Questions for us all

Why do I read Matt Yglesias? He's routinely something of a know-it-all twit. But skimming through his broad range of topics does broaden my own thinking -- so yes, I do read him.

Today he answered an interesting reader question:

Vasav Swaminathan: In honor of the fourth of July, what was America's greatest moment? Of all time? Of your lifetime? Of the last decade?

Of all time, I would say World War II and the Marshall Plan. Of my lifetime, probably PEPFAR. And of the last decade, either the rapid development of Covid vaccines or the rapid deployment of emergency military aid to Ukraine. 

I can take a swing at that question. It's interesting.

Click to enlarge.

America's greatest moment of all time? Unequivocally, the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. By the middle of the 1860s, the Union army had obliterated the Confederate rebellion in a bloody war which ended slavery. At the conclusion of that war, the President -- Abraham Lincoln -- who had cautiously and bravely led the North through that terrible trial of the nation's values, was assassinated by a sympathizer of the losing South. His Vice-President, the south-sympathizing Andrew Johnson, was quite prepared make peace with the defeated states on terms that allowed continuation of white oligarchic rule over the freed slaves. 

Republican majorities in Congress (the GOP was a different animal then!) stumbled their way through complicated legislative maneuvers, including a failed impeachment of Johnson, to enacting the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution which were meant to ensure we'd be a democratically organized country observing citizens' rights. No more chattel slavery, the rule of law must be recognized by the various states, and no denial of the right to vote on the basis of race -- roughly speaking. 

Yes -- the current Supreme Court is trying to gut these accomplishments. But those 19th century Americans were right to enact their "rebirth of freedom" then and we are right now, to hell with John Roberts and his posse of black-robed crooks.

Of my lifetime? That's easy. The Black civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s which forced the reaffirmation and re-invigoration of Reconstruction amendment principles, including forcing one-person, one-vote districts, integration of public schools and public facilities, and, by extension, full citizenship for women and LGBT people.

The current MAGA party doesn't recognize any of that either. We're being subjected to the ascendancy of aggrieved ignorant white men. I guess we have to rise up against cruelty and bigotry again ...

Of the last decade?  On this I find myself agreeing with Yglesias: the development and deployment of the COVID vaccine pointed the way to species-survival in the world humans have made. We can make a livable world if we can overcome the fraction of us who are too dumb or too self-centered to understand the project.

Thanks Matt! How would you answer those questions?

Remembering the Birmingham church bombing

I do remember the bombing by KuKluxKlan white supremacists of that Alabama brick Black church in 1963. The next few days, pictures were all over the Buffalo News and the Buffalo Courier which my parents received daily. The horror stuck.

Religion News Service shared a set of pictures from the bombing which I'll post here.

A man falls to his knees in prayer amid shattered glass from windows of the 16th Street Baptist Church and surrounding buildings in Birmingham, Alabama, in Sept. 1963. Four young girls died as a racist’s bomb exploded at 10:22 a.m. on Sept. 15, 1963, during worship services and Sunday school sessions. In the following outbreak of violence throughout the area, two young black men were shot to death. Pleas for effort to stop further bloodshed were issued from government, civil rights and religious leaders across the nation. Religion News Service file photo

 

Firemen and ambulance attendants remove a covered body from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where an explosion ripped though the structure during services, killing four black girls, on Sept. 15, 1963. Sarah Collins Rudolph lost an eye and has pieces of glass inside her body from a Ku Klux Klan bombing that killed her sister and three other Black girls inside the Alabama church. (AP Photo, File)

Mourners gather around Mr. and Mrs. Alvin Robertson Sr., seated at right, and a sister, at left, of 14-year-old Carole Robertson. Carole and three other young girls, attending Sunday school in the basement of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, died in the 1963 terrorist bombing. Religion News Service file photo

Yesterday's commemoration in the Baptist Church:

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the nation’s highest court, speaks at the 60th Commemoration of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing Friday, Sept. 15, 2023, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)

Never again? It feels hard to promise ...

Marching on in faith

Monday, August 28, is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, remembered today for Dr. King's "I have a dream ..." proclamation. There will be commemorations, congratulations, and calls for renewed energy in the incomplete struggle for the freedom of all.

Inevitably looking back 60 years, we telescope events and markers of the Civil Rights movement era which actually spread from the late 1940s through at least 1968. The great march was not an end point, but perhaps a pivot point; what had been many localized eruptions became unequivocally national afterwards. A broad movement coalition was formed for the day; this won the grudging attention of the ruling Democratic Party powers-that-be ... and change followed.

Professor Peniel E. Joseph of UT-Austin describes the context. 

No major civil rights legislation passed in 1963, but it was the most important year in the decade that transformed America.... The forces that fueled segregation and racial hierarchy in America — and the forces that galvanized the political resistance to both — sped up that year. 

... The March for Jobs and Freedom, announced July 2, forged a new consensus across partisan divides by linking American traditions of freedom and democracy with the Black movement’s aspirational notions of dignity and citizenship.... Bayard Rustin — a Black, gay and radical social democrat who spent time in prison as a conscientious objector during World War II — led the organizing of the March On Washington at the behest of A. Philip Randolph, the legendary founder and labor leader who served as head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin endured vicious homophobia within and outside of the movement. ...

Yet Rustin endured, making a final unstoppable comeback within movement circles through his ingenuous organizing skills that helped ensure the eclectic coalition of religious, labor, student, civil rights, business and civic groups were all there in Washington, equipped with buses, portable toilets, sandwiches, water fountains, chairs for dignitaries and more....

That's how a social movement gets things done: broad coalitions enabled by competent logistics. Or so I believe.

