But I kept tripping over glowing and chirpy references to it on social media.

Harper projects his own soda-straw view of “elite academia”—a few years of teaching at Bates College—on all “prestigious American colleges,” where he says “wokeness” and DEI have “blossomed.” From the mid-1990s to 2025, I taught at many universities, sat on the board of directors of one of these (the School of Visual Arts), held fellowships or residencies at a couple. To me, his essay reflects a reactionary form of the lefty ideological capture he condemns. The piece is very much of this Trumpian moment.

So, I wrote this.

My professional training as a journalist—along with my respect for my academic colleagues and for honest debate—would not allow me to generalize about the environment at US colleges from my experience, as Prof. Harper does in his Atlantic essay about Bates. The article struck me as tortured straw-mannery, the creation—or isolation—of a target to attack the concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion with little more than anecdote and unnamed sources.

I’m a strong supporter of the type of DEI—we called it affirmative action when I was coming up—where the D does the work of Democracy. In such initiatives, school administrations seek to challenge and remediate the documented discrimination faced by women and marginalized people for generations, through admission policy and curriculum. I saw (and practiced) this form of proto-DEI at Brown University in the late 1980s as an admission officer. We looked at candidates holistically. A white, working-class student from rural New England got as much attention—and credit for her journey—as did anyone else. The AOs who came to the table to deliberate over the applicant pool, subjective humans, certainly had their preferences, even biases, but together we extruded a pretty good class. What was seldom talked about then—leaving legacies aside—was the policy of funneling wealthy, prominent, and well-connected applicants directly through the director of admissions. I’ll call him “Jim Rogers”—because that was name.

If you have paid attention, you know that DEI is not the same thing in every place it is (or was) instituted. I’m not a fan of the cynical style that emphasizes numerical, chromatic “diversity” over “equity and inclusion.” That approach exists, to be sure, but it is nothing new—nor is the focus by some outlets, such as the Atlantic, that dial up the resolving power of their critical lens where people of color appear to benefit—or fail—while ignoring the rest of the people in the petri dish.

Erin showed me a graphic posted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mona Chalabi on Instagram. It features several high-profile academics who have been “accused of plagiarism.” William O’Reilly, Nicola Morrison, Rachel Reeves, Anna Lora-Wainwright, Neri Oxman, John Hattie, and Susannah Dickinson, are white. They appear in green squares, which means they kept their jobs. Harvard’s Claudine Gay and the late Jason Arday appear in red squares. They were forced to resign.

Prof. Kimberlé Crenshaw points to the tsunami of national attention given to accusations against Gay, who was “humiliated and removed,” and the absence of similar coverage when Stanford University white president, neuroscientist Marc Trevor Tessier-Lavigne, resigned after accusations of misconduct. (It was a dearth, not an absence of coverage—both NPR and the NY Times did Tessier-Lavigne stories in 2023.)

A rather gentle report by Stanford’s Scientific Panel refuted some of the most damning charges against him, but determined that Tessier-Lavigne had “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record” and ran a laboratory with an “unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and/or substandard scientific practices from different people.” The Harvard Corporation’s review of Gay’s work “revealed a few instances of inadequate citation“ but “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.”

My journey to the academy is the reverse of Prof. Harper’s, who jumped from Bates to the Atlantic. I arrived in the mid-1990s as a journalist, first at the School of Visual Arts, where I got my MFA. Since then, I have taught, as an adjunct and as a visiting professor, at the undergraduate and graduate level at many institutions—New York University, Baruch College of the City University of New York, Hampton University, University of Richmond, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

What I have found at all of the institutions are unique cultures and people. Departments within these schools have their own tendencies and orientations; they often conflict and contend. The majority of my colleagues—left and right, tenured and non—taught students to distinguish between fact and fiction, to interrogate theory and opinion with evidence, and, if need be, to revise their conclusions when superior evidence overwhelmed what they brought to the table. Over the years, I did cross paths with professors and administrators from across the political spectrum who fell short of this standard.

Prof. Crenshaw identifies what the Atlantic is doing. It is also not a new thing. “About the media’s facilitation. They are not just reporting,” she said, accusing mainstream outlets of adopting the far right’s strategy of targeting “Black bodies in high spaces.”

“[It’s] all about the idea that Black people are less than, it’s all about the continuation, about the basic ideology that allowed us to be enslaved. That narrative has never been substantially interrupted, which is why this is not a left-right problem. This is across the board. There are elements of MAGA thinking about us that we can find all the way to the far left of American society, so to think that this is all about progressives, liberals, moderates—it’s not about that, it’s about anti-Blackness and the way it continues to thrive in this country.”

Many people have worked to challenge and revise this bleached and blinkered narrative with abundant evidence of Black and brown agency amassed over generations, but white resistance to this project—to fact-based inclusion and democratization—has been formidable, ruthless, and deceitful. And it has been divisive by design. Project 2025, Freedom 250, and all of #47’s crusades under his intellectually dishonest and blatantly discriminatory Executive Orders such as “Ending Radical Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” and “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” are just the most recent examples.

Rather than look at what’s been revealed about our country in the intervening years, say, between the Bicentennial in 1976—which I remember fondly for the funky ‘n’ fresh navy blue gabardine suit with Liberty Bell lining that my mom bought me—and now, we are once again repeating conventional, received wisdom. At our peril.

The New York Times falls into step today with “America Celebrates 250th with Patriotic Fervor, Despite Political Turmoil.” The article closes on a quote from “a Black Republican in a city that is 92 percent white and overwhelmingly Democratic.” Interesting choice by the editors, I must say. He “will bring up the rear”—yes, that’s in the article—of the annual Fourth of July parade in a costume that, to him, suggests “Lady Liberty enlightening the world.”

“What I’m going to wear is something that says freedom,” Alfred Hughes Jr. told the reporter.

African American—and NY Times editors—please. Our ancestors deserve better than minstrelsy, especially today, in this time of “political turmoil.” But also every day.

Professor Eddie Glaude has pointed out in recent interviews about his new book, America, USA: How Race Shadows America’s Anniversaries, how white ideologues and power brokers have worked feverishly to erase any progress toward equality Black folks have made in order to to maintain their dominance, with words and violence. And Glaude names the central paradox the nation has yet to confront, much less resolve.

The United States, Glaude said, “imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic, and you can’t hold those two things together without contradiction, without depositing a kind of madness at the heart of the country.” That madness will be on display, in full flatulent force, in just a few hours on the National Mall. The military flyovers begin at 1:15 EST.

Few mainstream, corporate 250th retellings are highlighting inconvenient and fundamental—one might say founding—facts, among them that many more Black folk, upwards of 20,000, fought for the British than for the colonists, who fielded somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 African American soldiers.

Today would be a great time to ask ourselves, Why? The evidence is at our fingertips. Plenty has been written about these men, some of it by Black loyalists themselves, like Boston King.

As I asked in a previous post on Frederick Douglass, who by 1852 had switched from damning to praising the founding father, was their allegiance strategic or sincere? Perhaps better questions are the ones that these and scores of other African Americans would have asked themselves throughout the American experiment:

How do I resist and destroy that which enslaves us?

It is this type of resistance (and resister) that I’m celebrating today. I start at James Madison’s Montpelier, where I work. The opinions expressed are mine alone. The facts? Click the links to see for yourself.

Anthony escaped. He self-emancipated when he left Montpelier in Orange County, Virginia, in June 1786, where he had been enslaved by James Madison Sr. Madison asked his son, the future fourth president of the United States, to run an advertisement in the Virginia Gazette, the state’s paper of record, to get him back.

Anthony had no surname that we know of.

He was captured a year after his escape, just a couple of counties away, where he had been working as a servant. But he stole himself again the day after his apprehension. There’s no trace whatsoever of Anthony after that second escape.

Ezekiel liberated himself from the Madisons too, in December 1794, and was heading toward Pennsylvania, James Madison Jr. wrote in the runaway ad in Baltimore’s Federal Intelligencer newspaper. The copy described Ezekiel as “a small Negro man… 19 years old, of a light black color, and turns his toes out when he walks.”

Ezekiel also disappeared without a trace, according to Montpelier’s senior research historian Hilarie M. Hicks, who, with her colleagues, created the phenomenal Naming Project, an online collection of biographical profiles of the people enslaved at Montpelier.

Other people escaped Montpelier, were captured, and reenslaved. Paul Jennings was among them. The Madisons placed an unsigned ad in the Federal Intelligencer and Baltimore Daily Gazette for him. He and others found freedom by different means. Jennings eventually bought himself. And he joined the effort to free others. Evidence shows that Jennings helped organize a bold escape attempt that Ellen Stewart, also enslaved by the Madisons, joined in 1848. Abolitionists paid for Stewart’s freedom.

Enslavers chose to call the urge to take one’s freedom an illness. Samuel A. Cartwright of Louisiana manufactured a diagnosis he called “drapetomania,” from the Greek drapetes, runaway or fugitive.

None other than writer Frederick Law Olmsted—later a famed park creator and landscape architecture sage—got a perverse kick out of Cartwright’s venomous creativity:

the learned Dr. Cartwright, of the University of Louisiana, believes that slaves are subject to a peculiar form of mental disease, termed by him Drapetomania, which, like a malady that cats are liable to, manifests itself by an irrestrainable propensity to run away; and in a work on the diseases of negroes, highly esteemed at the South for its patriotism and erudition, he advises planters of the proper preventive, and curative measures to be taken for it.

The cure advanced by Cartwright, an enslaver himself? It was “whipping the devil out of them.” The sickness the “doctor” projected on Black folks was clearly in his own deformed mind.

And Cartwright was no medical outlier but “a controversial but widely read figure in the southern medical profession whose general belief in black inferiority was standard

among southern physicians.” And plenty of northern ones too. Their toxic legacy still lives on in contemporary American medicine.

White people such as Cartwright and the enslavers he enabled used their power—of law, wealth, and violence—to define all Black folk as property, actual or potential. In freeing themselves, Anthony, Ezekiel, and thousands of others wrested that power from their enslavers to define themselves. Bajan scholar Sir Hilary Beckles called this spirit the “self-liberation ethos of enslaved blacks.”

Black men, women, and children self-emancipated, fought slavery, and resisted its conditions for as long as it existed in the United States, the colonies that preceded it, and across the Atlantic world. African American resistance came in myriad forms—leaving a slave-labor plantation without permission for a short time, perhaps to visit family a few miles away; refusing to work or going slow; sabotaging equipment. Resilience and endurance were also forms of resistance. Surviving, even thriving, in spite of one’s oppression, living to see another day and helping others to do the same.

During the Middle Passage, some captive Africans leapt overboard, choosing death over whatever their captors had in store for them. But resistance began even before the shackles and ships: Africans attacked slavers, homegrown and European, on their own soil. In the early 1560s, local fighters in Cape Verde attacked Sir John Hawkins, “one of England’s first traders in human captives,” and his crew of more than 100 men, writes historian Sudhir Hazareesingh.

More than a century before Hazareesingh published his excellent 2025 book, Daring to Be Free: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World, the towering yet undersung African American scholar Luther Porter Jackson chronicled Hawkins’s bloody assaults on Africans—and local people’s counter-assaults—in the Journal of Negro History.

“Many of Hawkins’ men were injured in some way by the envenomed arrows of the blacks, which produced lock-jaw,” Jackson wrote.

Hawkins himself says, “although in the beginning they seemed to be but small hurts, yet there hardly escaped any that had blood drawn of them, but died in a strange sort, with their mouths shut some ten days before they died, and after their wounds were whole; I myself had one of the greatest wounds, yet, thanks be to God, escaped.”

Sir John Hawkins lived to capture scores of Africans. But his 16th-century marauding was just the beginning: Jackson notes that Britain’s peak slave trading years were still roughly a century away. “Hawkins merely inaugurated on a very small scale what in later generations assumed vast proportions,” Jackson wrote in 1924. “The several hundred slaves trafficked by Hawkins in three voyages extending over a period of five years became the annual twenty-five or fifty thousand of the latter eighteenth century.”

In the same year Jackson was writing about Hawkins, Virginia’s General Assembly passed its Racial Integrity Act, further tightening the screws of Jim Crow on Black people. These white men were busy bees of discrimination and oppression. Richmond mayoral candidate Fulmer Bright campaigned on the slogan “No negroes on the city payrolls—city jobs for hard working white men.” As mayor, he followed through, barring African Americans from holding city jobs. There was an exception: Black teachers in segregated Black city schools.

Lest we forget, the threats to African Americans were not just legal or economic. “Sixteen persons, all negroes, were lynched in 1924, the smallest annual number since records have been kept,” the New York Times reported in 1925, as if this were cause for celebration. Among the Ku Klux Klan’s documented acts of terrorism in 1924 was a cross burning to intimidate Frederick W. Wells, an African American law school student. At New York City’s Columbia University.

While the cross burned outside, white students ran through the corridors of the residence building, screaming “down with the Negro,” and “Put the N----- out!” Wells barricaded his door, preparing to defend himself and ready to “show his teeth” in case of assault. When he awoke the next morning – after a fitful sleep – he found that a threatening letter, signed by the Ku Klux Klan, had been slipped under his door during the night.

