic Senators! President Biden will acknowledge the sea turn and recognize President Carter's ethical Democratic leadership!

On the other hand, shame on Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins who, during a ZOOM interview with Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, defended the Georgia voter suppression law.  

Echo editorial opinion published in the New York Amsterdam-News.

Once again an American past imbued (motivated) with racism and discrimination is resurrected, (aka "Jim Crow"), after the GOP Georgia Governor Brian Kemp last week—against a backdrop of a slave plantation—signed a piece of legislation passed by Republicans that will severely impact the voting rights of Black residents.

President Biden was so incensed that he characterized it as “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” He viewed the nearly 100-page legislation as a “blatant attack on the Constitution and good conscience.”

The action comes as a direct response to the last election cycle in which the state of Georgia, turned blue, was so decisive in changing the political landscape.

Gov. Kemp’s support of Georgia lawmakers is just the most recent attempt to turn back the clock, and President Biden is spot on in his challenge of this insidious attack on the democratic process.

The world witnessed a violent aspect of this retrenchment back on January 5th,  with the mob upheaval (insurrection) at the Capitol, and now lawmakers, not only in Georgia, are seeking ways to make these reactionary feelings less bloody, but no less consequential, by ramrodding laws through state governmental bodies.

Yes, Mr. President, Jim Crow is alive and well, and what he represents is just as demeaning and dangerous as it was back in the 1870s when the KKK came into existence.

What happened recently in Georgia is a harbinger that other states—and state rights is the operative phrase here—are moving speedily to evoke and to halt the Biden’s administration’s determination to right the wrongs of the previous years, if not the distant past.

Voter suppression has emerged with an even greater portent to deny the franchise of African Americans and other people of color, and we applaud President Biden for addressing this spreading menace.

Either we become more vigilant and steadfast against this diabolical plot or succumb to its devastation. As one of our media mavens has suggested, “We must pay close attention” or be complicit in the undertow drowning our quest for total freedom and justice.

We hear you loud and clear President Biden, and Joe we got your back!

Editorial Board

Georgia Republicans fear a multiracial electorate

"Passing out food and drink to voters is also criminalized and partisan poll watchers will have to undergo training."- Savannah Morning News

Jim Crow laws - "Let us march on ballot boxes until brotherhood becomes more than a meaningless word in an opening prayer, but the order of the day on every legislative agenda,” Dr. Martin Luther King.

Echo opinion published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution news:

In response to a highly contested and highly scrutinized election, the majority of Georgia legislators rejected facts and embraced fear-mongering and conspiracy theories. 

Georgia's Governor Brian Kemp and the Republicans in the state legislature rejected the same electoral process in which they, themselves, won election. Senate Bill 202 is an anti-voter bill that attacks absentee voting, criminalizes giving Georgians a drink of water to their neighbors, allows state takeover of county elections, and retaliates against the elected Secretary of State by replacing him with a State Board of Elections Chair chosen by the legislature — not the voters.

The General Assembly voted to undermine our democracy by attempting to manipulate not only the electorate, but also the 159 independent boards of election in the counties. As always, the burden of these changes falls most heavily on voters of color.

In that speech in Montgomery, Dr. King provided a history lesson — that Jim Crow and segregation were created following Reconstruction, because “the Negro and white masses of the South threatened to unite and build a great society: a society of justice where none would prey upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away; a society of brotherhood where every man would respect the dignity and worth of human personality.”

In 2020, Georgians united, again in a multiracial, multicultural coalition that elected a white man and a woman of Asian and African descent to the highest offices in the land and a Jewish man and a Black Baptist preacher to the U.S. Senate.

Georgia voters elected the most diverse General Assembly in our history, and chose Black Americans to lead county commissions, district attorney offices and sheriff’s offices in formerly “white flight” suburbs.

Again, we face a backlash against multiracial democracy.

The majority that controls the General Assembly rejected the multiracial vision that welcomed the world to Atlanta in 1996, built the world’s-busiest airport, and created one of the most popular hospitality and logistics centers in the United States.

We will follow Dr. King’s admonition, “Let us march on ballot boxes until brotherhood becomes more than a meaningless word in an opening prayer, but the order of the day on every legislative agenda.”

Andrea Young is executive director of the ACLU of Georgia.

22,000 member American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia. 

She is a life-long advocate for civil and human rights. 

The ACLU of Georgia is a trusted, ethical, nonpartisan defender of our civil liberties: opposing threats to civil liberties; combatting voter suppression; supporting criminal justice reform; protecting freedom of speech, immigrant rights, and women’s rights, especially reproductive freedom. 

