As if we needed a reminder that Josh Hawley is not just a traitor, but also an intellectually dishonest, grandstanding clown.
– P. Sicher
Violence
Ulysses S. Grant was on the right side of history
I enthusiastically and proudly support Black Lives Matter. I attended a protest just last weekend. But I’m saddened at protesters’ destruction of a Ulysses S. Grant statue.
As a Union general he advocated for black soldiers and crushed the slaveholders’ rebellion. Between Lincoln and LBJ, no president fought harder for racial justice than Grant. He secured passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments, signed Civil Rights Acts that wouldn’t be seen again until the 1960s, and wiped out the KKK for a generation.
Grant wasn’t perfect. No one is.
His effort to do right by Native Americans was was genuine, but he bears much of the responsibility for the Peace Policy’s collapse. Nonetheless, the world is a better place because he existed. Frederick Douglass had good reason to say that Grant was “a man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point.”
– P. Sicher
The Meaning of “Black Lives Matter”
Even as protests grip our country in response to the brutal murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many more, far too many white American refuse to understand the meaning and importance of Black Lives Matter. Willfully and hatefully ignorant, they choose to believe that Black Lives Matter is somehow racist, that to say “Black Lives Matter” is to believe that white lives do not matter.
Obviously, that is utter nonsense. When people say that “Black Lives Matter,” they are calling attention to the fact that our society does not value black lives as highly as other lives. In declaring that “Black Lives Matter,” they are condemning this undeniable injustice and demanding change.
First Blood: The Pratt Street Riot
(A version of this article originally appeared in the Johns Hopkins News-Letter on April 14, 2011.)
On April 19, 1861, four days after the surrender of Fort Sumter and 86 years to the day after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the City of Baltimore witnessed an outbreak of violence that resulted in the first combat deaths of the American Civil War.
Continue reading
The Real Robert E. Lee
Over the last several days, white nationalist terrorists descended on the city of Charlottesville, Virginia in order to protest the recent removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. As a direct result of their actions, at least three people are dead.
This is merely the latest outrage perpetrated by white nationalists in defense of Confederate symbols in general and memorials to Lee in particular. Yet there are “moderates” on the right who would have us believe that Lee was a good and noble man, that the use of him as a symbol by bigots and terrorists represents a perversion of his legacy.
Bullshit.
The Confederate Flag: A Heritage of Hate
Two years ago nine African American worshipers were killed in a racially motivated terrorist attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In the wake of the attack journalists discovered that the perpetrator had been regularly photographed with Confederate flags. Since that time a growing number of people have called, often successfully, for the removal of Confederate flags and symbols from public places.
The Lincoln Liberal 