Wells proclaimed that he would “not be bullied in any way.” He finished out the year, then, prudently, transferred to Cornell. In his career, Wells developed public housing, and worked at the Urban League in California and United Service Organizations. The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture holds the collection of his papers.

Resistance was most often communal and cooperative, from individual escapes aided by enslaved and free Blacks, to rebellions and the formation of “maroon” settlements, usually melting pots of self-emancipated Black people, Indigenous folk, and even disaffected white folks, whom we might call “allies” today.

After slavery, through Jim Crow, into the Black Freedom Struggle, and beyond, African Black resistance continued—through organizing, agitating, sitting-in (and wading in) fighting, marching, voting, art-creating, and putting pen to paper. It had to.

Black resistance was diverse, communal, and vital. And it continues.

We stopped at the restored Gilmore Cabin, a two-floor log home built in 1873 by George Gilmore, a man born at Montpelier and enslaved by the Madisons. The tour ended at the Montpelier Train Depot. Banker William du Pont, who bought Montpelier in 1901, bankrolled the station, which lay along the Southern Railway Company’s existing line. He used it for travel to work in Wilmington, Delaware. Service was available to the public as well, though African Americans were required to use the “Colored” entrance, which deposited them in a closet-like waiting room that adjoined the more spacious Whites-only facility. This is American history.

The Juneteenth celebration organized by the Orange County African American Historical Society was in full swing by the time arrived. I missed Henry Anglin’s brief talk—not a “speech,” he told me—about his forebear Isaiah Allen Jackson, a physician and son of Allen Jackson, Anglin’s great-grandfather, a formerly enslaved man who helped found Jacksontown, a historic Orange County Black community. The speakers who followed shared their stories, all rooted in the African American communities of Orange and surrounding areas.

“It is both a blessing and an honor to stand before you on this Juneteenth, a day that calls us to do more than celebrate freedom,” Bruce Monroe said in his address. “It calls us to remember, to reflect, to honor those who endured those who persevered and those who never stopped believing that a better day would come.”

Census.gov says that Orange County is a little over 80 percent white and 13 percent Black. The crowd gathered at Orange’s African American Commemorative Park looked like the inverse of that. I name race here, as I always do, because it so often matters and yet is glossed over by many people as if it doesn’t. Here, it mattered wonderfully, because I saw Euro-Americans, white folks, who I know and recognize from events like this one. I saw veteran Montpelier archaeologist—and OCAAHS Secretary—Matt Reeves manning a table near the stage, along with another colleague, Allison James. OCAAHS board member Deborah Newman was front and just off-center recording the event, seated next to Denise Cooper Thompson, African American restaurateur, owner of the always-humming Coopers Cookin and Catering.

Things didn’t magically become sublime for Black people when the word came to Texas that the Civil War had ended and chattel slavery was no longer legal. The fire-breathing professor Stacey Patton reminded readers in her Juneteenth post what General Gordon Granger’s June 19, 1865, proclamation actually was. Hint: it was not a ringing anthem of liberation and justice.

The people are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

The “all slaves are free” part gets an A+ for rhetoric. “Yay! Wonderful. Excellent. Finally,” Patton writes. “Let’s give y’all a cookie for ending some evil shit that should have never happened in the first place.” But she draws our attention to the order parts of General Order #3. Stay on your plantation, continue in your subordination to your former enslaver—now boss—get back to work, and forget about getting anything from the government that institutionalized and profited from your people’s bondage for generations.

Essentially, it was a cruel and monumental bait-and-switch.

“This is why Juneteenth should never be reduced to a soft-focus celebration of delayed good news decorated with a red, black, and green flag with a raised brown fist over it,” Patton writes. “General Order No. 3 announced Black freedom in one breath. And then, announced slavery by another name in the next breath.”

I felt at ease at the laid back and largely Black gathering downtown in a way I didn’t, couldn’t on the tour of Montpelier, a site that still squarely centers a founding enslaver. African American resistance and resilience were not novel concepts to the people gathered for this celebration. It was in the air we all breathed and in the soil on which we stood. What I witnessed on Friday in downtown Orange wasn’t a footloose celebration by any stretch of the imagination. It was a sober, community affirmation among people who’ve done the hard the work of making connections across difference and history. Juneteenth was a collective breather from a struggle they know continues.

I saw the sticker in the photo on the right last week on the walk to and from an appointment on 110th Street. It took back 35 years to Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters. News media were invited in to witness and participate in the event, not a regular occurrence. Rebbe Schneerson gave us quarters that day.

Roughly a month earlier, on August 19, a car in his caravan of vehicles, which had an NYPD escort, hit two children on the sidewalk. The station wagon killed a seven-year-old boy of Guyanese descent named Gavin Cato and severely injuring his cousin Angela, also seven.

Word spread; violence exploded in the streets. A group of Black men overtook a 29-year-old Australian Jewish scholar named Yankel Rosenbaum. Lemrick Nelson, 16 at the time was identified by Rosenbaum as one the attackers. He was charged with two counts of first-degree manslaughter and one count of second-degree manslaughter. Three trials and more than a decade later, Nelson was found guilty of violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights. A grand jury declined to bring criminal charges against the driver of the car, Yosef Lifsh.

I remember the incendiary tension during and after the violence, which I covered as a young photographer. I did not imagine or project this. I saw it in people’s faces, heard it in their voices, saw it in their actions, and smelled it in the air. Exiting the subway to cover the unrest on the second night (I was not there for the first), I saw riot-helmeted cops dragging a Black teen across the pavement, leaving a wide, bloody skid-puddle. I smelled the burning trash and saw an overturned NYPD patrol car.

After dark one night, a rooftop sniper pinned down people, including me, until cops found their way to him. It was racial but so much than that. Hasidic Jews and Caribbean Americans, marginalized communities in a marginalizing city and country with radical cultural differences, living cheek by jowl. I watched clumps of men—a Black one over here, a white one over there—roam the neighborhood, taunting each other, running from police.

A two-volume report on the Rosenbaum killing and the unrest released July 1993 by State Director of Criminal Justice Richard H. Girgenti catalogues numerous grave mistakes by NYPD. They start at the crime scene and stretch into the investigation, though he points out that “Rosenbaum’s murder occurred in the midst of a riot involving hundreds of people.” Among the most tragic:

Rosenbaum lived for three hours after the attack. During much of this period he was lucid and could have provided a detailed description of his attackers. Yet, he was never questioned by police. Even when Rosenbaum identified Nelson, he was not asked about Nelson’s role in the attack. As a result of this failure, the police lost valuable evidence.

There have been many journalistic examinations and dissections of the riots-unrest. Collier Meyerson, a Black Jewish journalist, did podcast series about it in 2022 that’s among the deepest dives. It’s called Love Thy Neighbor.

Ten years later, I was working as CNN correspondent. I had pitched the 10-year anniversary story and got it approved. But that morning, I was given a different assignment: the 100th anniversary of Harley-Davidson. Really, I thought? Motorcycles over the tenth anniversary of major unrest ? I bristled a bit too loudly and forcefully—and self-righteously—to my boss, the inimitable Edith Chapin, CNN’s NY Deputy Bureau Chief. The Harley-Davidson story was stupid or ridiculous, I said—or words to that effect. I need to do the Crown Heights story, I proclaimed. Edith told me, calmly and firmly, that insubordination of the sort I was performing was a firing offense; from Edith, this was not a threat. She then gave me a choice: do the Harley piece and if there is time, do Crown Heights, too. Period. I did both, kept my job, and counted my blessings for Edith.

I said in the Crown Heights story (transcript here):

These two tragedies in Crown Heights ignited several long nights of violence that I witnessed and photographed for a New York City newspaper. A small number of men caused the violence, but the perception outside the neighborhood was that all blacks and Hasidic Jews were at each other’s throats. Most people were just trying to stay safe. Still there were and still are significant differences that created the tension that exploded in 1991, culture, religion and economics.

“The number one issue that was the undercurrent, both within the black community and the Jewish community in 1991, was that the other guy is getting a bigger piece of the pie,” Rabbi Shea Hecht of Chabad Lubavitch’s National Committee for the Furtherance of Jewish Education told me. That rang true. Richard Green, founder and head of the Crown Heights Youth Collective, spoke hopefully and pragmatic. Crown Heights will most likely not become one of those mythical melting pots, he said. He used a different, now quite familiar analogy. “We’re all distinct pieces within that salad bowl, and each of us make up the salad. But you can tell the difference between the lettuce and the tomatoes or the cucumbers and the avocados. They are all different pieces. But come together, we come together to make up a salad.”

Carmel Cato, Gavin’s father, told me then that he was still hurting.

The 35th anniversary of the Crown Heights riots/unrest is this August. The 25th anniversary of the 9-11-2001 attacks is a few weeks later. I remember that too.

The FP was an African American paper in the former capital of the Confederacy. Its journalists were well aware of the history of blinkered and biased coverage of nonwhite communities by white-owned news media in the city. They countered that tendency.

The Free Press is its people. I say is because the accomplishments of its staffers will endure. I worked side by side with veteran Free Pressers like Sandra Sellars and Regina Boone. I watched young’uns such as writer George Copeland Jr. and photographer Julianne Tripp Hillian come into their own as journalists. And I endured difficult but necessary revisions of my stories at the hands of editors such as Bonnie Winston. Beyond fixing the many typos in my drafts, Bonnie refined their focus and shaped them into Free Press style. She wanted the facts, delivered with clarity, brevity, and accuracy.

The thread, through these people and the publication, is integrity. As we glide into celebrations of America 250, remembering why we need publications such as the Free Press is critical. The press has never been truly free in America. The sensibilities and prejudices of white-owned “mainstream” outlets have always been embedded in their products. Biases against nonwhite people and women were virulent in the early decades of the republic. So people excluded from—or denigrated and demeaned in—these outlets started their own. Amelia Jenks Bloomer started The Lily, a women’s newspaper, in 1849. Black folks founded Freedom’s Journal in 1827 “to plead our own cause. The Cherokee Phoenix opened the following year, giving voice to that nation within a nation. The Richmond Planet followed 60 years later with courageous stories about lynching, Black empowerment, and what is properly called American apartheid. The Planet’s archives are gold for those of us working to reclaim vital stories of Richmond’s Black community—and of the city, state, and country. Needless to say, its editorial point of view was quite different from most other Southern newspapers.

I see the spirit of the FP in the current exhibition at the Shockoe Institute, Expanding Freedom, which explores the intersecting stories of different groups of Americans, particularly those of African and European descent—with segments devoted to Indigenous people.

It is not your conventional historical hop, skip, and leap from great white Pilgrim to Pioneer, from momentous battle to pivotal election. Expanding Freedom takes care and time to develop a narrative of Black folk not as passive objects upon whom history acted, but as agents of history. The exhibit documents and honors people as individuals and in their communities; it names names and highlights people most Americans don’t know, but should—Elizabeth Key, Fannie Berry, Harriet Jacobs.

The power isn’t in the polemic. There isn’t one. It’s the sheer density of the documentation, the evidence. Marland Bruckner, president and CEO of the Mellon Foundation-funded Shockoe Institute, calls the show “data-informed.” I’d say data-saturated, which to me is a good and essential strategy.

Go, if you can. And then go a second time to absorb what you missed on the first go. It’s a lot, but that’s what exactly we need now, as lies become the currency of the realm—and cowardice keeps them in circulation.

As we do most evenings, a few Tuesdays ago we parked our car at Evergreen Cemetery in the usual spot. It’s right next to the burial plot of Dr. Sarah Garland Jones, Virginia’s first licensed African American woman physician, and her family. I plunked our fluorescent orange traffic cone onto the roof of our Subaru to signal to passersby, typically very few, that we weren’t there to mess around. You might get that impression if you spied Teacake, our dog, holding her big blue ball in her mouth, her tail wagging up a storm of delight—and ignored us in our dirty boots and worn clothes. She was there to play; we were there to work.

Erin dove right in, as she’s been doing for 11 years. No empty beer can or fallen stick can escape her. Then, she walked down to Evergreen’s west side and the wisteria. One must see it to believe it. The invasive plant with pretty purple flowers has swallowed acres of cemetery, spreading a matrix of roots across the ground, over gravestones and illegally dumped tires, and shooting vines upward, strangling trees.

Meanwhile, I dawdled and fretted. Despite all the work that we and thousands of volunteers have done, Evergreen still looks degraded, battered, disrespected. I can’t help but think of lovelier—and historically white—Hollywood Cemetery across town, favored by more than a century of law and custom. Those same race-based laws and customs starved Black cemeteries like Evergreen and its neighbor East End, where we began working with volunteers at the end of 2014. Once again, I think, Why don’t these critical, historic Black sites matter as much as white sites—and white people—do to America?

I started writing this essay after the president’s State of the Union (SOTU) address on February 24, four days before he started bombing Iran. The attack gave me pause, a very long pause.

I had been thinking then about the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which is creeping up on us. #47 dropped a reference to this milestone in his epic rant.