Republicans repugnant in the age of Donald Trumpziism- a powerful stereo opinion

Echo opinion by Charles M. Blow published in The New York Times: Trumpism’s Infinite Vulgarities

Republicans have come to accept what they once professed to abhor.

(Maine Writer- In other words, the toxic "kool-aid" is becoming addictive to Republicans.)

The terrains of acceptability and respectability have shifted under the American conservative.

That which was once forbidden is now embraced. That which they once condemned they cheer. Conservatism has been unveiled in all its craven glory. No longer is it shrouded behind morality, small government, traditional values and spending concerns.

Donald Trump is the new doctrine, and Republicans bought it. There is no amount of cruelty or crudeness he can display that Republicans won’t cheer and defend. His corruption has become theirs.

And, it is possible that Trump is growing bolder in his coarseness, and it is revealed that there is precious little that will shake loose his base and its blind devotion to him.

Last week, Trump went on more profanity-laced tirades. At a campaign rally in Minnesota, Trump said of Joe Biden: “He was only a good vice president because he understood how to kiss Barack Obama’s ass.”

Let’s ignore for the moment that one could not find a more obsequious vice president than Mike Pence, a man who looks at Trump like he’s made of rainbows and cotton candy. (Talk about "kissing ass..."- ugh!)

Let’s instead focus on the coding of the charge against Biden, whether Trump is conscious of it or not, whether it was intentional or not.

The insult invokes a fear and disdain that white racists have had throughout American history: The subjugation of the white man to the black one.

Indeed, Jim Crow (the illegal practice of segregating black people in the US) was born out of a fear of “Negro domination” in which white Southerners were deadly afraid that they could be forced to live under black rule in the wake of the Civil War.

This was a real possibility. In the 1870 census, the first after the enslaved were emancipated, several Southern states were majority black and several others were within striking distance of that marker.

And many Southerners despised Northern liberals for seeming to encourage the ascendance of black people in the South.

So, Southern states, beginning with Mississippi, called constitutional conventions to write white supremacy into the DNA of those states.

The subjugation of Biden, the Northern white liberal, to the black man is not only a symbol but an omen. The white supremacists see this as a particular kind of racial betrayal and racial subjugation that can never be made normal.

To them, these white men and women who would happily play second fiddle to a black man — or white feminist, or someone who is Hispanic or Arab, or someone who is LGBTQ — is engaged in surrender of the white racist patriarchy. It is a sign of weakened, misplaced affections, and a lust of annihilation. These white liberals to them are N-word lovers.

That is why Obama stays on the tip of Trump’s tongue. The invocation of him is a hot-wire shorthand that gives an emotional charge to his statements that his audience receives intuitively. The racism is coded, received, without the burden of delivery.

The disdain for and distrust of Obama is still strong and abiding.

Conservatives scoured every facet of his life looking for a scandal and found none. They picked at every imaginary faux pas — wearing a tan suit, putting his feet on the desk, putting mustard on his burger — and yet they not only defend Trump’s truly vulgar behaviors, they cheer them.

Sarah Palin made a whole campaign out of saying that Obama “pals around with terrorists,” while Trump quite literally cozies up to murderous dictators and brags about the love letters he exchanges with one.

Republicans see nothing wrong here. Trump is a rich white man defending white supremacy and white nationalism. For him, the rules are different. For him, certain dispensations must be given.

According to Politico:

“One of Donald Trump’s most prominent Christian supporters will argue in a book due out before the 2020 general election that American evangelicals ‘have a moral obligation to enthusiastically back’ the president.”

How can that be?

Pat Robertson, upset last week over Trump’s unconscionable abandoning of the Kurds in northern Syria, said: “The president of the United States is in danger of losing the mandate of heaven if he permits this to happen.”

As if he had a mandate from heaven.

The way that the Religious Right has bent and distorted biblical doctrine to support this vulgar man is absolutely obscene. It makes a mockery of their faith and their supposed philosophies.

The moment that Trump insisted on separating immigrant children from their families, locking those children in cages and arguing in court against having to provide soap and toothbrushes to those children, or against turning off the lights so that they could sleep, should have been the red line to any true Christian — or for any human being with a shred of compassion, regardless of faith. But it wasn’t. So, now I no longer know what to call these people.

Righteousness simply can’t be this transactional and situational. What is the point of your books of rules if you will gladly oblige a man who flouts them? Either morality has meaning or it doesn’t.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram.

Stacy Abrams speech transcript - rebuttal to Trump marathon gibberish

“This is the next battle for our democracy”: Stacey Abrams answers Trump with voting rights- A Vox.com report

In the Democratic response to Trump’s State

In the formal Democratic response to Trump’s 2019 State of the Union speech, Stacey Abrams made the case for fundamental election reform, particularly in light of today’s dynamics in Washington.