The minister of my Buffalo, NY, Episcopal parish attended; his daughter and I were envious. But supportive white northerners didn't think this was anything to take kids to -- sixteen years old was less mature in 1963 than it is today. In a distanced sense, far away parents knew the freedom struggle was no picnic, that violent pushback was always a possibility. As it was. As it is.

Ten years ago, in 2013, another commemoration of the great march took place in Washington. Via Religious News Service, comes this affirmation of the faith from those participants.

Edith Lee-Payne explains: "... it means to me - as a person of faith - a re-dedication that with God all things are possible. ... we knew that sometimes God takes us through some things ... [God] takes us through them to get us where God wants us to be."

The struggle for liberty is not finished, or even fully engaged

Carla Hall is an opinion writer for the Los Angeles Times: 

In America, liberty has never been part of a woman’s brief, and our personal autonomy has neither been spelled out nor assumed. It took suffragettes more than 70 years to win a federal right for women to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. Congress still won’t pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

... Now, instead, what is being spelled out in the law is what women can’t do with their bodies. In some states, they can’t terminate a pregnancy after 12 weeks of gestation, or six weeks — or ever, unless maybe they get so ill during a pregnancy that they will die without an abortion. Millions of child-bearing women live in states with no abortion rights or extremely restricted rights, putting them at risk of having to give birth against their will.

What kind of a country that believes in the pursuit of liberty and happiness does that? ...

 ... After the 1994 uprising in Chiapas, the Zapatistas enshrined women’s rights into the Women’s Revolutionary Law, which rules the way they live today. It reads in part: “Women have the right to decide how many children they will have and take care of.”

It shouldn’t take another American revolution for women in this country to simply have full autonomy over their bodies. We don’t need a new government. We just need the people who run this one to realize that without personal autonomy there is no liberty.

On this Independence Day, liberty still needs its ardent, determined friends.

As queers have long insisted, we are everywhere

Tim Mak was reporting from the war in Ukraine for NPR until that network laid him off in March in response to funding shortfalls. The former DC journalist and US Army combat medic decided he wasn't done. So he has stayed on in that invaded country and launched a substack, The Counteroffensive, promising: 

Readers will come with me to cities all across Ukraine, tasting the soups made by Ukrainian cooks, meeting the heroic animal shelter volunteers in frontline cities, and listening to patriotic Ukrainian music that’s making a comeback.

You will also experience the cruelties of war: walking through bombed out cities with Ukrainian soldiers; late-night conversations in a bomb shelter with a four-star general; observing war crimes that the Russian military and Putin are responsible for.

Pursuant to that mission, along with his journalist friends, he followed a story -- and get a rude reminder of our domestic culture war.

Editor’s note: This week we posted a story highlighting a trans activist in Ukraine; after all, Russia cited LGBTQ+ rights as a reason for the war. We didn’t anticipate the negative reaction: more than 1,000 readers unsubscribed, and we lost paid subscribers as well.

For a publication that is just two months old, it was devastating. We work seven days a week to grow our audience. However, we believe that subscriber numbers don’t mean anything if we don’t hold true to our values. We will continue to highlight marginalized communities and the people you don’t hear about in other outlets.

The Counteroffensive offers both paid and free subs. Check it out. 

• • •

Over the past weekend, the Episcopal Church commemorated the life and witness of the civil rights activist and legal innovator, the Rev. Pauli Murray. Decades before Rosa Parks, Murray refused to move to the back of a segregated bus and was arrested for her pains. 

While in law school at Howard University in DC during World War II, she participated in sit-ins demanding service at a lunch counter that refused to serve Black people. (I think we can assume Murray would have viscerally recognized the threat to all public accommodation laws implicit in the Supremes' recent decision exempting a website designer from the legal obligation to serve all comers.) 

NAACP lawyer and future Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (he's May 17 in the Church calendar) called Murray's writing "the 'Bible' for civil rights litigators." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited Murray for developing the legal underpinnings for Equal Protection law -- which is all we've got in the absence of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Late in life, Murray followed a calling to be ordained a priest, one of the first set of women to take up the vocation in 1977.

Murray enjoyed a long, complicated friendship with First Lady and human rights agitator Eleanor Roosevelt; the fragments in the previous couple of paragraphs derive from the short bio of Murray posted at the National Park Service site for one of ER's residences. 

That site attempts honestly and honorably to present one of the puzzles the amazing Pauli Murray sets for us in our current state of understanding of who people are (and who they were) to themselves:

Pronouns, Gender, Pauli Murray

Terminology and language referring to LGBTQ communities, gender expression, and gender identities is different today than it was in Pauli Murray’s lifetime. Murray self-described as a “he/she personality” in correspondence with family members. Later in journals, essays, letters and autobiographical works, Pauli employed “she/her/hers'' pronouns and self-described as a woman. Scholars use a range of pronouns when referring to Murray: “he/him/his” pronouns (Simmons-Thorne), “they/them/theirs” pronouns (Keaveney), “s/he” pronouns (Fisher), and “she/her/hers” pronouns (Rosenberg, Cooper, Drury). We don’t know how Pauli Murray would identify today or which pronouns Pauli would use for self-expression. This remains an ongoing discussion in the National Park Service, but we do recognize that pronouns matter.

Exactly. We don't know how Murray might have engaged with the possibilities of expanded understandings of sex and gender. But I think we can be sure she would have engaged forthrightly and bravely.

REI: doing the right thing

It was heartening to encounter this affirming sign in the co-op this morning. I wonder if REI is so demonstrably welcoming to all people in all locations? Corporate press releases say the answer is "yes".

Progressive folks are probably well represented in its market; REI doesn't sell guns or ammunition and urges other outdoor equipment sellers to engage with a national discussion of gun safety. This stance probably helps define who chooses to shop with REI.

