Sublime

In 1946, President Truman appointed, by executive order, a blue-ribbon committee to study the civil rights problem in all its aspects, and the committee’s report, “To Secure These Rights,” called not only for a permanent FEPC, abolition of the poll tax, and federal laws against lynchings but also for the establishment of a permanent Commission on

Lewis’s was a vision of nonviolent social change that has more in common with the martyrs of old than with the politics of a given hour. “At the moment when I was hit on the bridge and began to fall,” Lewis recalled, “I really thought it was my last protest, my last march. I thought I saw death, and I thought, ‘It’s okay, it’s all right—I am doing

August 1876, and Walker died two months later. He was seventy-seven years old. The cause of death, says Bil Gilbert, was nothing more or less than ‘having lived long enough’. How to distil that life into six lines, containing

Samuel Whittemore, age seventy-eight, was working in his fields on April 19, 1775, when he spotted a brigade of British soldiers sent to assist the retreat of forces from Lexington and Concord. Whittemore loaded his musket and ambushed the soldiers from behind a nearby stone wall, killing one. He then drew his dueling pistols, killed a second

A key argument in Lincoln’s case against slavery was that it supported an aristocracy determined to undermine America’s promise that “the humblest man [has] an equal chance to get rich with everyone else.”

Judge James Barry