“This July 4th, we will mark two and a half centuries of liberty and triumph, progress and freedom in the most incredible and exceptional nation ever to exist on the face of the earth,” #47 said. “And when God needs a nation to work his miracles, he knows exactly who to ask. There is no challenge Americans cannot overcome, no frontier too vast for us to conquer, no dream too bold for us to chase, no horizon too distant for us to claim. For our destiny is written by the hand of Providence. And these first 250 years were just the beginning.”

Virginia’s newly elected governor, Democrat Abigail Spanberger, also referred to America’s 250th in her SOTU response.

“We are gathered here in the chambers of the House of Burgesses,” Spanberger told the camera set up in that historic Williamsburg, Virginia, building. “In 1705, the people of the Virginia colony gathered here to take on the extraordinary task of governing themselves.”

“The people who served here ultimately dreamed of what a new nation—unlike anything the world had ever seen—could be.”

The governor was sounding a lot like #47 to me. Not all the “people of the Virginia colony” were considered “people” by the powerful men who met in that building, though some of those nonpeople would have been serving and cleaning up after them.

I waited for the governor to finish her point or provide context, but it never came.

Governor Spanberger rightly hammered #47 for his obvious and consistent mendacity, but she missed a perfect opportunity to tell viewers the whole truth: in 1705 these same Virginia burgesses declared “the Negro, Mulatto, and Indian Slaves within this dominion to be real Estate.” Not people.

Spanberger could have acknowledged America’s history of brutality. I know, that’s a very difficult thing for a mainstream politician to do. But after she delivered that bitter fact-pill, the governor could have given us the lollipop of hope & progress. The United States has come so far since 1705. But instead, she chose the path of least resistance: repeat U-S-A platitudes that erase people of color and comfort the folks who have been happily narcotized by white American exceptionalism.

A few months ago, I realized while walking the cemetery that I needed a theme, a through line, to get me through these ugly, antidemocratic, Orwellian times. I willed myself to think of one that applied to the sites Erin and I work and visit: cemeteries, plantations, museums.

“Self-emancipation” was what came to mind. This was the dangerous process of stealing oneself from one’s “owner” before 1865. I thought of my own great-grandparents, Julia and Mat, who freed themselves from slavery in Virginia during the Civil War, and then the half a million other Black folks who did the same thing.

William I. Johnson and Henry Wheaton—the first, buried at East End; the second at Evergreen—liberated themselves to serve in the US Army as did nearly 180,000 other Black men. They were following a long tradition of self-liberation, one as old as the brutal institution of chattel slavery itself. Enslavers came to call it “drapetomania.” This alleged mental illness made enslaved people run away, they surmised, as if these craven white folks had the knowledge—or the soul—to diagnose the deadly deficit of freedom these Black people were suffering from.

I looked to our sagacious foreparents, progressive and radical women and men, for more insight into self-emancipation. Frederick Douglass seemed like a good sage to start with as I pondered the 250th—as well as the president’s brutality.

In Douglass’s early years as an abolitionist, he was unequivocally anti-Founding Father. “I have not, I cannot have, any love for this country, as such, or for its Constitution,” Douglass said in an 1847 speech. “I desire to see it overthrown as speedily as possible and its Constitution shivered in a thousand fragments, rather than that this foul curse should continue to remain as now.”

Git ‘em, Frederick, I thought!

But then Douglass tripped me up. “What to the Slave is The Fourth of July?” his blistering 1852, address, was actually a ringing defense of the Founding Fathers (FFs) and what they wrought.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.

Was Douglass being sincere? Was he genuinely convinced of the truth and universality of their 18th-century prose and the strength of their convictions? Or was he being strategic and using their words to chastise 19th-century white Americans for falling so far short of their own forefathers’ high ideals? Historian and Douglass biographer David Blight asserts the latter powerfully in Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Blight cites Douglass’s address to Washington, DC’s Metropolitan AME Church in January 1894, a year and a month before Douglass’s death.

Time and strength are not equal to the task before me. But could I be heard by this great nation, I would call to mind the sublime and glorious truths with which, at its birth, it saluted a listening world. Its voice then, was as the trump of an archangel, summoning hoary forms of oppression and time honored tyranny, to judgement. Crowned heads heard it and shrieked. Toiling millions heard it and clapped their hands for joy. It announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality.

Even after the cruel and cowardly termination of Reconstruction, and in the midst of the plagues of Redemption and racial-terror lynching, Douglass appears to have kept the faith in the FFs’ ideals.

Historian Hannah Spahn, author of Black Reason, White Feeling: The Jeffersonian Enlightenment in the African American Tradition, places Douglass in the school of Black thinkers who hailed the founding documents as timeless and universal. Among them are Phillis Wheatley, Lemuel Haynes, and Benjamin Banneker. The way they chose to interpret the Declaration of Independence, the term “unalienable Rights” applied to everyone under the sun, not just white men.

Whether sincere, strategic, or both, none of these pioneers was under the illusion that the fine words would leap off the parchment and defend their rights and dignity. They were all profoundly strategic, keeping their eyes on the ultimate prize: freedom for all. And they were also seriously tactical in the ways they fought to win it. When talk of “unalienable Rights” fell on deaf white ears, they kept writing, preaching, and publishing their own revelatory and radical words. They dissented, protested, and persisted.

There’s a direct connection between past and present, which President #45-47’s ascendance and malign rule make painfully clear. It’s no secret that the FFs baked special status, privileges, and rights for landed white gents into the foundational documents and institutions they created. The checks and balances they included certainly did some important work, but they weren’t—and aren’t—full protection against the powerful and venal men (and women) who eternally push a white-supremacist, wealthy-supremacist agenda.

These carve-outs and perks that the FFs created for themselves such as the 3/5 Compromise and the Electoral College merely expanded on a project started by their forebears during the century before the Declaration. Early colonial legislators and land barons (usually one and the same) engineered a culture and economy built on slavery and Native dispossession. Massachusetts’ legislators legalized slavery in 1641, rubber stamping a brutal institution that had already taken root—colonists started enslaving indigenous Pequot people in 1637. By 1638, they were trading in “Negroes,” along with cotton and tobacco. Virginia’s House of Burgesses made slavery hereditary in 1662. That status passed through the mother. These colonial statutes became the law of their new land.

In addition to laws that gave us chattel slavery, the FFs (and proto-FFs) encoded their prejudices into all things American. For generations, they crafted and propagated what Bryan Stevenson has called “narratives of racial difference,” myths that congealed into a fatberg of racist ideology: whites are supreme, and were made so by God; nonwhites were made to serve whites and live under their domination. This was Thomas Jefferson’s forte. The “unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people,” he wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia.

In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection…Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the white; in reason much inferior … and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.

We don’t know what Sally Hemings made of this hypocrisy. Jefferson and the system he built and defended to his death rendered her mute.

While scholars note that Jefferson became a wee bit less strident about Black inferiority as he aged, he advocated for the removal of free Blacks from the US until the end of his days. And those who Jefferson enslaved were sold off to pay his abundant debts after he passed away in 1826. George Washington, to his abundant credit, freed the Black people he owned in his will. In fact, Washington was the only southern FF to emancipate all of those he enslaved. That said, we shouldn’t forget that he and Martha spent years hunting Ona Judge, a woman who had emancipated herself from their ownership. They never found her.

Through their words and deeds, the FFs inculcated a kind of “racial callousness”—historian Christopher Graham’s term—among many white Americans that has persisted into the 21st century. If those people, the Black and Brown ones, are less than you, their struggling and suffering is normal and natural. Which means it can be shrugged off.

White Americans—certainly not all, but just enough—have been shrugging off our pain and their role in it for generations. They embraced slavery and kept it going for centuries. They tolerated Jim Crow and domestic terror. Many shrugged off Indian removal, immigrant exclusion, and America’s imperialist and pro-despot policies abroad. Just enough Americans—plus almost all Republicans in Congress and their Democratic, AIPAC-funded colleagues—have tolerated or supported the US partnership in the Gaza genocide with Israel. In the war of choice on Iran, the US and Israel have killed thousands of people, according Human Rights Activists in Iran and other watchdog groups. Shruggable. #47 may not be stupid, crazy, or bloodthirsty enough to shoot people on Fifth Avenue, as he joked. Yet. But he can and will dispatch US forces to kill them elsewhere—Tehran, Minneapolis, wherever.

But let #47 meme himself as Jesus and MAGAmerica flips out and turns on him. Maybe forever, but maybe only for couple of news cycles. It won’t matter. Even if MAGAmericans desert their current standard bearer, there’s no reason to think they’ll abandon the white supremacist cause. It has a deep bench, deep roots, and a long history of delivering the spoils—the cultural ones, though not the material goodies—that a segment of our population craves.

In case you missed it, a few years ago the US launched America250, a bipartisan initiative “spearheaded by the congressionally appointed U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission and its nonprofit supporting organization,” to mark the 250th anniversary. Check out the pix of the “ex-officio members”—and the crazy juxtapositions therein.

It gets crazier. Kelly Anne Conway, alternative-fact doyenne and former media hatchet person for #45, is a full-fledged “commissioner.” And so is US Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA), the lawmaker manhandled live on TV by federal agents as he asked former Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem a question. I’m guessing such a brain-fryingly broad spectrum of officials was chosen so that individuals with opposing views would cancel each other out. Either that or it’s just a paper commission, not a functional one. Could be both.

Presumably displeased by not having full, autocratic control of America250, #47 and his enablers set up their own semiquincentennial project, Freedom 250. He needed his own brand, like with steaks, casinos, hats, Bibles—all so biggly successful.

The F 250 website features an online library of videos made with artificial intelligence that purport to tell America’s story. They don’t. Right-wing media outfit PragerU and Hillsdale College, a Christian School in Michigan, produced the content for the White House, according to Freedom 250. They are predictably biased and blinkered, and therefore deeply worrisome.

In 2020, four Hillsdale professors, including college president Larry Arnn, signed a letter to the Pulitzer Prize committee beseeching it to revoke Nikole Hannah-Jones’s award for her lead essay in the 1619 Project titled “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” The 21 signatories objected to Jones’s assertion that “the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America” and that it contained “factual errors.”

But Arnn himself, a professor of history and politics, let slip some factual errors—and his true colors—in an interview with the Hillsdale Collegian, the school newspaper: “they were actually indentured servants, not slaves,” he said, “but they were captured Africans brought to America likely against their will.”

He’s right about the “against their will” part, though the “likely” is disingenuous. These first Africans in British colonial America were seized at sea by privateers from a Portuguese slave ship. These “20. and odd Negroes” arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, as pirate’s booty on a vessel called the White Lion. There, they were “bought for victuals.” In other words, used as currency by the ship’s crew to buy food. “The Africans were sold into bondage despite Virginia having no clear-cut laws sanctioning slavery,” scholars at Historic Jamestowne tell us.

The scholarship is clear, and it was decades old by the time Arnn spoke to the paper in 2020. Historian John Thornton, part of a dynamic scholarly duo with his wife Linda M. Heywood, researched the origins of the first Africans (they were from modern-day Angola) who landed in the colony and wrote:

Thanks to documentary records uncovered by [Professor Engel] Sluiter, we now know that the “20. and odd Negroes” that arrived at Point Comfort in August had been taken on the high seas from the Sdo Jodo Bautista. This ship was a Portuguese slaver captained by Manuel Mendes da Cunha bound from Luanda, Angola, to Vera Cruz carrying slaves in conformity with an asiento, a contract to deliver slaves to Spanish colonies.

The late Prof. Sluiter culled his evidence from the actual slave ship account books and published his article in 1997 through William and Mary’s Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Who knows where Arnn, a Heritage Foundation trustee since 2002, scrounged his “evidence”? Unfortunately, it’s his version of bunk “history” that Freedom 250 is selling us.

Writing on Time.com, historian John Garrison Marks connects F 250 to the administration’s attacks on real history, the kind backed by decades of scholarship. “Freedom 250,” Marks writes, “fails to adequately address the impact slavery has had on our country. Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, statues of enslavers have been relocated to Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, projects like the ‘Founders Museum’ and traveling ‘Freedom Trucks’ minimize or ignore the founders’ involvement in slavery.” Yes, #47 is fielding 18-wheelers not to haul lumber or vegetables but propaganda to a town near you.

I couldn’t find a single reference to slavery when I searched the Department of Interior’s webpage devoted to F 250 on April 16. (Let me know if anything pops up for you.)

Slavery does, however, feature in one of F 250’s AI-slop videos, which Ben Davis of ArtNews found. It features Thomas Lynch, a sickly South Carolinian and the youngest signer of the Declaration. “I gave what little time I had because even the young and unwell can rise—when their country calls.” So noble a sentiment, so incomplete a story. Davis directs us to historian Robin Einhorn, who tells us what Lynch actually stood for. “On July 30, 1776—less than a month after the adoption of the declaration—Thomas Lynch of South Carolina issued an ultimatum on behalf of his constituents. ‘If it is debated, whether their Slaves are their Property,’ Lynch warned, ‘there is an End of the Confederation.’” So Lynch was a freedom fighter—as long as that freedom didn’t extend to the people he owned. This is a nasty, duplicitous, and sadly typical omission by the White House. Totally on brand.

And this thing called Freedom 250 gets worse. Seven US senators wrote to the White House after an NY Times report revealed some of the program’s even sketchier aspects.

