Sublime

“Harold jumped up, overturning his chair, threatening to knock my block off. Duff took over. She told us not to get feisty. Told me I should go and take my books with me. ‘We are who we are,’ she said. ‘We used to be your friends.’

If Perkins, the Progressive turned New Dealer, spent her life addressing problems left behind by Greeley’s Civil War generation—corporate power, exploited labor, political corruption, poverty—Rustin spent his battling injustices that the New Deal generation didn’t address: racism, segregation, and the threat of militarism to world peace. No one in

Her oldest son, Frederick, put on a uniform and went off to fight. Impatient with Lincoln for not announcing emancipation right away, she went down to Washington when he finally proclaimed that the slaves would be free, and was received privately in the White House. The scene is part of our folklore. “So this is the little woman who made this big w

is safe to say that Lockert has achieved far more than she would have, had she not encountered disruption. Lockert epitomizes the principles of The Thriving Mindset: She didn’t just “survive” in spite of disruption; she evolved, grew, and accomplished even more because of what she experienced.

Southern Democrats on Capitol Hill had long been able to count confidently on support for their anti–civil rights stands from conservative Republicans (and not a few Democrats) from midwestern or Mountain States with negligible black populations. During the last two or three years, however, the years of Brown and Till and Lucy and Martin Luther Kin

Winning became harder because of the Second World War. Turning back civil rights measures in the Senate had been easy in 1935 and 1938, but the great buildup for the oncoming war brought huge defense plants to the South (ironically, to Georgia more than any other state, thanks to the influence of Russell and his House counterpart, Carl Vinson, on c

That day Perkins did not have to go off for a late-afternoon drink with anyone, so he stayed in the office and read, interrupted only by a little trouble with some advertising copy. On the whole, he told Miss Lemmon, “it was a fair day.”