It was especially good to encounter this sign right after reading Brynn Tannehill's terrifying description of how Republicans in red states are working to outlaw what they call "transgenderism" -- which amounts to outlawing transgender people. No kidding.

There is more than a hint of the attitude that “we have tolerated these people for too long, even as they destroy our nation from within and pollute our culture.” There’s incitement to violence to protect women and children, even as party-affiliated militias (whether the Sturmabteilung or the Proud Boys) engage in campaigns of intimidation. Such sentiments and statements would not seem out of place uttered by Goebbels in 1933 or Tucker Carlson today.

There’s a pattern to how states target disfavored minorities with the intention of driving them out, or underground. It starts with rhetoric demonizing a minority, designed to start a moral panic, and with laws meant to “encourage” the targeted minority to leave by making life as dangerous, unpleasant, and untenable for them as possible.

Over time, as the situation deteriorates, many choose to leave no matter what the personal cost because anything is better than this: whether it was Blacks fleeing the American South during the Great Migration or the 60 percent of German Jews who left the country between 1933 and 1939. Modern-day Republicans are not even hiding the fact that the goal of their anti-LGBTQ policies is to encourage them to flee. When a poll found that over half of Florida’s LGBTQ parents were considering leaving Florida because of Governor Ron DeSantis’s policies, his press secretary, Christina Pushaw, responded on Twitter with an emoji of a hand waving “Bye!”

The MAGA mob is serious about remaking the country in their demented image. In their warped vision, some people will have to go. Tannehill fears the GOP will try to categorize non-conforming gender identities as mental illnesses, requiring enforced "rehabilitation."

Most companies aren't going to have the guts to stand up for a minority. They are warily watching Ron DeSantis take on Disney. (Probably not the smartest target for MAGA; I'd still bet on the Mouse.) Even relatively small companies that do show courage are important to building the broadest coalition possible that stands for freedom and dignity for all. Thanks REI.

A warning of civil violence

Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has described a pattern of developing civil violence that should worry us all. She contends that in societies where political terrorism takes root, there's a pattern.

Violent groups that get involved in politics in other countries follow a common path ... 

At first, politicians recruit experts in violence and intimidation to use those tools as a campaign tactic.  

Later, those violent leaders run for office or take political roles directly, cutting out the political middleman. Usually, what they want is power and impunity, so that they can make money from more lucrative criminal activities, though sometimes they simply want power for its own sake.  

To understand where this can lead: 11 of India’s current national legislators face open cases for murder, 30 have attempted murder charges and 10 serving legislators have been convicted of such serious crimes – a doubling from ten years ago.

In India, with its long history of violent religious sectarian violence, this may not seem so surprising -- though sadly, India once proclaimed itself the world's largest democracy before the current Hindu nationalist government came to power.

In the U.S., we're seeing all too much of Kleinfeld's pattern. In Pennsylvania, the Republican candidate for governor paid for buses to Washington for supporters of Donald Trump's January 6 attempted coup. Doug Mastriano has been subpoenaed to testify about what he did that day.

Here in Nevada, Republican candidates for both U.S. Senate and state governor are adherents to the Big Lie. The GOP candidate for secretary of state (the official who runs elections) insists the vote in 2020 was rigged and that he wouldn't hesitate to overturn a majority vote of Nevadans if he were in office.

Kleinfeld has taken note of ominous developments in the state where we're working on the midterms:

In Nevada, it appears more clear that the Proud Boys are still at the first stage, being recruited by unscrupulous political actors who are using their violence to amass more power for themselves. ... Why would a faction of Republicans still in power or running for office at the federal, state, and local level make common cause with violent criminals? Because violence and intimidation are already bolstering their power. ...

We sometimes look away, but violence from the right has been escalating ever since Barack Obama broke the rule that a Black man could not be elected President.

... Americans may feel that these incidents of political violence are “high politics” that they can avoid if they steer clear of the political arena. That feeling is widespread in countries I have studied where political violence grows to dangerous levels. It Is always a false hope.  

In the United States, it is already far more dangerous to exercise freedom of speech than in the recent past. Driving cars into civilians used to be a tactic favored by overseas terrorists. It had been recorded just twice in the United States before James Alex Fields Jr. murdered Heather Heyer by driving into a crowd of counter-protestors at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. Yet from George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020 through September 30, 2021, at least 139 drivers drove their cars into protests across America, injuring 100 – sometimes severely – and killing four. ... 

... Violence begets violence – once its use mainstreams, moderates who espouse non-violence appear anemic and unable to offer protection to their side. The middle weakens, while violence eventually takes on a rhythm of reprisal far removed from the original causes. ... Even if Trump passes from the scene, the embrace of violence and intimidation as a political tactic by a faction of the GOP will cause violence of all types to rise – against all Americans.

No one is exempt. And our civil society could become a nightmare.

A growing divergence between young women and young men

Thanks to Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) for this interesting data point:

Responses suggested several possible reasons for this trend.

There's the obvious: Republicans, especially since the rise of the Donald, have made themselves the party of male anger. Screaming misogyny and abortion bans are off-putting and liberals claim to point to a happier future for young women.

In addition, as Erudite Partner explored in June, almost two out of three current college students are women.

Democrats are speaking quite directly to this trend. In an upstate New York House race in which the vote is August 23, aspiring Congressman Democrat Pat Ryan is running this ad.

Picture of the day

Overcoming many predictions, women in Kansas have preserved abortion rights by popular vote. Along with their menfolk, of course.

See rejoicing!

Who is left and who is right

Matt Yglesias offered one of his counterintuitive takes at his Slow Boring substack recently that that I found worth thinking about:

American politics has been shifting leftward for years. 