“This is the next battle for our democracy, one where all eligible citizens can have their say about the vision we want for our country,” Abrams said. “We must reject the cynicism that says allowing every eligible vote to be cast and counted is a ‘power grab.’”

She followed that call by invoking Jim Crow and the legislative milestones of the civil rights era, urging America to take more seriously the lingering stains of racism and inequality in this country.

“We fought Jim Crow with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, yet we continue to confront racism from our past and in our present — which is why we must hold everyone from the very highest offices to our own families accountable for racist words and deeds, and call racism what it is. Wrong.”

The job of a State of the Union response is usually a thankless one, but the former Georgia House minority leader, who lost her governor’s race against Republican Brian Kemp amid rampant concerns of voter suppression, was a powerful messenger on the need for protections of voting rights.

House Democrats have made a significant package of reforms — making Election Day a holiday, automatically registering voters, and overhauling campaign finance laws — one of their top priorities in the new Congress. Abrams used her platform on Tuesday to advocate for the top item on the Democratic agenda, making a case to the nation about the need to overhaul the nation’s elections in order to preserve and protect democracy.

Abrams’s “power grab” line was a reference to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has never been shy about opposing such reforms and who has called the Democratic plan a “power 

grab” in floor speeches and newspaper op-eds.




Abrams also scolded President Trump for the recent government shutdown, the longest in American history at more than 30 days. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers missed two paychecks (though they will be repaid), and even more federal contractors also went without pay (and they will likely not be compensated) — many of them low-paid workers of color.

The former Georgia lawmaker said she recently volunteered to serve meals to furloughed federal workers who had gone without pay.

“Making their livelihoods a pawn for political games is a disgrace,” Abrams said. “The shutdown was a stunt engineered by the president of the United States, one that defied every tenet of fairness and abandoned not just our people but our values.”

Lastly, Abrams criticized the president and his party’s agenda as out of touch with the economic needs of Americans. Democrats ran in the 2018 midterms on opposition to the Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the tax law that they said favored corporations over the middle and working classes.

Abrams herself pledged to expand Medicaid if she had been elected governor in Georgia, which has refused to extend health coverage to hundreds of thousands of poor residents. Democrats in the House are planning to pass a bill increasing the federal minimum wage to $15, though it is not expected to be picked up by the GOP-controlled Senate, nor would it likely be signed by Trump.

“In Georgia and around the country, people are striving for a middle class where a salary truly equals economic security. But instead, families’ hopes are being crushed by Republican leadership that ignores real life or just doesn’t understand it,” Abrams said. “The Republican tax bill rigged the system against working people. Rather than bringing back jobs, plants are closing, layoffs are looming, and wages struggle to keep pace with the actual cost of living.”

A transcript of Abrams’s full remarks are below.

Good evening, my fellow Americans. I’m Stacey Abrams, and I am honored to join the conversation about the state of our union. Growing up, my family went back and forth between lower middle class and working poor.

Yet, even when they came home weary and bone-tired, my parents found a way to show us all who we could be. My librarian mother taught us to love learning. My father, a shipyard worker, put in overtime and extra shifts; and they made sure we volunteered to help others. Later, they both became United Methodist ministers, an expression of the faith that guides us.

These were our family values – faith, service, education and responsibility.

Now, we only had one car, so sometimes my dad had to hitchhike and walk long stretches during the 30 mile trip home from the shipyards. One rainy night, Mom got worried. We piled in the car and went out looking for him - and eventually found Dad making his way along the road, soaked and shivering in his shirtsleeves. When he got in the car, Mom asked if he’d left his coat at work. He explained he’d given it to a homeless man he’d met on the highway. When we asked why he’d given away his only jacket, Dad turned to us and said, “I knew when I left that man, he’d still be alone. But I could give him my coat, because I knew you were coming for me.”

Our power and strength as Americans lives in our hard work and our belief in more. My family understood firsthand that while success is not guaranteed, we live in a nation where opportunity is possible. But we do not succeed alone – in these United States, when times are tough, we can persevere because our friends and neighbors will come for us. Our first responders will come for us.

It is this mantra – this uncommon grace of community – that has driven me to become an attorney, a small business owner, a writer, and most recently, the Democratic nominee for Governor of Georgia. My reason for running for governor was simple: I love our country and its promise of opportunity for all, and I stand here tonight because I hold fast to my father’s credo – together, we are coming for America, for a better America.

Just a few weeks ago, I joined volunteers to distribute meals to furloughed federal workers. They waited in line for a box of food and a sliver of hope since they hadn’t received a paycheck in weeks. Making their livelihoods a pawn for political games is a disgrace. The shutdown was a stunt engineered by the President of the United States, one that defied every tenet of fairness and abandoned not just our people - but our values.

