Sublime

When I was told, it takes time, when I was young, I was being told it will take time before a Black person can be treated as a human being here, but it will happen. We will help to make it happen. We promise you. Sixty years of one man’s life is a long time to deliver on a promise, especially considering all the lives preceding and surrounding my

In his 1948 message on civil rights Truman was doing just that. “We believe that all men are created equal and that they have the right to equal justice under law,” the president wrote to Congress. “We believe that all men have the right to freedom of thought and of expression and the right to worship as they please. We believe that all men are

“Their cause must be our cause, too,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”

For a century—ever since Thomas Jefferson, to emphasize the separation between executive and legislative branches, had ended the practice—no President had appeared in person before Congress. But in April, 1913, Wilson did so, announcing to a joint session the first bill he wanted Congress to take up: a new tariff reduction measure. (The revenue

Racist voting policy has evolved from disenfranchising by Jim Crow voting laws to disenfranchising by mass incarceration and voter-ID laws.

Kennedy’s language was straightforward, his tone reasonable. “This is not a sectional issue,” he said. “Difficulties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every State of the Union, producing in many cities a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety. Nor is this a partisan issue….We are confronted primarily