I know some people find that absurd. But imagine if [Republican House Speaker-in-waiting] Kevin McCarthy gave a speech this week where he said “after we retake the House this fall, we’re going to fight against wokeness by kicking gay soldiers out of the military and curb inflation by privatizing Social Security and cutting Medicaid and K-12 school funding.” That would be the best news the DCCC and DSCC have heard in years! But it would just mean McCarthy was reiterating his support for Paul Ryan’s policy ideas from 10 years ago. Meanwhile, Biden’s positions on virtually everything are at least a little bit to the left of Obama’s.

I think he is correct that Dems have moved left in many respects. 

This very broad coalition has to cover a lot of bases; we are a magnificent mix struggling to preserve a democracy in which citizen participation gives majorities some power. This coalition also struggles between and among its constituencies. This mystifies GOPers. Our internal battles look like "moving left" to a mono-cultural Republican party of old, white Christian nationalists. And they do move us somewhere new, in uneven fashion. 

But Matt's take is belied by what we saw in the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. Republicans haven't moderated their most repressive aims; they merely expect to shift the battle away from the people to their packed court. At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern saw all too clear portents in the Republican grilling of the next Justice that, after decreeing that women are just vessels for fetuses, they hope the Court will come after the notion of a right to sexual privacy and individual choice, starting with gay marriage and moving on to contraception.

During Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearings this week, GOP senators have, predictably, condemned Roe—but not as much as might be expected. Instead, many senators have turned their attention to a different precedent that’s likely next on their hit list once Roe likely falls this summer: Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision recognizing same-sex couples’ constitutional right to marry. 

Loathing for Obergefell emerged early on Tuesday, when Republican Sen. John Cornyn launched a frontal assault on the ruling, then sought Jackson’s reaction. He began by criticizing “substantive due process,” which holds that the “liberty” protected by the due process clause protects substantive rights, not just procedural ones. The Supreme Court has used this theory to enforce “unenumerated rights” that it deems fundamental, including the right to marry, raise children, use contraception, and terminate a pregnancy. Along with equal protection, it served as the basis of Obergefell. According to Cornyn, however, this doctrine is “just another form of judicial policymaking” that can be used “to justify basically any result.” 

... In case it wasn’t clear what these senators were up to, Cornyn made it explicit on Wednesday afternoon. “The Constitution doesn’t mention the word abortion,” he lectured Jackson, “just like it doesn’t mention the word marriage.” ...

Look for these attacks on the lives of us all to be labelled "protecting religious freedom." As a person who identifies with a religion, I am offended.

This packed Supreme Court will be an obstacle to human freedom -- and to the desires of majorities of us -- until it isn't. How that happens I don't know, but if we preserve democracy, it will happen.

On flipping states toward democracy

 

The corporate campaign to push back against Republican voter suppression legislation is on in Georgia. This billboard targeting one of Atlanta's biggest businesses was paid for by the New Georgia Project which is leading the resistance to GOPer efforts to crush democracy when they don't like the results of people voting. The sort of ant-democratic voting rules they are pushing are only a little less violent than the 1/6 assault on the Capitol. I mean, outlawing giving out water to people waiting in long lines to vote? 

In a recent interview with the Times' Kara Swisher, Georgia voting rights leader Stacey Abrams explained the strategic insight which led to the creation of the New Georgia Project. All of us concerned with organizing ourselves for more effective progressive politics can learn from her.

I am part of a coalition of organizations. I would say I had a bit of a lead in the process in that I helped to secure tens of millions of dollars for the state of Georgia. I have been a clarion demanding attention for the state for about a decade. I helped build infrastructure and invest in organizations. I mean, one thing that Lauren [Groh-Wargo, Abrams' political director/side-kick] and I are always very intentional about is when we raise money, we share our resources. So when we did the New Georgia Project back in 2014, we took a quarter of a million dollars and made sure we gave it to other organizations that weren’t going to have access to the resources we did. 

In 2020 and 2021, we shelled out more than $25 million to other organizations. And so my posture is that, yes, I had a leadership role in this, and in a lot of ways became sort of the avatar for what happened. But what I always want people to remember is that it took a coalition of organizations more than a decade to get us here.

Swisher: So what did you learn from Georgia 2020 that you think would help turn states blue? How do you scale? 

Abrams: There’s scaling, and then there’s replication. Sometimes you scale an organization so that the organization just expands its service map. 

And sometimes you replicate it in the franchise system. And instead, you say here are the benchmarks, here are the metrics, and here are the resources you need, but then you allow each franchisee to adapt to where they are. Changing a state is a franchise model. It’s not a scaling model. 

And our responsibility, my responsibility is to make certain that any franchisee of democracy, plus any franchisees of Democratic transformation, big D, that they have the building blocks they need as a franchise would. But my intention is not the scaling notion. That is, I should not be making the decisions —

She's talking about creating and aiding organizations that are rooted in their places and can, with investment of sweat and money, turn their places in a progressive direction.

Abrams: ... you got to figure out what your opportunities are where you are. Then the building blocks are the same. The building blocks are, you’ve got to build political power within your actual party. Your party has to be effective. You have to understand what the party is and what the party isn’t. You have to have political leaders that are willing to take risks and work with other political leaders, not worrying about who gets the credit. 

You’ve got to raise absurd amounts of money, but that money can be raised. And part of the conversation we’re having is with donors that they need to invest in places and understand that investment cannot be a one-off, and they cannot only show up during elections. 

You’ve got to work with the grassroots organizations and recognize that they don’t have to have the exact same methodology that you have. But they have to have a combined ethos and an intentionality of working together. And then you have to wash, rinse, repeat, and evaluate what you did that worked and what you did that didn’t work and whose fault it was.