For seven years, I led the Democratic Party in the Georgia House of Representatives. I didn’t always agree with the Republican Speaker or Governor, but I understood that our constituents didn’t care about our political parties – they cared about their lives. So, when we had to negotiate criminal justice reform or transportation or foster care improvements, the leaders of our state didn’t shut down – we came together. And we kept our word.

It should be no different in our nation’s capital. We may come from different sides of the political aisle; but, our joint commitment to the ideals of this nation cannot be negotiable.

Our most urgent work is to realize Americans’ dreams of today and tomorrow. To carve a path to independence and prosperity that can last a lifetime. Children deserve an excellent education from cradle to career. We owe them safe schools and the highest standards, regardless of zip code.

Yet this White House responds timidly while first graders practice active shooter drills and the price of higher education grows ever steeper. From now on, our leaders must be willing to tackle gun safety measures and the crippling effect of educational loans; to support educators and invest what is necessary to unleash the power of America’s greatest minds.

In Georgia and around the country, people are striving for a middle class where a salary truly equals economic security. But instead, families’ hopes are being crushed by Republican leadership that ignores real life or just doesn’t understand it. Under the current administration, far too many hard-working Americans are falling behind, living paycheck to paycheck, most without labor unions to protect them from even worse harm.

The Republican tax bill rigged the system against working people. Rather than bringing back jobs, plants are closing, layoffs are looming and wages struggle to keep pace with the actual cost of living.

We owe more to the millions of everyday folks who keep our economy running: like truck drivers forced to buy their own rigs, farmers caught in a trade war, small business owners in search of capital, and domestic workers serving without labor protections. Women and men who could thrive if only they had the support and freedom to do so.

We know bipartisanship could craft a 21st century immigration plan, but this administration chooses to cage children and tear families apart. Compassionate treatment at the border is not the same as open borders. President Reagan understood this. President Obama understood this. Americans understand this. And Democrats stand ready to effectively secure our ports and borders. But we must all embrace that from agriculture to healthcare to entrepreneurship, America is made stronger by the presence of immigrants – not walls.

Rather than suing to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, as Republican Attorneys General have, our leaders must protect the progress we’ve made and commit to expanding health care and lowering costs for everyone.

My father has battled prostate cancer for years. To help cover the costs, I found myself sinking deeper into debt – because while you can defer some payments, you can’t defer cancer treatment. In this great nation, Americans are skipping blood pressure pills, forced to choose between buying medicine or paying rent. Maternal mortality rates show that mothers, especially black mothers, risk death to give birth. And in 14 states, including my home state where a majority want it, our leaders refuse to expand Medicaid, which could save rural hospitals, economies, and lives.

We can do so much more: take action on climate change. Defend individual liberties with fair-minded judges. But none of these ambitions are possible without the bedrock guarantee of our right to vote. Let’s be clear: voter suppression is real. From making it harder to register and stay on the rolls to moving and closing polling places to rejecting lawful ballots, we can no longer ignore these threats to democracy.

While I acknowledged the results of the 2018 election here in Georgia – I did not and we cannot accept efforts to undermine our right to vote. That’s why I started a nonpartisan organization called Fair Fight to advocate for voting rights.

This is the next battle for our democracy, one where all eligible citizens can have their say about the vision we want for our country. We must reject the cynicism that says allowing every eligible vote to be cast and counted is a “power grab.” Americans understand that these are the values our brave men and women in uniform and our veterans risk their lives to defend. The foundation of our moral leadership around the globe is free and fair elections, where voters pick their leaders – not where politicians pick their voters.

In this time of division and crisis, we must come together and stand for, and with, one another. America has stumbled time and again on its quest towards justice and equality; but with each generation, we have revisited our fundamental truths, and where we falter, we make amends.

We fought Jim Crow with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, yet we continue to confront racism from our past and in our present – which is why we must hold everyone from the very highest offices to our own families accountable for racist words and deeds – and call racism what it is. Wrong.

America achieved a measure of reproductive justice in Roe v. Wade, but we must never forget it is immoral to allow politicians to harm women and families to advance a political agenda. We affirmed marriage equality, and yet, the LGBTQ community remains under attack.

So even as I am very disappointed by the president’s approach to our problems – I still don’t want him to fail. But we need him to tell the truth, and to respect his duties and the extraordinary diversity that defines America.

Our progress has always found refuge in the basic instinct of the American experiment – to do right by our people. And with a renewed commitment to social and economic justice, we will create a stronger America, together. Because America wins by fighting for our shared values against all enemies: foreign and domestic. That is who we are – and when we do so, never wavering - the state of our union will always be strong.

Thank you, and may God bless the United States of America.