We are particularly concerned by the solicitation for sponsorship packages circulated to potential Freedom 250 donors promising supporters who give $1 million or more preferential access to the President and high-profile events held at or in connection with official government venues. Linking private contributions – explicitly or implicitly – to invitations to White House events, photo ops, ceremonial roles, or other forms of access unavailable to the general public, raises serious concerns about the auctioning of government activities. Furthermore, these arrangements may implicate federal bribery, conflict of interest, or ethics statutes and will be subject to close scrutiny.

Did I mention that #47 deployed a “Freedom Plane” too?

If the ancestors were talking to me, I was moving too fast to hear them.

I have written this before. I don’t mean it literally. I’m not inclined toward the metaphysical or paranormal. It’s just that in the early days—really, years—of doing our cemetery work, I rarely felt the visceral charge I expected and wanted to feel when I walked ground that my ancestors had walked, farmed, been enslaved on, were buried in.

Over time, I slowed down, looked and listened more closely, and kept studying. Black folks have freed themselves in myriad ways. Yes, they used their wits and feet to escape bondage, as William I. Johnson and Henry Wheaton did, as Ona Judge and Hercules did when they liberated themselves from the Washingtons, and as Anthony, Ezekiel, and Ellen Stewart, stole themselves from the Madison family plantation.

Lately, though, I have been thinking of self-emancipation more broadly. Black folks freed their hearts and souls in the hush arbors (or harbors) of worship away from the eyes and ears of their enslavers. Some enslaved people seized opportunities when they arose to soak up letters and words to free their minds, risking punishment for being discovered as literate. Many used the dark of night to visit loved ones on neighboring enslavers’ farms, and in doing so strengthened the ties that bound family and community—and sustained hope. More radically—and lethally—Nat Turner, Charles Deslondes, and others killed and died to end slavery. After 1865, Black folks built their own churches, businesses, mutual aid societies to free themselves from dependence on white institutions and favor.

The throughlines of Freedom 250 and America250 are essentially the same ones we grew up with: the greatness of particular white men plus America’s incomparable and inevitable drive toward justice and perfection. This story hides more than it reveals, and that’s the point. It must ignore the fact that powerful white men have continually extracted from and oppressed the people who taught them the most, the women and men who measured their oppressors/neighbors against the high standards they professed but failed to live up to or just flat-out flouted.

Their story must ignore the system of white supremacy that the various Founding Fathers, their predecessors and successors, honed, strengthened, and adapted for changing times. Yes, they built those wonderful checks and balances into our government, but also enough privilege and wiggle room for racial, class, and gender injustice to endure, even after all those amendments to the Constitution.

The FFs essentially enshrined hypocrisy in American politics and discourse. All rulers and their minions must lie to prevent their hypocrisy from being labeled what it truly is. Those lies, backed by the threats of violence, form an armor of impunity around the Achilles’ heel of that hypocrisy. The bigger the lie, the bigglier the violence and hate deployed to protect it.

America could deflate the whole enterprise if we pierced that armor of impunity to reveal and accept the contradictions between what the FFs et al said and wrote, and what they did. America would then see history in a new light, which illuminates the right-now insanity, illegality, and brutality of the orange-white man in the Oval Office and the cynical, venal white people in Congress elsewhere who back him.

Unfortunately, as we have seen, even liberals have a hard time keeping it real about early American history, try as they might. Episode one of the American Revolution, the PBS miniseries produced by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, leads with an actor voicing a quote from Thomas Paine. But then it launches boldly into an enlightening scene about the union of six nations—Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora—that created the larger Haudenosaunee nation in the northeast of what became North America.

“We know our lands are now become more valuable,” says the actor voicing Canassatego, the Onondagan spokesman for the confederacy. “The white people think we do not know their value. But we are sensible that the land is everlasting.” The narrator then jumps in to tell us that Ben Franklin borrowed the Indigenous example to craft his Albany Plan of Union for the British colonies. Tell me more, I shouted! Nope. Like the colonists, the filmmakers borrowed the idea and then hightailed it back to the white people.

Indigenous and Black people pop up like this in the American Revolution within the conventional narrative. The filmmakers do a valuable service by sharing the voices of Canassatego, formerly enslaved notables Caesar Sarter and Phillis Wheatley, Black abolitionist Lemuel Haynes, and others—and also by including excellent scholars who have spent years revealing strands of the American past such as Maggie Blackhawk, Vincent Brown, Christopher Brown, and Kathleen Duval. It’s much better than nothing, but not nearly enough to do justice to the Black and Brown founding parents of this nation. We weren’t sprinkles on the sundae of American greatness, we were scoops right next to the vanilla people.

Scholars at Harvard, that liberal arts bastion and target for “antiwoke” crusaders, smashed into the limits of the university’s good intentions while digging into the history of its deep connection to and profit from chattel slavery. In the Guardian, journalist Michela Muscufo describes how intrepid researchers, historian Vincent Brown among them, apparently found too much slavery in Hahvahd’s past for the university’s poobahs to handle. So they fired them or, according to folks like Brown, drove them out.

“Have Harvard’s leaders buckled to external pressure from donors or government, who have decided that suppressing Black history will be an effective way to discipline the political views of future generations,” Brown wrote in his letter of resignation from the Memorial Project Committee, reported in Harvard Magazine. “Or is this all about internal institutional disputes, some petty court politics unknowable to the general public? These questions displace the more important ones: How many people did Harvard leaders enslave, and where? What were their names? What can we discover about their lives? Who are their descendants and how can we help reconnect them to the stories of their ancestors?” Harvard’s spokespeople had no clear answers. So Brown is heading to Yale, where he’ll learn if the nation’s third oldest university (second oldest Ivy) can take the whole truth and nothing but.

I checked my state 250th website, VA250, for references to “chattel slavery,” the institution that fattened Virginia enslavers and the nation’s coffers, north and south. I found five on April 17. All but one are passing references or items on long lists of statewide events.

The one meaningful item was a transcript of an August 2025 speech delivered on African Landing Day by Mamie E. Locke, an African American state senator who represents the city of Hampton and parts of Newport News. She’s also a vice-chair of VA250.

“The year 1619 marked the introduction of the African presence in the English colonies and the birth of a centuries-long system of racialized chattel slavery, one that would shape the social, economic, and political fabric of America for centuries,” Locke said.

“Reflecting on 406 years since the first African landing at Fort Monroe, our challenge is twofold: to honor the memory of those who endured the unimaginable, and to reckon with the legacies of those who profited from their suffering.”

Locke told it like it was, harrowing and heartening, and then she told us what a genuine celebration of the 250th should be.

"Oscar Davis. He died in 1968, and I would have been about 14 years old at the time,” James Bruce Monroe told me as we stood in the old, disused cemetery behind the home of his 95-year-old father, also James Monroe. “As a kid I remember him, and I think he had a brother. They used to sit outside the house, just sitting out there, you know. That's mainly what I remember, but I was told that he was a deacon at the church also," Monroe, who goes by Bruce, said. (Monroe’s memory serves him well. Mr. Davis was a deacon in his church.)

It’s a small burial ground, about seven miles north of James Madison’s Montpelier. One might charitably call it rugged, but it’s definitely not abandoned.

The area is rich in history. James Madison’s brothers also owned land—and people—in the neighborhood, given to them by their father, James Sr. Brother William christened his 1,300-acre plantation Woodberry Forest. Francis called his 1,000-acre property Prospect Hill. (The family cemetery on that land, where Francis is buried, is just a mile away.)

In November 2021 and March 2022, volunteers did major cleanups of the graveyard—following minor cleanups—with the Orange County Historical Society and Orange County African American Historical Society. You can walk the site easily and see the gravestones.

“Living right over the hill, I can remember lots of burials, lots of funerals, funeral processions and so forth,” Monroe said. “Sometimes in the middle of winter, when the roads weren’t paved—all of them were dirt roads—[people] had trouble getting the vehicles and the casket to the burial site.”

Mike Saxton, a former trustee of Graham Cemetery (also in Orange County) counted over 80 burials when he visited, “but there could be a lot more,” Monroe said. There are only a dozen or so identifiable grave markers, actual headstones with inscriptions for people born in the late 19th and early 20th century, but a profusion of what appear to be field stones, large rocks used to mark graves. “When we first started clearing it, we thought that they were just plain rocks, so some of them might have been moved,” Monroe said. They’re common at burial grounds for the enslaved, but have been used as grave markers around the world for centuries.

The cemetery has at least two names. Monroe refers to it as Little Petersburg Cemetery. On FindaGrave.com, it’s called Fisherman’s Lodge, aka Galilean Fishermen Cemetery. Both names point to essential pieces of African American history, both local and national.

“Little Petersburg” emerged from the 1867 purchase of land by three African American men—Ruben Hackett, Winston Snead, and Cele Walker—from Charles Lewis Bankhead, who just seven years earlier had held 20 Black people in bondage, the youngest were a girl and a boy, both one year old, according to the 1860 US Census. Snead and Walker bought more land from Bankhead, who sold plots to other African Americans as well. “Over the next decades, these properties were divided and sold to other freed blacks,” according to a history Monroe wrote of Little Petersburg. It became one of many free towns or freedmen’s communities in the area and across the South.

The name “Fisherman’s Lodge” comes from the Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen, an African American beneficial organization founded in 1856 in Baltimore. The Fishermen were among the “the most influential” Baltimore secret societies at the turn of the century, earning a positive mention from W.E.B. Du Bois in a 1907 study he edited, Economic Cooperation Among Negro Americans. Thirty years earlier, the white press was drawn to the “Peculiarities of a Large Secret Society of Colored People in Baltimore” when a dispute between two members became public. The interests of the Baltimore Bulletin—and the New York Times, which reprinted the story on August 8, 1877—were prurient and its tone patronizing, but the writer did acknowledge the organization’s good work “among the colored residents.”

The Fishermen built a meeting hall, Evergreen Tabernacle #147, on this small parcel in Little Petersburg. It served as their lodge, but also as a school and a church (Little Petersburg Baptist). “[R]eligious services were held on the fourth Sunday of each month,” descendant Alexis Kemper writes in her brief history of the church. The congregation quickly outgrew the small building, so they built a new church at a different site, eventually changing the name to Bethel Baptist. The cemetery passed through several hands until recently being transferred to the trustees of Bethel Baptist, along with the lodge and an adjoining plot of land held by a family trust. (Monroe and Kemper are Bethel church trustees and deacons.)

Grave markers for the Davis family predominate here and it’s not clear why (yet). “You know that is a mystery,” Monroe said. Many local families chose to bury their loved ones at Westview Cemetery while the Davises were still using Little Petersburg. But there are other such sites, small graveyards and family cemeteries, on properties close by.

Little Petersburg Cemetery isn’t an anomaly or a curiosity, for the area or the region. There are thousands of such defunct African American cemeteries across the South—and up north. They are opportunities, history-rich sites waiting to be reclaimed.

This quote from a 2025 Boston Review essay by scholar Robin D.G. Kelley, who’s quoting Langston Hughes from 90 years ago, resonates powerfully as we enter the second year of this presidential administration:

As poet, playwright, essayist, and activist Langston Hughes told those assembled at the Third U.S. Congress against War and Fascism in 1936, “Fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America. . . . This kind of terrorism is extending more and more to groups of peoples whose skins are not black.”

Hughes’ words, tragic and true, fall into the I Told You So and Mmmmmhmmm categories. It’s more analysis, truth-telling, than guidance.

This morning, I watched video of the attack on US Representative Ilhan Omar, D-MN, that came just seconds after she called on the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to resign or face impeachment.

The attack was cowardly and heinous, but it’s the aftermath, Omar’s response, that stood out to me. The congress member held her ground. She resisted attempts by her aides and security guards to bundle her up and drag her to safety. Then she mollified them with, “just give me 10 minutes. Please don’t let them have the show.”

And then she went back to what she was doing, speaking truth to autocracy, calling people of goodwill to action. That’s the same thing Omar did yesterday and the day before and the day before that. She showed courage under fire and kept moving. That’s the guidance.

That’s why I haven’t been Stacking lately.

That said, I have been photographing steadily, as always, some at Montpelier and plenty at Evergreen and East End, the two Richmond-area historic Black cemeteries at which Erin and I first volunteered 11 years and two days ago.

We continue to clear brush and find gravestones beneath the carpet of leaves, English ivy, roots, dirt, and under the otherworldly matrix of wisteria vines that enmesh parts of Evergreen’s western section.

At Montpelier, I have been digging into databases and reading my way through the impressive body of history and archaeology that staff members have created over the past two-plus decades. I’m also immersing myself in the broader history of relevant eras: from the early 18th century, when the first Madisons arrived at what became Montpelier; through the Revolutionary War and War of 1812; then into the period after 1844 when Madison family ownership ended; through the Civil War, when Confederate troops occupied areas of the plantation; and into the 20th century, when the DuPont family owned the property.

While I was in grade school in New Jersey during the 1970s, I learned many things about the “Founding Fathers,” the men of European descent credited with creating the United States of America. That education was heavy on their bravery and brilliance, but feather-light on the less savory deeds that were central to their nation-building—among them participation in (or tolerance of) the enslavement of African Americans and the dispossession and near-annihilation of Indigenous people.

Fifty years on, I’m learning more about the FFs, along these lines and others. It’s a rich and complex journey so far.

Of equal or greater importance, I’m finding out about their African American contemporaries, people who also clearly qualify as founding parents of this nation because of their high ideals, courage, and tenacity in the face of withering persecution. Their work is out there—in books, letters, sermons, dissertations, footnotes—but it’s fragmentary and parallel to, not thoroughly integrated into our collective national story. For generations African Americans and allies have worked hard to break down that historical segregation. But Black folks have worked even harder to acquire the space and means to speak on their terms, both to their own people and to the broader public.

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) popped up as a notable name—without a story—during Black History Week when I was young. (We didn’t get a whole Black History Month until 1976.) She authored Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first known book of poetry in English written by a person of African descent to be published (in 1773, in London), according to historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Gates is the author of The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers. She wrote much more, including an elegy for David Wooster, an American Revolutionary War general killed in a 1777 battle, which Wheatley sent to his widow, Mary. In that poem, Wheatley, who supported the Revolution, took to task those “patriots” who demanded their freedom from the tyranny of England’s taxation while condemning her people to the tyranny of slavery.

But how, presumptuous shall we hope to find

Divine acceptance with th’ Almighty mind—

While yet (O deed ungenerous!) they disgrace

And hold in bondage Afric’s blameless race?

Let virtue reign — And thou accord our prayers

Be victory our’s, and generous freedom theirs.

(Thomas Jefferson derided Wheatley’s writing as “below the dignity of criticism,” but George Washington praised her poetry.)

I read only recently about Lemuel Haynes, a Black abolitionist and minister who served in the Revolutionary War, in Alan Taylor’s The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. I should say I noticed Haynes because this was my second time reading Taylor’s marvelously illuminating book. Haynes didn’t resonate on that first pass. I didn’t see the connection between his radical words, those of a free, relatively privileged Black thinker, and the self-evidently radical actions of the brave enslaved people who escaped bondage during the War of 1812 to follow a promise of freedom made by the British in exchange for service to the Crown. I see that connection now. I understand better how such words can kindle, justify, and support such actions. (More disclosure: I also managed to breeze past references to Haynes, Wheatley, Truth, and so many other powerful Black voices of yore—John Brown Russworm, Alexander Crummell, Highland Garnett, McCune Smith—when reading W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Talented Tenth, published in 1903, plus other works in which he illuminates African American intellectual history. So I’m going back to Du Bois too.)

Haynes was born in Connecticut to a man of “unmingled African extraction” and “a white woman of respectable ancestry in New-England,” in the words of the Reverend Timothy Mather Cooley, who wrote his biography in the 1830s.

In 1776, after his service as a Continental soldier, Haynes published Liberty Extended: Or Free thoughts on the illegality of Slave-keeping; Wherein those arguments that are used in its vindication are plainly confuted. Together with an humble Address to such as are concerned in the practice. That’s one heck of a wordy, old-timey subtitle. But Haynes was also magnificently direct:

[W]e may reasonably conclude, that Liberty is equally as precious to a Black man, as it is to a white one, and Bondage equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other: Seeing it effects the laws of nature equally as much in the one as it does in the other. But, as I observed before, those privileges that are granted to us by the Divine Being, no one has the least right to take them from us without our consent; and there is not the least precept, or practice, in the sacred scriptures, that constitutes a Black man a Slave, any more than a white one.

(Historian Nicole Eustace, author of 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism, points out that the Reverend Haynes wasn’t an equal-rights-for-all kind of activist. He called Indigenous people “savages,” a prejudice he shared with many a founding father, including, most famously, Washington.)

The conventional FFs were a critical intended audience for Haynes, Wheatley, and other Black abolitionists and thinkers—from Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), Absalom Jones (1746–1818), Richard Allen (1760–1831), James Forten (1766–1842); through Sojourner Truth (1797–1883), and Sarah Parker Remond (1824–1894). Some of the FFs, like Washington, responded to them on occasion; others ignored or disparaged them, flexing their near-limitless power to marginalize those who penned inconvenient truths.

But Black abolitionists’ ideas still spread. Some white newspapers and pamphlets referred to them; antislavery ones published them. “African Americans wrote roughly 1,500 documents between 1760 and 1829,” Richard S. Newman, historian of early America, writes. “By the Revolutionary era … black authors abounded: Jupiter Hammon, James Gronniosaw, Olaudah Equiano, Richard Allen, Phillis Wheatley.” Black folk who could read would pass on their message to those who had been denied the freedom to learn.

And even though we may not have concrete documentary evidence that the enslaved sat around the hearth parsing Haynes’s or Wheatley’s sentences, we can be certain that they heard other people, Black and white, discussing them. “In every community, throughout history, slaves and servants, have been privy to the innermost secrets, anxieties, strengths, weaknesses, successes, and failure of the people they served,” Annette Gordon-Reed writes in The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Many enslaved people were mighty close to those who held them in bondage—as body servants, wet nurses, valets, domestics, coachmen, and, of course, targets of intimate violence—close enough to hear such choice things. Big house insiders would share that intimate intel with those on the outside, and it would spread even more widely through the muscular and extensive Black grapevine.

Of Philadelphia-based abolitionists James Forten and Richard Allen, Gordon-Reed writes, “Both men’s reputations extended far beyond their city; literate blacks read about them, and those who could not passed the word.”

These powerful ideas and words—of Black humanity and equality, of chattel slavery’s evils—delivered by the Black abolitionists spread far and wide, through towns and cities, and onto plantations. They influenced and blended with homegrown, nontextual forms of African American self-assertion, resilience, defiance, and resistance. Our ancestors left abundant evidence of this. It’s our job to find them, in the archives and the ground; in Richmond’s Black cemeteries, at Montpelier, and beyond.

A few weeks ago I drove west from Richmond to Charlottesville to hear knowledgeable, dedicated people talk about history at a symposium organized by the Descendants of Enslaved Communities of Virginia. I arrived late, but just in time for a breakout session and then the keynote speech by Carlotta Walls LaNier, one of the Little Rock Nine.

I knew something about the saga of the Black children who spearheaded the desegregation of Central High School in September 1957, three years after Brown v. Board of Education. In 2013, I interviewed Moses Newson, who had covered the story for the Baltimore Afro-American. “We got a few licks but nothing serious,” Newson, then 86 years old, told me.

A colleague of Newson’s, however, had a very different experience, he said. L. Alex Wilson, a reporter for the Tri-State Defender, a Black newspaper, “refused to run, and he took a horrible beating out there,” Newson recounted. “They climbed on his back, and they hit him with bricks and kicked him in his stomach, and—they just beat him up pretty horrible.”

The “they” Newson was talking about was a mob of white segregationists.

In her Charlottesville address to us—and in her book—Walls LaNier described her encounters with that very same they.

She and her peers were smuggled into the school the morning of September 23. When the white people protesting outside, roughly 1,000 strong, found out that the Black kids were already inside, they exploded. Authorities feared the violence would spread if they didn’t defuse the situation, so they jammed the Black children into the back seats of police cruisers at a side exit. They covered them with blankets and then roared onto the street. The cops stopped for no one and no thing. You would have been killed had you been standing on the sidewalk in their way, Walls LaNier told us.

Walls LaNier reminded me a lot of Newson. She spoke of the brutalities she witnessed and endured in a measured voice—no bombast whatsoever. Just her experience and facts.

“September 23 was very similar to January 6,” Walls LaNier said. She wasn’t just talking about history. She was linking her past directly to our now.

If a pin had dropped right then, everyone in the room would have heard it, loud and clear.

The Little Rock struggle was long and ugly for these young people and their community. It continued even after President Dwight Eisenhower dispatched 1,000 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division under the command of Edwin A. Walker, a two-star general, to protect the students on September 24.

The segregationists, old and young, however, were far from cowed.

Once Walls LaNier and her eight peers finally got into their classrooms—one Black child per class—they were harassed, spat on, attacked, often as (white) adults watched. Most of them did nothing. A white girl, who Walls LaNier called her “redheaded nemesis,” would follow her through the hallways stomping on her heels until they bled. One day, Walls LaNier stopped dead in her tracks during one of those heel stomps, causing the white nemesis to crash into her Black body. That ended the redhead’s personal terror campaign.

In the fall of 1958, white officials shut down all Little Rock public high schools for the academic year rather than follow through with real desegregation. Here in Virginia, they did the same thing, but on a bigger scale. White segregationists shut down schools in three cities, including Charlottesville, rather than allow African American students to enter. Prince Edward County shuttered its whole school system from 1959 to 1964. They called it “massive resistance.”

It got worse for Walls LaNier. Her home was bombed in 1960. Did the police conduct a thorough investigation? No, with zero evidence they arrested her father, Cartelyou Walls, and two Black teens. The cops couldn’t beat a confession out of Mr. Walls, but they broke the boys, Herbert Monts and Maceo Binns. The cases against them were so weak they unraveled, but Monts still served 20 months in jail. He was pardoned in 2018.

Walls LaNier never thought about quitting. “You have not whipped me, whittled me down, or scared me enough to quit.” So when graduation came just a few months after the bombing, “I pushed back my shoulders and held my head high as I walked across that stage.” She took her diploma from the principal, one of the segregationists who had initially blocked the nine children from attending Central High.

“Bravery was the only way to make it through to the other side,” Walls LaNier told us.

Clearly, the struggle for true democracy, equity, and inclusion didn’t end with Walls LaNier’s graduation. But a victory is still a victory, and something we can learn from.

Guests were invited to submit questions in advance. I posed mine from my seat, in real time.

Will you do a version of this event on the record and for the public? I asked.

I got no definitive answer from Spanberger.

After the panel ended, two fellow audience members, Black folk, accused me of breaking protocol and “disrespecting” the organizers, Black women.

I was perplexed. I told them I disagreed. This was not, in my view, a gotcha question. A white candidate for Virginia’s highest office entered a Black space for a “community discussion,” essentially making a pitch for my vote during an absolutely perilous time in this country. Of course I’m going to ask her to do it again, on the record and for the people, not in a stage-managed event for the organizers’ and campaign’s version of the talented tenth.

My question was a genuine request, but it was also a test of a candidate with a scant political track record—one term in Congress—whose most prominent résumé entry, in my view, is operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, an outfit with a long history of violating laws and human rights.

Every day offers more proof that #47 poses an existential threat to this nation. Since that August 16 event at the Black History Museum, he has ordered the extralegal killing of more people at sea—suspected smugglers of drugs—continued to use federal immigration agents to terrorize law-abiding people seeking their day in court, and told 800 of the nation’s highest ranking military officers that he will use them to make war on citizens at home who are exercising their Constitutional rights.

“This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control,” Trump told the be-starred and be-medaled men and women. “It won’t get out of control, once you’re involved, at all.”

If Spanberger wins, our livelihoods and lives will depend on her ability to stand up to a president whose strategy is to deploy lies, violate laws, hurt so many vulnerable people, and start so many fights that citizens struggle to mount effective defenses.

Will this former CIA ops officer protect the privacy rights of the Commonwealth’s citizens? Will she stand with those attacked by #47’s regime? Will Spanberger be the fighter we need or a functionary who’ll disappear after her victory speech? We should be able to ask her.

I’m not anti-Spanberger. I’m well acquainted with the alternative. I interviewed her current opponent, Winsome Earle-Sears, in 2022 when she was running for lieutenant governor. She sides with Trump and Governor Glenn Youngkin on most issues, including #47’s hatcheting of the federal workforce through DOGE. She opposes marriage equality. And she’s said some things about DEI, slavery, and critical race theory that are divorced from the reality we all inhabit.

The oddness of her answers astounded me. When I asked Earle-Sears, a Jamaican immigrant of African descent, about critical race theory, she took a surprising detour.

“Marxism has never helped anybody. It sounds good initially—that everybody’s going to share and share alike—but it doesn’t work that way,” she said. I had not asked her about Marxism or communism or socialism.

Her boss, Youngkin, rode an anti-CRT message into office. His first executive order banned the teaching of it and other “inherently divisive concepts” in public schools, something that was not happening. This was a devious and familiar misrepresentation. It was an assault on evidence-based inquiry into systemic white American racism, a force that was foundational to this nation’s formation and is sadly persistent in American politics. Earle-Sears signed onto this propaganda program and then doubled down on it with me, conjuring the bogeyman of communism.

“I’m tired of fighting people who look like me,” Earle-Sears told me, without acknowledging the reasons that many Black folks fought against her and continue to do so: her positions on most issues are antithetical to our interests.

Early voting started in Virginia on September 19. Spanberger will be debating Earle-Sears tonight at Norfolk State University. I asked her political director, with whom I have been emailing, for an invitation. She didn’t reply.

Mother Jones gathered a different sort of comment on social media, those made by Kirk’s fellow far-right travelers who are fashioning his killing into a pretext for attacking their foes. Us.

This is beyond chilling. It’s terrifying—and also utterly predictable coming from people who routinely demonize, stigmatize, malign all of us they deem lesser.

What will the backlash look like? We can’t know.