She has proved she knows whereof she speaks.

Don't miss joy as a Virginia state Voting Rights Act becomes a law

We're about be in for a season of Democrats trying to extend voting rights through federal legislation, which is their constitutional right through Congress. It's going to be a complex struggle.

And meanwhile, Republicans are trying to reduce who can vote, as an Arizona lawyer defending restrictions explained to the Supreme Court last week:

“What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?" Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, referencing legal standing.

 “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” said Michael Carvin, the lawyer defending the state's restrictions. “Politics is a zero-sum game. And every extra vote they get through unlawful interpretation of Section 2 hurts us, it’s the difference between winning an election 50-49 and losing an election 51 to 50.”

He thinks everyone voting is unfair and must be illegal! GOPer rejection of majority rule is getting explicit and very ugly.

But horrible as this is, something perfectly amazing just happened in Virginia. 

Not so long ago, Virginia was Dixie, the land of celebrating the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee. It was a place that still had segregated toilets in my youth -- driving through with my mother escaping Buffalo winters on spring break, I marveled in horror.

In the last few years, an emerging majority of people of color and a significant fraction of suburban whites in the DC and Richmond suburbs have won the state legislature and governor's office for Democrats. That new majority worked to pass a Voting Right Act for the state. Listen to a legislator, Delegate Marcia Price, and share her delight in this once unthinkable accomplishment:

Those of us in other states won't know all the names of allies that she shouts out to, but we can catch the gist: it takes everyone working together to make democracy real.

"There is nothing extraordinary about us that do the work. It is just the choosing to do it. So whatever your lane is, whatever your time, talent and resources can get done ... GO DO THAT!"

A civil rights hero for public transit

When I came upon this banner celebrating Mary Ellen Pleasant (lived 1814(?) – January 4, 1904) on one of the most obscure public bus barns in the city, I'd never heard of her.

In case that's true of you too, here are some glimpses of the life of this amazing San Franciscan. The New York Times featured her in one of their obituaries for people they know the publication had "Overlooked."

Pleasant lived her life between the lines of legitimacy and infamy, servitude and self-invention. She became known throughout San Francisco as Mammy Pleasant, because of the years she spent as a domestic servant. Yet she was also, incredibly, a former slave who became a millionaire. Add to that improbable pairing, a dedicated abolitionist, credited with being an important conductor of the Underground Railroad.

What we know of her life history is murky, apparently including fables she encouraged herself and inventions in 19th century tabloid newspapers which found her an attractive subject. It seems mostly agreed she was born in Georgia or Louisiana sometime in the second decade of the 19th century and spent her youth as a domestic servant for a wealthy white Nantucket household, probably abolitionists. In the 1830s, she married a James Henry Smith, a white or perhaps mixed race Virginia planter. During their marriage, she led groups of enslaved men and women to freedom via the Underground Railroad to Canada. When Smith died in 1840s he left her a significant inheritance. She claimed to have helped fund John Brown's attack on the federal garrison at Harpers Ferry.

She remarried to John Pleasant and went looking for new opportunities, again according to her delayed obit:

In 1848, the California Gold Rush began and word soon spread that even blacks were free to seek their fortune on the West Coast. Pleasant heeded the call. She moved to San Francisco and found work as a cook, invisible and unimportant once again. She shrewdly eavesdropped on the wealthy people she served, and using the information, invested bits of her inheritance. “It’s quite possible that the jobs she had as a domestic were a cover that she was using because she clearly made her money from investments,” [Lynn] Hudson, [her] biographer, said in an interview.

Her portfolio grew to include shares in businesses that ranged from dairies and laundries to Wells Fargo Bank. She owned restaurants and boardinghouses, which locals whispered were actually brothels. In the 1890 census, she stated that she was a “capitalist” by profession. 

... She formed a decades-long business partnership, possibly romantic, with a white man named Thomas Bell. After his death, it turned out that much of Pleasant’s portfolio, including the mansion she designed and had built, were held in Bell’s name. Historians believe that the pair used his name in many of the business dealings to facilitate what surely would have been more difficult for a woman, and especially for a black woman. Bell’s widow sued Pleasant and won control of the Bell estate. In an instant, Pleasant’s fortune was diminished. She died in 1904.

Yet that spectacular rise and fall in wealth is not what caused Mary Ellen Pleasant to be heralded by our bus service. According to an ACLU Northern California history website, along the way this indomitable woman won a major victory for civil rights in her new state.

In 1866, a street car conductor in San Francisco refused to let her board because she was black. Outraged, Pleasant sued. The case went all the way to the California Supreme Court. In a historic decision, the court ruled that segregation on streetcars was illegal in California.

In keeping with so many episodes in her life, she didn't receive the money damages a lower court had ordered. But she landed on her feet, with an implausible victory.

San Francisco has always been a boom and bust town attracting determined, unconventional characters. Against the odds, Mary Ellen Pleasant found a right place for her talents and made it a better one.

Resources for working against voter suppression

A friend asked recently if I could point her to how to work against efforts to suppress voting rights. This is a huge subject. It is complicated by the fact that voting in this country is administered at the state and local level, so one size doesn't fit all. But it seems worth sharing the broad overview I came up with here. There's plenty of scope for any one who wants to work on this. Here's what I wrote:

The go-to source on all matters of voting fairness, voter suppression, and vote by mail is the Brennan Center for Justice.

The nation's top scholar of these matters is Rick Hasen (UC Irvine). The top voting expansion lawyer these days (Democrat) is Marc Elias. Op-ed's by either are always valuable as are news stories that quote them.

There are many groups, many organized as non-profits, that work to expand the vote. At the moment, the underlying impulse is coming from the Democrats because restricting the franchise has become part of the Republican Party's orthodoxy in a moment when it can't seem to adapt to changing demographics.

