Sublime

King’s civil rights movement, at least, took on ontological assertions, calling us to honor the concrete humanity of our neighbor.

democratic form

At the beginning of 1957, the Senate still stood—as it had stood, with rare exceptions, since the founding of the Republic—as a defiant fortress barring the road to social justice.

We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.

The measure that gave Marshall the authority to circumvent it was concealed as a rider to the Army’s annual appropriation bill.32

Three white men approached Lamar Smith, who during World War II had enlisted in the Army at the age of forty-nine, and who now, having returned from the war to build up a profitable farm, had enlisted in another battle: “He was determined,” an admirer would say, “that his people would have a say in local government.” The three men warned Smith to s

In his first State of the Union address, Eisenhower had promised to carry out Truman’s edict and end segregation in the military and in the District, and he had kept that promise. By the end of 1953, all public facilities in the capital had been desegregated, and he could boast that in the Navy and the Air Force, segregated units were “a thing of t

During the first seven years of the postwar era, moreover, there had been a President in the White House who had been determined to harness that tide, a President who not only reiterated the requests of his predecessor, twice passed by the House but twice rejected by the Senate, for the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission a