Sublime

Wells was best known as a journalist for exposing the lies behind the justification for lynching. Negroes charged with recklessly eyeballing a White woman, or worse, were often people who had found prosperity and respect despite the constraints of Jim Crow. The lynchings put them back in their place. Wells nearly met a similar fate, but escaped as

King left his text altogether at this point—a departure that put him on a path to speaking words of American scripture, words as essential to the nation’s destiny in their way as those of Lincoln, before whose memorial King stood, and those of Jefferson, whose monument lay to the preacher’s right, toward the Potomac. The moments of ensuing oratory

my full name "Booker Taliaferro Washington."

ABRAHAM LINCOLN struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life. He was to call the passage of the

[This chapter is no longer applicable to the condition of the negro race in the United States, since the abolition of slavery was the result, though not the object, of the great Civil War, and the negroes have been raised to the condition not only of freedmen, but of citizens; and in some States they exercise a preponderating political power by

The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest.

The assumption that emancipation had rendered the former slaves equal to white women – both groups equally requiring the vote for the completion of their social equality – ignored the utter precariousness of Black people’s newly won ‘freedom’ during the post-Civil War era. While the chains of slavery had been broken, Black people still suffered the