Fair Fight is working largely in Southern states, seems competent, and reasonably well funded.

Voto Latino, Black Voters Matter, and Rock the Vote work to get people registered, a major hurdle to voting.

The national ACLU Voting Rights Project has been at this forever.

In California, the ACLU in San Diego has taken the voting rights lead.

This might seem old fashioned, but in may localities, the League of Women Voters still does vital voting rights work.

All of us help by knowing as much about voting systems as possible. It seems that citizens would be familiar with election procedures, but in fact it's all sort of a black box for many people who are afraid they don't know enough to take part. You can help simply by understanding your local procedures, where to register, when elections take place ... etc.

Hope this gives you some leads. I suggest jumping in somewhere. Many of these groups want more than your money, though they all want that too.

Guaranteeing rights

The last time in U.S. political history when a substantial fraction of the people were screaming that the Constitution had enabled monstrous evil was immediately prior to the Civil War. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison famously called our basic document "a Covenant with Death, an Agreement with Hell" because it countenanced slavery. And so, eventually, conflicting passions broke the system and the nation fought a Civil War which killed 620,000 combatants. And then the victors set about fixing the Constitution.

Historian Eric Foner's The Second Founding is the story of how a radical Congress (in those days, the radicals were Republicans) set about remaking our basic law to guarantee civil equality of the races -- and how the next generation and a conservative Supreme Court set about subverting the new edifice the Civil War generation had built. Foner is the author of an exhaustive history of the Reconstruction era (1863-1877) which I've explored here, here, and here. His current book focuses on the Constitutional changes -- the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments -- which their authors believed would put the evil which they had just overthrown behind them forever.

It didn't work out that way.

• The 13th Amendment outlawed "involuntary servitude," "except as a punishment for crime" -- an exception that the states of the former Confederacy used to entrap Black citizens in "neo-Slavery" using "vagrancy" laws and other phony offenses. The ill-effects of that Constitutional phrase continue today in our disenfranchisement and discrimination against people with criminal records.

• The 14th Amendment guaranteed equality and citizenship to anyone born here. The courts fairly quickly allowed segregation laws to gut this promise of equal treatment, though the same courts rapidly became very solicitous of the "due process" for those favored phony "legal persons," big corporations.

• The 15th Amendment gave black men the vote, but the same courts allowed states to hedge the franchise with poll taxes, literacy tests, and other restrictions, gutting the franchise.

Congress built further interpretation and implementation into the amendments. But this ran the risk that their purposes could be defeated by narrow judicial construction or congressional inaction.

All these amendments promised that Congress could make the laws needed to realize their intent, but a combination of lack of political will and unfriendly courts prevented that from happening until, partially, the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and '60s. I take from that experience that the meaning of law will always be somewhat dependent on how much we're willing to agitate for in the streets -- plus doing all that other stuff like educating ourselves and voting.

Foner has provided a short, very accessible treatment of the legal aspect of Reconstruction in this book. In the current moment, when Republicans believe, accurately, that they can't win numerical majorities for their policy preferences, and so must game the Constitutional system, this is history we can't ignore. Foner is not despairing.

Rights can be gained, and rights can be taken away. A century and a half after the end of slavery, the project of equal citizenship remains unfinished. ... And because the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy are always contested, our understanding of the Reconstruction amendments will forever be a work in progress. So long as the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow continue to plague our society, we can expect Americans to return to the nation's second founding and find there new meanings for our fractious and troubled times.

Let the young people vote!

In the Democratic debate last night, candidate Senator Amy Klobuchar made a point of her support for automatic voter registration at age 18; she contended that if this reform had existed in Georgia in 2018, Stacey Abram would be Governor today. This may be true and was certainly appropriate in Atlanta.

But there's a far more ambitious vision floating around the edges of the political system that very likely will gain traction over time. That's lowering the voting age to 16. Candidate Andrew Yang is on the case. He believes lowering the voting age would increase citizen engagement with democracy.

Studies show that allowing younger people to vote has positive impacts on overall voting habits. Localities that have lowered the voting age have seen an increase in voter turnout across all age groups. Other studies have shown that delaying when a person first votes (because of birth dates and election cycles) decreases the likelihood that they will become a regular voter.

At 16, Americans don’t have hourly limits imposed on their work, and they pay taxes. Their livelihoods are directly impacted by legislation, and they should therefore be allowed to vote for their representatives.

Last March, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass) introduced a bill in the House to lower the federal voting age to 16. She argued that young people "have their own distinct experiential wisdom."

A 16-year-old will bring with them the 2019 fears that their father’s insulin will run out before the next paycheck.

A 17-year-old will bring with them the 2019 hopes to be the first in their family to earn a college degree.

A 17-year-old will bring with them a 2019 solemn vow to honor the lives of their classmates stolen by a gunman.

The Democratic Party controlled House rejected Pressley's measure by 126 to 305. We old folks aren't ready apparently.

But if we really believe that U.S. democracy thrives when civil rights and civil responsibilities are accessible to all of us, Astra Taylor explains what we can learn from local experiments with the franchise for younger people.

In 2013, Takoma Park, Md., became the first city in the United States to lower the voting age for local elections to 16. The turnout rate of 16- and 17-year-olds in the next election was nearly twice that of those 18 and older, inspiring the nearby town of Hyattsville to follow Takoma Park’s example.

Something similar happened in local elections in Norway in 2011, when 21 municipalities conducted a trial lowering the voting age from 18 to 16. A range of studies support the conclusion that 18 is not the optimal age to bestow the right to vote; people are leaving the nest and too preoccupied navigating college and work to figure out how to cast a ballot, let alone register to do so.

It is also the case that voting, though typically regarded as the paramount individual right, is actually a social affair. Research conducted in Denmark shows that having children old enough to vote at home makes their parents more likely to vote as well. And it’s habitual: Once you vote, you are more likely to do it again. A person’s first election is critical, a kind of democratic gateway drug, and it’s best to get him hooked young.

Being serious about democracy is likely soon enough to mean, without much controversy, adopting the campaign for this extension of voting rights.

Extending the vote to younger people is not just a U.S. novelty notion. As the United Kingdom once again confronts an election in which the fate of Brexit is engaged, three of the main political parties -- Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish National Party -- all support a 16 year old voting age. If more young people had been able to vote (and more had bothered to do it), Brexit would never have passed. Yet it's the young people who will have to live with its consequences for much of their future lives.

Everywhere, it's the young people who will have to live with ever increasing consequences of climate chaos. Extending the vote to 16 year olds is only right....And if that seems too radical, you might want to consider a good explainer by Kelsey Piper on why just maybe there should be NO age qualification for voting.

Oddments from Rawlins, WY

This billboard was not what I expected to encounter on Interstate 80 outside Green River, Wyoming. Apparently it is a national campaign reaching the considerable number of states where LGBTQ people still do not enjoy full civil rights. Sure, we can get married. But we may have no rights in employment, or to receive medical care from unwilling medical professionals, or to eat in restaurants that don't want us around. Don't know what erecting a few billboards does, but the Beyond I Do campaign provides national information on continuing discrimination.

We stopped to use the facilities at the original Little America which was unimposing, selling expensive gas and sundries. I'd driven by many times but don't think I'd ever before been into this heavily advertised truck stop and motel. Oh yes -- there were also these for sale in the lobby. Click to enlarge. Wyoming is a different culture.

Morty had a far too interesting day. I knew he wasn't going to enjoying driving uphill from Salt Lake City to Park City, Utah. He did not -- howling all the way (perhaps his ears were popping?) and breaking into the body of the car from his jail in the far back. Here he explores the front seat while the humans repaired his enclosure. I don't think he can do that again. Once the road straightened out, he did better for the rest of the drive.

We've crossed the Continental Divide -- it's all downhill from here. Ha!

Frederick Douglass: an outside/inside agitator for freedom

The book-reading world has swooned over Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight. The Yale professor's magnum opus won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, a slew of historical profession association awards, and was named one of the best books of 2018 by just about all the major media.

I don't get it. I found this exhaustive and exhausting (36 hours when read by ear) volume profoundly unsatisfying. Usually I refrain from writing blog notices about books to which I respond by feeling that I wish the author had written the book I wanted, rather than the one the author wanted. Blight's Douglass is such a volume. But it is being touted as so important I just have to vent my frustration.

The first thing to understand is that Douglass is biography, only tangentially a history. This despite the fact that its principal was at the center of the most significant turning point in the country's trajectory. But this is about the man himself, far less about his role and particular contribution to the long struggle toward African-American and human freedom in the United States. It focuses on intimate details, on the formerly enslaved activist's inner conflicts, his complex relationship with a loyal wife he seems to have taken for granted, and with a series of white women donors who helped keep him and his work afloat financially, his ongoing economic and family struggles, his oscillation between injured pride and confidence, his feuds and his generosity.

That's all interesting enough, but I wish Blight had centered what made Douglass a giant in our history rather than the colorful, even tabloid-worthy, fluff around the edges of a life.

So on what do I think the story of Douglass ought to center? The man, actually and consciously and with political intent, embodied the trajectory of the movement to end slavery in the emergent United States. He honed his oratorical talent into a political instrument for the abolition fight and for decades made himself a weapon of struggle. In the role, he explored all the twists and turns of what we can think of as the "Long Civil War over Slavery" from about 1840-through 1876 and beyond.

His story illustrates the development of abolition strategy. Beginning as a Garrisonian moral pacifist, he preached a prophetic jeremiad against the slavery-accomodating U.S. Constitution and against ordinary politics:

I have no love for America as such. I have no patriotism. I have no country. The institutions of this country do not know me as a man, except as a piece of property.

The 1850s saw the last convulsion of that Slave Power in fights over extending of slavery to western territories and the right of "owners" to capture their fugitive "property." In that decade Douglass became close to John Brown who eventually led a doomed raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, aiming to inspire an insurrection by enslaved people. Douglass had to flee the country for a bit after that.

Yet throughout his life he flirted with other approaches and reformers who hoped to craft more conventional political solutions which would bring down the Slave Power. He participated in the first women's rights convention at Seneca Fall, New York in 1848. Meanwhile, he had begun to warm to the idea that the Constitution was not "a covenant with evil" (per Garrison) but rather "if strictly construed" it was "not a proslavery instrument." Consequently for the next decade he involved himself with a series of electoral initiatives -- Liberty Party, Free Soil Party and eventually the new anti-slavery Republican Party -- which were trying to articulate a legal path to abolition. He spoke and worked to make the contest between slavery and freedom manifest in politics. His upstate New York base in Rochester where he published several small agitational newspapers was a hot bed of these currents. Electoral engagement departed from the purity of the anti-slavery crusade -- but it just might set people free.

Blight summarizes Douglass's apparent gyrations.

Douglass's 1856 endorsement of the Republican Party conformed to a pattern he had established in 1848 and 1852 when he supported the Free Soil Party. In the Liberty Party and its doctrinal successor, the Radical Abolitionists, Douglass always had a party for his principles, but in the Republicans, as with the Free Soilers before, he found a party for his hopes. ... It would hardly be the last time Douglass cast his vote for hope in the general elections, then in off-year contests retreated to his principles among the radicals. ... for the rest of his life, Douglass voted for a Republican for president ...