These events dragged me back to 2015. While watching Ava DuVernay’s Selma, a scene leapt out at me. Black men had gathered outside Brown Chapel, which was serving as a first aid station for Civil Rights marchers beaten by state troopers, police, and racist civilians after they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge.

Three very ANGRY MARCHERS appear in the entrance. They’re  looking for someone.  

ANGRY MARCHER 

Gerry! Gerry! Come with us!

GERRY 

I can’t walk! 

ANGRY MARCHER 

We need your gun, man! 

[MLK COMRADE ANDREW] YOUNG overhears them and approaches quickly. 

YOUNG 

Hey! What you need guns for? 

ANGRY MARCHER 

Bible says an eye for an eye, Reverend. I’m sick of this shit! 

YOUNG 

Yeah? You got any idea how many guns they got out there? That’s an entire army out there. What you  got? A couple of .32s? A .38 maybe? Couple of old scatter-guns? What? 

ANGRY MARCHER 

Enough to kill a couple of them crackers, that’s what we got! 

YOUNG 

And how many of us you think they’ll kill in retaliation? With their Colt automatics? Their 12-gauge pump-actions? Their Remingtons? Their helicopters! Their tanks! 

YOUNG (CONT’D) 

We won’t win that way. I ain’t talking the Bible. I ain’t talking what’s right by God. I’m talking facts. Cold, hard facts. You take two of them, they take ten of us. We have to win another way.

As a teen, I remember thinking, why didn’t Black folk fight back eye-for-an-eye style? I woulda… (Woulda what, my dad would have asked if I had dared voice this to him. He had lived Jim Crow, been hurt by it, and had fought back when he could.)

As a 50-year-old in 2015, I understood the folly of trying to fight a hot war with a massively armed state bent on your subjugation—and, if you resist too vigorously, elimination. Watching that scene, I finally got it viscerally. I imagined blood and bodies under tank treads in the streets.

Ten years ago, I was just learning about the myriad ways Black folks fought back against white America’s oppression—don’t comply, don’t show up, etc. It was almost never by going gun for gun with the state and the white citizens it has historically empowered to terrorize Black and Brown communities, though we had the Nat Turners, Charles Deslondes, and Black Panthers who tried.

I came to understand in my bones that Black folk weren’t being passive or even strictly nonviolent. They were being pragmatic and strategic. Our forebears understood the concept of deterrence—don’t start nothing, but be prepared to finish whatever nastiness the white man (or woman) kicks off. The Deacons for Defense and Justice, armed Black men, protected Black Freedom Struggle leaders. They were not the Deacons for Offense and Justice, but they didn’t play. They scared the Klan, Kellie Carter Jackson tell us in We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance. “White supremacy meant Black people could be harmed without recourse,” the Wellesley College Africana Studies writes. “Force proved Black Americans were entitled to defend their humanity and, ultimatelty, their citizenship.”

The Bull Connors and George Wallaces of our day are just itching for a violent pretext to mow us down. Again. I’m hoping this is not it—and that it never comes—but Trump and his crew have made retributive violence possible in old and new ways. They have resurrected the age-old culture of (white) “American exceptionalism” and violence in their anti-immigrant assault at home and robust support for a genocidal state abroad (Israel). They have erased or degraded advances made during the Black Freedom Struggle (and Indigenous, women’s, queer, and so many other rights struggles). And they have institutionalized white nationalism and grievance at the highest levels, thereby supercharging them. So anything is possible.

I’m bracing for violence. I’m keeping my head on a swivel, like Marines on patrol showed me. I’m keeping my people close and looking for new ones. And I’m working for unity and peace.

The July 19 panel at Richmond's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School led by Senator Tim Kaine felt very much like Black church to me. The senator shared the stage with leaders and a key staffer from old-line Black organizations—NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Urban League. SEIU repped organized labor. State and local African American leaders were front and center. Other Black and white folk, clearly those with their ears to the ground—the only public announcements about the event I saw were on church and private social media accounts—filled out the audience.

Kaine was the big-time guest pastor at this convening of what was, to a great extent, his Amen corner.

The discussion from the stage was primarily about #47’s budget bill. It was informative, as I wrote on Instagram weeks ago. The vibe in the auditorium was decorous and subdued, so unlike recent town halls where audiences have been tearing into Republican lawmakers executing the president’s brutal agenda.

Overall, the session felt inert, backward-looking, and, in the end, freighted with resignation. If any bold ideas or proposals were ventured—by Kaine or his stage mates—I missed them. Poorly promoted, this seemed like a retreat to the safe and familiar embrace of the Black community, and not what was needed: an emergency conclave to deal with #47's comprehensive and coordinated assault on democracy and humanity, particularly Brown and Black humanity.

As I photographed this discord-free event, I debated for a few seconds whether to re-ask the senator questions I had already posed to him face-to-face twice. I had asked him in 2023 and 2024 about Israel's war on Gaza and U.S. support for it. Kaine himself has consistently given full-throated support to Israel's "right" to wage war in "self-defense," sprinkled with a few caveats.

I was about to give one of our country's most powerful men a pass in the face of what countless authorities, witnesses, and survivors have defined as genocide. Not called but defined as, according to the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and other tenets of international law. The U.N. Special Rapporteur was using that language as early as March 2024. Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, called it "genocide" just six days after October 7, 2023, in his essay for Jewish Currents, "A Textbook Case of Genocide."

So, I asked Kaine my questions, including: Does a Palestinian life have the same value as an Israeli life? As he did in December 2023 and December 2024, he said yes. I asked him to say it publicly, as I asked those first two times. He demurred, again, at MLK Jr. Middle School, instead telling me to stay tuned for a joint announcement in two days with Senator Mark Warner.

A week-plus later, Kaine's office made two Gaza-related announcements:

• Kaine signed onto a July 29 letter with 18 other senators calling on #47 to "immediately cease all U.S. funding for [the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation] ..."

• The senator also voted in favor of Senate Resolutions 34 and 41 calling for a halt to certain—but not all—weapons sales to Israel.

These measures did not answer my fundamental question, so I asked again via email.

"Will Senator Kaine say publicly what he has told me in private, that a Palestinian life has the same value as an Israeli life?"

The fourth time was the charm. His office emailed me this statement on August 7:

Of course a Palestinian life has the same value as an Israeli life. Senator Kaine has not used the term genocide to describe the war in Gaza because he hasn’t concluded that the tragedy there warrants that description. He has publicly maintained that US military support for Israel should be for defensive weapons necessary to defeat attacks by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and others while voting three times since November to disapprove of offensive weapons sales.

Kaine made public what he had said to me in private—though his office made clear the statement came from a "Kaine spokesperson," not the senator himself. Still, this is something, I think.

The rest of the statement is far less than something; it's a retreat into the politics of equivocation and denial.

His substitution of "genocide" with the passive term "tragedy" is brutally telling. Avoiding that term allows the senator—and so many others—to ignore the actual, ongoing, systematic slaughter, engineered starvation, and erasure by Israel of Gaza and Gazans with weapons supplied by the United States. His and other senators’ distinction between offensive and defensive weapons has scant meaning and no impact IRL. Neither Senate resolution passed, for one thing. For two things, so-called defensive weapons provide a shield—an Iron Dome—for the so-called offensive ones that Israel uses to obliterate homes, schools, hospitals, journalists’ tents, and the people in them.

Why go so hard on Kaine? a couple of folks have asked me. Erin answered succinctly: Because Kaine could do so much more. Why not lean on Warner? Because he is, it seems, a hard-power Democrat inured to the suffering of the people our weapons annihilate in foreign lands. Kaine exudes menschiness and concern. His stands on so many issues are reasoned and democratic with a small D—he supports gun control, access to voting, and a person’s right to an abortion (though he says he is “pro-life”), because, he said, “women should be able to make their own decisions regarding reproductive health without unreasonable government interference.” That pro-lifeness hasn’t translated into protection for Gazans, whether been-born or yet-to-be-born.

Recently, Senator Kaine criticized Virginia General Assembly member Sam Rasoul for calling Zionism "supremacist ideology created to destroy and conquer everything and everyone in its way.” Rasoul is an American of Palestinian descent.

"I forcefully reject any claim that Zionism—the desire of Jewish people to have a state of Israel—is inherently racist or evil," Kaine said in an interview, according to Blue Virginia.

"Much love to so many of my Jewish friends who have stood up from the first weeks of this horror to say this is not in our name,” Rasoul said in his comments. Kaine ignored this part of his remarks as did Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger, who, without naming Rasoul, lobbed the charge of "using antisemitic language" in his direction.

Their charges are absurd. (Qasim Rashid dismantles Kaine’s and Spanberger’s attacks in his Substack Let's Address This.) They are essentially conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Moreover, calling Zionism “the desire of Jewish people to have a state of Israel” borrows the maximalist language of those who deny Palestinians have a right to anything in Palestine.

Thousands of antioccupation, antigenocide Jews—from Jewish Voice for Peace to B’Tselem—reject the Jewish supremacy that undergirds that statement.

And Albert Einstein, a self-proclaimed Zionist, rejected Jewish supremacy too. Einstein was persistent and consistent. He made his case for a binational Palestine in letters to politicians, editors, and fellow Zionists of all stripes long before the state of Israel was founded, through the Holocaust, until his death in 1955.

“The most important aspect of our policy must be our ever-present, manifest desire to institute complete equality for the Arab citizens living in our midst," Einstein wrote to Zvi Lurie, an Israeli politician and Zionist toward in January 1955.

Einstein condemned the brutality of far-right Zionists like Menachem Begin, a commander of the Zionist paramilitary Irgun, which committed acts of terror against British officials and Palestinian civilians. He included Begin—later Prime Minister of Israel and Nobel Prize winner—among the “fascist elements of Israel” in a 1948 letter to the NY Times. The late Fred Jerome dropped that knowledge in his book Einstein on Israel and Zionism.

The legendary journalist I.F. Stone called this form of Zionism—the one that preached equality and peaceful coexistence—the “Other Zionism.” Stone witnessed and documented its decimation at the hands of ultranationalists, but he still had hope. And wisdom.

“Israel can exhaust itself in new wars,” Stone wrote in a September 1978 Harper’s article. “It can commit suicide. It can pull down the pillars on itself and its neighbors. But it can live only by reviving that spirit of fraternity and justice and conciliation that the Prophets preached, and the Other Zionism sought to apply.”

Imagine if more American politicians began to sing this tune.

Folks—left, right, and center—love to quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We all do it, but selectively. That's what quoting is about, using a luminary’s weighty words to beef up our arguments. Right-wingers highlight Dr. King’s call for a colorblind society. Yet they skip right over his life’s work: pushing the government to take concrete steps, affirmative actions one might say, to eliminate the racial discrimination embedded in American law, society, and minds. Liberals and progressives cozy up to all that's comfortable in his speeches but don't often quote King's criticism of them. Some, among them Reverend William Barber II, reminded us on Instagram of key sections of Dr. King's 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail. They stand the test of time.

Omar El Akkad channels Dr. King in his book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, published by Knopf earlier this year. He writes about the two “ledgers” he keeps. The one tallying atrocities is packed.

Alongside the ledger of atrocity, I keep another. The Palestinian doctor who could not abandon his patients even as the bombs closed in. The Icelandic writer who raised money to get the displaced out of Gaza. The American doctors and nurses who risked their lives to go treat the wounded in the middle of a killing field. The puppet-maker who, injured and driven from his home, kept making dolls to entertain the children. The congresswoman who stood her ground in the face of censure, of constant vitriol, of her own colleagues' indifference. The protesters, the ones who gave up their privilege, their jobs, who risked something, to speak out....

It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away.

Sereen Haddad, a Virginia Commonwealth University psychology major, won a major battle against her school last week. But the war she's fighting is far from over.

Haddad's victory came on July 28 when VCU emailed to tell her that she would finally be getting the degree the school had withheld from her for 82 days.

This spring VCU had found the 20-year-old Haddad "responsible" for violations of the school's expression and "space utilization" policies when she "attended and acted in a leadership role for an unauthorized event" on April 29, 2025.

VCU's decision is a major, yet very quiet and bureaucratic about-face. It avoids countercharges by the students—and many of the school’s own professors—that it selectively enforces policies in order to chill, or eliminate, politically unpopular speech. And it also ignores the reasons Haddad and other students, like her classmate Selma Ait-Bella, had gathered this spring. They were commemorating April 29, 2024, the day police from three different forces stormed the campus to break up encampments that students had built to call attention to the killing of Palestinians in Gaza by Israel's armed forces, the U.S.’s material and political support for Israel, and VCU's investments in companies that do business with Israel.

Clearly, this story is bigger than VCU or Richmond, said Sam Freedman, a former Columbia Journalism School professor and a former education columnist for the New York Times.

“You have to wonder if VCU is feeling the pressure of Governor Youngkin's attacks, through his appointees to the boards of the state's public universities. He's already driven out the president of UVA and is putting enormous pressure on the president of George Mason,” Freedman said. “And, along with DEI initiatives, pro-Palestinian protests have been a key target of MAGA. So it could be that VCU, as a public university, was either getting pressure already from the governor and his appointees or chose to ‘obey in advance,’ as the phrase goes, in order to be spared pressure down the road. Though giving in to a bully never works.”