For Douglass, as for many I think the most effective of justice advocates, elections were one tool in a wider array of tools for making the changes we need. This is the sort of essential lesson from this giant that gets buried in Blight's approach.

After emancipation and during the terrible rollback of democratic (small "d") possibility that was Reconstruction, Douglass continued to use his oratorical gift in support of freedom for Black people. He became something of an honored relic of more principled times in the white culture of industrial capitalism triumphant, trotted out to speak for Republican presidential candidates -- who he believed, for all their many faults, continued to be lesser enemies of Douglass' people than the southern-based Democrats. Republican presidents gave Douglass appointments on which he was dependent, since none of the rest of his huge family seemed to be able to support themselves. Yet principle remained. In 1893 he served as the Republic of Haiti's representative to the Chicago Worlds Fair -- and, along with Ida B Wells who had taken up the anti-lynching cause, denounced the fair's putrid racism.

“Theoretically open to all Americans, the Exposition practically is, literally and figuratively, a ‘White City,’ in the building of which the Colored American was allowed no helping hand, and in its glorious success he has no share ...”

Douglass died two years later, still complex, still principled....David W. Blight's biography makes it clear that Douglass' antebellum life was very much a Western New York story. Blight told a reviewer that one of the things his research had taught him was that "it is likely that more Americans heard [Douglass] speak than any other figure of his time." Since both my great-grandfathers were among the activists organizing the new Republican Party in that area, I feel sure that they, and possibly even their families, must have heard Douglass thunder against slavery. It's a heart-warming thought.

Proud queers becoming

Twenty-five years ago, Erudite Partner and I traveled to New York to attend the 25th anniversary of Stonewall. Stonewall was not quite the first magnitude milestone in gay consciousness on the west coast that it was back east. There's was plenty of lesbian and gay agitation and organization before Stonewall around here. But Stonewall25 was a celebration of progress we didn't want to miss.

We marched in that parade while giving away thousands of free stickers we had printed up that read: Gay Liberation -- A Movement, Not a Market. Folks grabbed them eagerly. Seems a little quaint on the occasion of Stonewall50, doesn't it? I'm not knocking the vast improvements in the life chances of many LGBT people we've won since then. We queers of every variety have needed all of them and still need a good deal more to achieve the freedom to be fully ourselves which we deserve in a free society.

But wandering around San Francisco in the last couple of weeks, it would have been hard not to notice the signs of Pride as commodity branding -- some merely commercial, others a bit transgressive, a few quite charming. Click on any of these for a larger image:




We're still becoming.

A challenge: can we learn to value all of us?

“Race isn’t about black people, necessarily,” says Eddie Glaude Jr. “It’s about the way whiteness works to disfigure and distort our democracy, and the ideals that animate our democracy.”

Ezra Klein podcast

The assumptions and material consequences of unconstrained white supremacy are the subject of this 2016 book by a Princeton professor of Religion and African American Studies. Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul is a hell of an indictment of our broken core.

Dr. Glaude spells out why the national financial implosion of 2008 should properly be labeled the "Great Black Depression." Black homeowners were defrauded of the little stake they had in US prosperity though mass foreclosure on mortgages designed to fail -- profitably -- by and for the bankers. He insists this ugly outcome and government's failure to protect black victims arose from the "value gap."

We talk about the achievement gap in education or the wealth gap between white Americans and other groups, but the value gap reflects something more basic: no matter our stated principles or how much progress we think we've made, white people are valued more than others in this country, and that fact continues to shape the life chances of millions of Americans. The value gap is in our national DNA.

One of the debilitating consequences of the value gap is that black public commentators like Professor Glaude learn to modulate what they'll say.

The fear of white fear distorts black political behavior. ... I can't call Bill O'Reilly a dumbass (at least not in public or on television). No matter the horror of the moment, our anger must be overcome ...

The history of blackness in America since the civil rights struggles of the 1960s as Glaude lays it out consists of a series of destructive circumstances by which black people have been muzzled and muzzled themselves -- through hagiography that has neutered Dr. King, through cooptation by Democrats including President Obama, through neglect and destruction of black institutions including colleges and churches.

Yet Glaude comes away from this sad catalogue still hoping for a "revolution of values." The young people who rose up in Ferguson, Missouri when a white police department let Michael Brown's murdered body lie in the sun for four hours, all the Black Lives Matter eruptions, and Rev. William Barber's Forward Together "moral movement" -- these still inspire him.

A revolution of value should change what constitutes success and individual initiative. The value of human beings should never be diminished in the pursuit of profit or in the name of some ideology. ...

... Americans have to live together, in the deepest sense of the phrase -- to make a life together that affords everyone (and I do mean everyone) a real chance. This can happen only when we experience genuine connectedness, when the well-being of African Americans is bound up with any consideration the well-being of the nation. When we are not asked to disappear, and instead have the space to reach for our best selves. ...

We have to say, without qualification, BlackLivesMatter! Obviously, we know we matter. The phrase isn't about asserting our humanity to folks who deny it. The voices of our mighty dead shout back that the price of the ticket has been paid already. No. BlackLivesMatter reminds white people that their lives do not matter more than others. It is a direct challenge to white supremacy.

...In 2019, this reads as a very 2016 book, written to help black people move on from the disappointments of the Obama era into yet more US politics as usual, black erasure as usual, by white supremacy as usual. Some of it reads off center as African Americans found themselves confronting not another neoliberal, but instead a neo-Confederate Attorney General and a neo-Nazi President. (Dr. Glaude discussed some of this in the podcast quoted abve.) But the core holds. The only path forward for American democracy remains eradicating the value gap.