VCU did not accept an interview request from me, citing the "student privacy under federal and state law," but issued a general statement repeating the charge against Haddad. After VCU dropped the charge I asked again for comment. "Privacy laws prevent us from discussing the conduct process involving a specific student."

To gt her degree, VCU administrators had given Haddad three options. She chose option three: confront her accusers.

Haddad made her case on July 22 in a virtual hearing with VCU administrators, faculty, staff, and a student representative, according to Haddad and Professor Glenn Hurlbert who served a witness.

Hurlbert, a professor of mathematics and member of VCU's faculty senate, told me he spent roughly half an hour pointing out the fundamental flaws in the school's case. "The technical issues are essentially the important part," Hurlbert said, which allow "the dismantling of that kind of argument. And that's where my mathematical expertise comes in."

One hole was the lack of clear definition in any university policy of the term "unauthorized event"—or even "event" itself.

"They define the word 'event' as, 'an assembly, or organized expressive activity,'" which "actually involves everything that two humans do together," Hurlbert said.

"This has never been specifically about, I want my degree," Haddad told me. "It's more so about what kind of disturbing message VCU sends that they can implement these kind of actions and take action against people who are protesting a genocide."

Ait-Bella, like several other protesters for Palestinian rights, also had her degree withheld, too, but she settled with the university before graduation and received he diploma. To get her sheepskin, Ait-Bella had to write an essay. The assignment from VCU: address one requirement of university policy, specifically highlighting what "benefits this requirement might offer the University and/or its students and the importance of complying with the policy."

Forty years ago, when I was Ait-Bella and Haddad’s age, I was an exchange student in the People’s Republic of China. In the mid/late-1990s I moved to Beijing and worked as a magazine bureau chief for roughly two years. VCU’s assignment sounded suspiciously like Maoist self-criticism, a psycho-political process designed by the Party to compel a dissenter to resubjugate herself, publicly, to its dictates. The public part of this matters: you disavow your beliefs before your peers, thereby destroying your credibility and undermining your cause without the powers that be having to flex.

Ait-Bella responded by turning the process on its figurative head.

"It is clear that policy functions as a tool to justify political repression," Ait-Bella wrote. "I think genocide is unreasonable and indefensible." She received no reply from VCU.

Neither Ait-Bella or Haddad use the term genocide lightly. More than 200 of Haddad's family members have been killed in the war on Gaza, her father, Tariq, said when they appeared on Democracy Now last week.

Since the October 7 attack by Hamas, Israel has responded with disproportionate and indiscriminate force, according to international humanitarian law experts and aid providers, medical personnel, dissenting Israelis, and Palestinians themselves. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been wounded or killed in Gaza. Israeli settlers kill Palestinian farmers and filmmakers in the West Bank with impunity. And the casualty numbers rise steadily, as the Israeli military continues its attacks and the government blocks most aid bound for Gaza, leading to mass starvation.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, denies Gazans are starving or that Israel is preventing aid from reaching that occupied territory. And, he said last year: “The charge of genocide leveled against Israel is not only false, it’s outrageous, and decent people everywhere should reject it.”

History shows that Americans have a habit of privileging Israeli voices and ignoring Palestinian ones—from the late Edward Said and Diana Buttu, to deeply credible newcomers like Tareq Abou Azzum. He’s a young Al Jazeera correspondent I’ve been watching closely. Abou Azzum has been filing clear and substantive reports from Gaza month after month, day and night. And he and his peers continue to report, even as they scrounge for food to eat, and even as they are targeted by the occupation forces.

While American corporate media shrink before the G-term—and the abundant evidence of it—prominent genocide and Holocaust experts use it to describe Israel's project. Stockton University's Raz Segal, writing in Jewish Currents, called Israel’s post 10/7 actions a "textbook case of genocide unfolding before our eyes." Brown University's Omer Bartov, an Israeli by birth who served in that nation's military, wrote a piece for the New York Times headlined "I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It." And just last week, two of Israel's main human rights organizations, B-Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, charged their own government with genocide against Palestinians. The title of B-Tselem’s report? Our Genocide.

“I have learned that educating the public about a genocide disrupts the school’s academic mission,” Ait-Bella wrote in her nonself-criticism, “because the real mission is to create the next engineers who will build the weapons of future wars, the political science students who will sign off on those wars from their elected seats, and the journalism students who will write off this genocide as an unavoidable ‘conflict.’”

"Virginia's crackdown exists within the nationwide context of Trump's punishment of major universities—all on the very dubious pretext of fighting antisemitism,” Sam Freedman told me.

“What's really going on nationally is an effort to use financial leverage, legal leverage, and threats of loss of accreditation, to make universities take their marching orders from the White House," Freedman said. "Turning any form of pro-Palestinian activism—however nonviolent—into forbidden behavior is very much part of the MAGA program." Freedman was on Columbia's faculty—and on campus—during Columbia's Palestine protests.

After got the good news about her degree, she texted me.

"I want to be clear that this was not VCU choosing to do the right thing or them waking up and realizing they had erred," Haddad said. "This was the result of pressure and of a case they couldn't defend, because of our evidence and because the truth was always on our side and they were left with no choice.

“I may be getting my degree now—but I never needed it to speak truth, to stand for justice, or to defend my people."

Haddad closed her message with "all eyes on Gaza."

According to the 1880 US Census, Alice Holmes Epps was living in Richmond with her husband, Armstead, aged 60, five sons, and a daughter, Rebecca. Twenty years later, Mrs. Epps, 60 and widowed, was living with her 34-year-old son Wallace, the head of the household, a daughter-in-law (Cornelia Gardner Epps, widow of son Matthew), and several grandchildren. Of her 13 children, only three were living at the time. There is no occupation for her listed on the document. Wallace P. Epps is recorded as a "public school teacher.” He was listed in the Times-Dispatch, the city's white newspaper, as one of Richmond's "qualified" teachers for the "colored schools." Wallace taught at Richmond schools with notable educators, J. Andrew Bowler, also buried at Evergreen Cemetery, and Rosa Dixon Bowser, buried at neighboring East End.

Finding information on Alice Epps has been difficult. Wallace, who is buried in the same plot and whose stone was found years ago, is less difficult, though details are still sparse. His headstone, a durable record of his achievements, lists the many offices he held, including two at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he served as clerk for 30 years. Dedicated in 1858, Ebenezer is one of Richmond's oldest African American churches.

Among the documents and newspaper clips, we found one especially revelatory one. The Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Missionary published a loving tribute to him after he passed away in 1926.

Prof. Wallace Epps, for many years teacher in the public schools and superintendent of the Sunday School of the Ebenezer Baptist Church of Richmond, Va., was one of the outstanding laymen among the Negro Baptists the country over.

Lott Carey (also written Cary) was a formerly enslaved Richmonder—he preached at First African Baptist, which is still here—who traveled to West Africa in 1821 with other Black Americans (and white members of the American Colonization Society) to escape the brutalities of slavery. Cary helped found the nation of Liberia.

About his decision to decamp to Africa, Cary wrote the following:

I am an African, and in this country however meritorious my conduct, and respectable my character, I cannot receive the credit due either. I wish to go to a country where I shall be estimated by my merits, not by me complexion; and I feel bound to labor for my suffering race.

Epps made a different choice more than a century later, a very different time, to stay in the US—and to support the (missionary) work of his brethren and sistren abroad.

Through Lott Cary, Wallace Epps was connected to Africa and the world. That’s a lovely thought—and a lovely connection to have made.

Today, more than 80 people from 40-odd countries became US citizens in Richmond, Virginia, as they did in many places across the country. The Honorable Roger L. Gregory, Circuit Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, presided, as he has for many years. "When power corrupts, poetry cleanses," he said in his address, quoting John F. Kennedy Jr. Eventually, perhaps, I thought.

I tried something different after photographing the ceremony at the suggestion of friend and colleague Fred Ritchin. Before asking two new citizens my standard journalist's questions, I made a few photos of them—quick portraits, nothing fancy—then showed them the images on my camera. I asked if they felt it captured who they are, and if it represents how they feel today.

Burhan Hussaini, a 25-year-old from Afghanistan, pointed out that the screen I was asking him to review was black. I fired it back up. He asked which photo I liked, so I showed him. "Yeah, that one," he said. It captures who you are? I asked. "It does," he told me. Does it represent how you feel on your first day of Americanness? I asked. "I don't know what to say, literally—like, [it’s] one of the best days of my entire life."

Hussaini had led the group in the Pledge of Allegiance from the podium. He told us, the audience, that he had walked his way out of Afghanistan all the way to Turkey. He’s dead-set on becoming a Virginia State Police Trooper. “That is just the beginning.”

I made several frames of US Army Private Tomisin Liadi, originally from Nigeria. In some she smiles with her teeth; in the others, no teeth. I showed her the photos and asked her preference. "The teeth," she replied instantly. Her friend, a fellow soldier from Ft. Lee—formerly Ft-Gregg-Adams and before that Ft. Lee—agreed. "Why is that you?" I asked. "I'm just a joyful and happy person." The smiling photo "makes me feel happy and emotional and grateful that I made it here," she said.

I asked both a question I knew would be problematic: How do you feel about becoming an American when our government is attacking immigrants? I had to ask because it's happening, but I also understood the peril that a frank answer could put them in.

"I think it depends how you enter the States, legally or illegally, but I'm not a politic[al] man. I don't want to say anything about that," Hussaini said.

"I don't even know if I can answer that," Private Liadi replied. "Can we answer that?" she asked her comrade, before answering herself: "No, we can't."

Both soldiers said something about not getting that much information from the outside world on base. They were playing it safe. They wear the uniform. They're bound to "obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me" by the army's oath of enlistment.

On its website the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the government agency that orchestrates these ceremonies, links to a welcome video from the current president. I won't.

Vibe detection is more art than science—perhaps all art because we, the measurers of vibes, are human and therefore inherently subjective. With that caveat, I'll say the overall vibe I felt at Richmond's No Kings demonstration on Saturday and the smaller Destroy ICE march that followed was overwhelmingly positive, affirming, connective.

There are those who will disagree with this assessment.

“You’re not accomplishing anything!” a Black motorist shouted at bike marshals blocking her little green car at the corner of 9th and Cary Streets. “I live right there,” she yelled, pointing to a spot mid-block clogged with demonstrators. As she argued with the mostly white marshals, thousands of No Kings marchers crested the hill heading our way. I approached the passenger, an older woman, the driver’s mom, I assumed. Certainly, two Black people of a certain age—me and Mom—could vibe our way out this standoff. She rolled down her window to listen. I said that it might be wise to move just a few feet to the corner until the marched passed… She gave me about 12 seconds, then rolled up her window. Fail. A white woman—not a marshal—then scooted up on her bike to Mom’s side of the car. Let’s see what she can do, I said to myself. Window down, they spoke for just a few moments. Window up; the car moved. Go figure.

I saw the white bike woman later, at the end of the march. We chatted. She struck me as a gentle, empathic soul. Part of the solution, not the problem.

A Richmond Black activist I respect called the marching “perfectly peaceful performative protest.” NY Times columnist Charles M. Blow defended “Black reticence” about participating in these anti-#47 demonstrations. I feel them. What did the Freedom Rides and Black Freedom Struggle marches, Vietnam War demos, ACT UP direct actions, anti-Gulf War anti-Iraq War protests, and Occupy Wall Street actually, tangibly change, in policy or practice? We can debate this for eternity. Demos are performance, but they’re much more: political statements, social barometers, wake-up calls to the powerful, and perhaps most critically, fellowship for those who feel disempowered. They can be first steps toward movement building. June 14 may turn out to be this. History also shows that certain protests were strategic, small parts of much larger programs, manifestations of powerful movements already built or building. Clearly, we’re not there yet.

As I waded through the crowd, I caught microvibes: levity and sarcasm from knots of older folk rocking their colorful and snarky signs; an almost grim earnestness radiating from groups of young folk, some masked for the occasion.

I brought my own microvibe, too. I was excited, a smidgen optimistic, but mostly anxious. I worried that the dozen plainclothes-cop-looking men and women I saw at Ironclad Coffee the day before would he lurking among the protesters, and then pop up to abduct organizers and sundry Brown people. I didn’t spot any of these feds on Saturday, and saw only a handful of uniformed cops monitoring from the edges. I’m sure that plenty of surveillance and intell gathering was going on, but there was nothing I could see that would have inflamed or threatened the crowd.

I have lost count of the protests I have covered since my first ones in NYC in the late 1980s. In January 1991, I followed an unplanned march that spun off from a Gulf War protest. Young marchers had taken the street, specifically a ramp leading onto the Brooklyn Bridge. A driver, perhaps under the influence, didn't see them. That night, I heard the sound of a speeding car slamming into fellow humans for the first time. I can’t unhear that or unsee the sights that followed. No one was killed, but two people were seriously injured.

On Saturday, I had this on my mind—and Charlottesville 2017, too. I also had it in my head five years ago during the George Floyd protests. One night, protestors filled the sidewalk along North Belvidere Street to the curb. Cars and trucks blew by perilously close to youthful hips, elbows, feet. I took a break from photographing to ask the organizers to tell people through their bullhorns to move away from the road. I have 30 years covering protests and conflict, I told them—street cred, I thought. I don’t recall their exact response, but it amounted to, We got this, Senior Citizen! Then they deployed their bike marshals to block traffic, took the street, and marched. No one was hit.

On Saturday, “Destroy ICE” demonstrators piggybacked on No Kings. Before the march stepped off, their banner-bearers leaped to the front, ahead of the organizers’ banner crew. Words were exchanged. The No Kings organizers protested. The Destroy ICErs held the spot. At dusk, they spun off their own march.

Down the road a piece, I got into a tiff with a couple of young masked protesters, a white man and a Brown woman. They tried to stop me from photographing two people graffiting buildings.

NO! You can't do that!

"Yes, I can," I replied. The balaclaved youngsters were tagging buildings in broad daylight, for ¶§^&’sake!

The man tried to block my lens. Not something I take lightly, particularly from a masked white guy. Caught up in the moment, he didn’t see the dangerous paradox that I did: he was ordering me, a Black man probably three times his age, to stop exercising my First Amendment rights—rights my ancestors fought tooth and nail to win against dudes who looked and spoke kinda like him. Do. Not. Go. There. I was hot.

We argued some more, then he split.

I asked the young Brown woman if she’d heard of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, masters of nonviolent civil disobedience and creative direct action. I had covered them as a journalist, then been arrested with them the one time I set down my camera to become intentionally, actively civilly disobedient. She hadn’t heard of the group, she said.

She asked me if I understood the potential consequences of capturing and disseminating images of protesters’ faces. I said, I did. We parted.

As I walked, I reflected on their reactions and mine. 2025 is not the late 1980s/early 90s. We’re in an age of free-flowing pixels and instantaneous global publication, of doxing and facial recognition. Digital phones, computers, and cameras in the wrong hands, of which there are many, are lethal weapons. Bad people use these tools with the Web to identify and track down victims, as the (alleged) Minnesota assassin reportedly did.

Beyond this, #47’s policies are hurting and killing people right now. He is giving us too many people to mourn. He’s gutting life-saving programs abroad like PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). DOGE-y disruptions and cuts are hacking away at Medicare, SNAP, and the National Institutes of Health, just to name a few domestic programs. #47’s full-on backing of Israel’s slaughter in and engineered starvation of Gaza, and support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s attacks on Iran are dragging us closer to a regional war. Or World War III. This is not hyperbole: #47 is has Xed not-so-veiled threats to “kill!” Iran’s supreme leader. “I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do,” he said to reporters when asked if he’d hook up with Netanyahu to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. TACO or not, #47 has shown himself to be mercurial, vengeful, and dangerous.

“I think the Israeli calculation is to hope that there won’t be any negotiations going forward at all,” veteran Iran analyst Trita Parsi said on Democracy Now last week. “The Iranians respond, and then, by that, making sure that the U.S. enters the war much more fully and openly than what it has been so far.”

Who, generally speaking, is fodder for such wars? Sixty-one percent of GIs killed in the Vietnam War “were younger than 21,” according to statistics from Vietnam Veterans of America, which the US Army cites. The average age of service members killed was 23.1 years old. I found no comparable stats for Vietnamese youth, but overall estimates for Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian civilian war dead, which include people killed by North Vietnamese forces and their allies—not just US and allied forces—are in the millions.

Young folks’ here have earned their rage—and their fear. They’re simply paying attention to what’s going on around them. We might even call them woke. So I’m trying to pay attention, listen closer, activate my empathy before rushing to judgment.

I DMed my friend Dalia after Iran started firing back at Israel, on her city, Tel Aviv, before I left for the marching. She and her family have been active in the movement to bring home fellow Israelis abducted on October 7, 2023, as well as to end her nation’s occupation of the territories, and to stop the “genocide”—her word—in Gaza. They have been bearing witness and holding their protest signs on the streets of Tel Aviv for months now.

“We r now in the saferoom under another missiles attack … in Gaza and Iran it’s worse… [her ellipses, not mine] we will keep fighting against all fascists! Big hug and be safe too.”

CBO "estimates that in general, resources would decrease for households in the lowest decile (tenth) of the income distribution, whereas resources would increase for households in the highest decile.” Cruelty.

Protesters' signs and chants also hammered Wittman for going whole-hog for #47's antidemocratic blitzkrieg and hiding from his constituents.

I have no party, but I have politics. And ethics. I felt good, even a little hopeful, among people speaking out for fairness, justice, equality. These folks were fired up, civil—kind, actually—and thoroughly peaceful. I’m hoping for a repeat this weekend—with bigger turnout.

Odd fact about Wittman: more than a decade ago, he intervened on my behalf when I was struggling to extract a written response to letters I’d sent the base commander of the Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity, aka Camp Peary. That's the top-secret training base for the CIA and assorted trigger-pullers, covert and overt, just north of the Williamsburg, VA. The Department of Defense inherited a number of cemeteries when it acquired the land in 1943. My great-grandparents, Mat Palmer and Julia Fox Palmer, are buried in one of them, Old Orchard, a segregated burial ground that served Black residents of the area. When I visited in 2012, I saw a sad and barely cared for place. The former community's white cemetery—whites were a minority in the area, called Magruder—however, was tidy, clearly the beneficiary of consistent maintenance. The grave of the Unknown Confederate Soldier there had its own little white picket fence. This was some Jim Crow #•¶@. It blew my mind, which was not yet well acquainted with the South’s—and our nation’s—toxic Confederaphilia. I wanted parity, equity in care for these cemeteries. So I asked for it.

The base commander ignored my letters asking Camp Peary not simply to do better by the Black cemetery but to commit to its perpetual care—or to care for it as long as the US military owned the land. Democratic lawmakers I had approached had essentially yawned at me, I told a friend of my late dad's, a wiser man and more strategic thinker than I. He suggested that I reach out to Wittman. There's nothing Republicans love more than sticking it to their Dem colleagues, he said, making them look lazy and unresponsive—especially when Black folk come a-calling. Cynical? Yes. Effective? Yup—at least in getting a response, but not better or consistent care for Old Orchard. The Department of Defense is caring for the site "diligently and respectfully," the commander claimed, and declined to commit to perpetual care.

I have visited since. Old Orchard has looked worse than 2012, but also better. I’ll see how it looks this year, if I can get permission to go.

Yesterday, June 5, was a big day for us. As the sun set, Erin uncovered 11 markers at Evergreen, one of which, Philomenia White (b. 1910; d, 1911), she had found in 2017. I was well past ready to go home, take a shower, and answer the leftover chicken in the fridge calling my name. Nevertheless, she persisted. I took the pictures.

Four nights ago, Erin found Ms. Viola Hall (b. 1887 d.1943). Ms. Hall, who was single, was a nurse and a member of Benjamin Temple, a women’s branch of the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks of the World here in Richmond. The IBPOE was an African American Elks group founded in 1898 by a Pullman porter named Arthur Riggs because the plain-old (white) “Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World,” wouldn’t accept colored folks. BPOE leaders sued him for forming his Elks. Some threatened Riggs with lynching. They fought for years, eventually settling. In July 2025, the IBPOEW holds its annual convention in Las Vegas. They too persisted. (BPOE holds its annual to-do in Kansas City, MO, around the same time. )

(It’s a heckuva story with a ton of drama and intrigue. Charles E. Dickerson II wrote a whole dissertation about it in 1981. Charles H. Wesley, a stunningly prolific, groundbreaking, and respected historian of Black institutions wrote the IBPOEW history in 1955. In 1937 Wesley published The Collapse of the Confederacy. This would have been his dissertation topic ten years earlier, acccording to Vanderbilt U.’s Dennis C. Dickerson, had his (white) advisor at Harvard not been hostile to Wesley’s conclusion that it was “Confederate demoralization that undermined the South’s willingness to fight,” not the overwhelming resources of the United States, a pillar of Lost Cause mythology. Wesley shelved the Confederate paper and instead cranked out another, which became a book, Negro Labor in the United States, 1850–1925: A Study in American Economic History, which you can read on the Internet Archive for free. Brother Wesley was way ahead of his time. )

Last week, Erin found the lovely, thin stone set for Lucy Patterson (b. 1838; d. 1912) not far from Maggie Walker’s family plot. It had snapped of at its based and been swallowed by dirt and plants over the decades.

According to her death certificate, Ms. Patterson, a widow, passed away from “an organic heart disease, apparently.”

This evening, with Teacake, we will go to Evergreen to rinse the recently found markers. I’ll photograph them. Erin will post them on Findagrave so that loved ones, genealogists, cemetery buffs, and scholars, whether they live in Hackensack or Honolulu, can see them. John Shuck or students from U. Richmond Prof. Lizzie Baughan’s team will plot the GPS coordinates so that folks can find them, if they choose to visit the cemetery. 2000+ markers found—that’s Erin count alone. I don’t think I’ve cracked 100 yet, but it’s not a competition. Oh no. 10+ years and counting. We’re still going. (Good Trouble T-shirt purchased from Mr. Denver “the Vendor” Hawkins-Bey in DC.)

As we left, we spotted a gathering of deer at the rear of the cemetery. They watched us; we, including Teacake, watched them. Then we drove away slowly, toward the leftovers.

I took a little time—OK, a long time—before posting this audio interview because Mr. Bell said some things that will be hard for many folks to hear. They were hard for me to hear. But he has earned the right to say them.

He told me that Richmond’s Black pastors, many of whom he tried to enlist in his reclamation effort, turned their backs on Evergreen, with precious few exceptions. “I used to go up to Fifth Baptist, I’d tell them, I said, ‘Listen, you see that man right there, the pastor of y’all’s church? That’s the only pastor in Richmond as far as I’m concerned,’” Bell told me. “Others do nothing, man.”

Bell gave the lion’s share of credit for sustaining his initiative to “white people.” He also said that the future of Evergreen depends on them.

For years, white folks have outnumbered Black folks at workdays organized by the Friends of East End (I’m a founding member). I have heard a number of explanations for this. One is a deep skepticism, in some cases, cynicism, born of lived experience. So many promises have been made to “the Black community” over the decades—first by white and then Black elected officials—and so few delivered on.

Furthermore, people with deep and natural connections to the cemeteries tend to be 70+. As kids, their parents and relatives took them—or “carried” them, as Virginians say—to funerals and family-plot cleanup days. Now, they’re old, they remind us.

Then there are the stealthy plot tenders. One must happen upon them or notice their work to give them the credit they’re due. The Bowser plot, final resting place of civic powerhouse Rosa D., and her kin, has been consistently tended by hands unseen for the 10+ years we’ve been working at the cemeteries. A member of the Knight-Branic-Bullock-Pleasants family, usually a matriarch, comes on holidays and weed whacks their East End plot. Immaculately. Then, like clockwork, a multigenerational crew of relatives rolls up to refresh the decorations around the stones. Then they move on to perform the same tasks for their ancestors at other Richmond cemeteries.

Last week, Erin saw bags of mulch in the Taylor family plot. That meant Mr. T, Thomas Taylor, was fixing to tidy up the graves of his people—parents John Henry Sr. and Ora Brown Taylor, brother Clarence, aka Bigboy, and sister Emily—and to plant fresh flowers. Over at Evergreen, Erik Lazzaro cares for the Braxton family plot, honoring his dad’s people with periodic trimming and raking.

Regarding Ranger Bell’s views on white people, in my experience, power and principle have been more decisive than the skin color of our elected and appointed officials when it comes to Richmond’s Black cemeteries. The officials who ignored and undermined the grassroots efforts at Evergreen and East End were white and Black. The officials who chose to partner with us after years of conflict came in both hues, too.

Ranger Bell first visited Evergreen in 1980. "We had to get through briars and honeysuckles to get to this site. And that hit me right here, man. I said, 'Now, you know one thing, we got to do something about this.'"

Mr. Bell took a couple of professional detours before diving into full-on reclamation roughly 17 years later, in 1997. "We had all of the ROTC students from all of the schools here in Richmond, plus that AmeriCorps out there, working at that cemetery," Mr. Bell said. "Man, I had that cemetery clean, getting clean, a heck of a job."

When he retired in 1999, Ranger Bell passed the torch. Successive efforts held it high for as long as they could, but personal and political conflicts—and a lack of consistent government support—sundered them. The restoration flame flickered, then fizzled. One cemetery initiative—more like an intervention—was heavily supported and subsidized by state and city government. It did not go well. That organization abandoned both East End and Evergreen in June 2022. (Most Richmonders know this ugly story. If you don’t, you can find my version of it at RVA Mag or Medium.) The Friends of East End waded in to beat back the summer and fall growth swallowing the section bordering Evergreen. And we kept going.

In May 2024, the City of Richmond acquired both cemeteries. It began sending out landscaping crews to help us slow nature’s relentless creep. To mark Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2024, we held our first workday in collaboration with the city. We’ve been teaming up ever since. This past weekend, we had a small and diligent crew supported by Parks and Rec staffers. The city workers got their boots and hands as dirty as we did.

The pain from #47’s discriminatory and merciless slashing of federal funding has started trickling down to Richmond—to city government, to nonprofits doing marvelous and essential work, to the cemeteries. But Jim Bell’s torch, now held by many hands, is burning again at East End and Evergreen. Come and see.