Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson (1970- ), lawyer and judge. Ketanji Onyika Brown was born in Washington D.C. and grew up in Miami. Her father worked as a teacher before attending law school and becoming chief counsel for the county school board, while her mother was a school principal and an uncle served as Miami’s chief of police. “My parents set out to teach me,” she later recalled, “that unlike the many impenetrable barriers that they had to face, my path was clear. If I worked hard and believed in myself, I could do anything or be anything I wanted to be.” At her predominantly white high school, she served as class president, acted in school plays despite opposition from a teacher who did not want her to take a part written for a white actor, and won a national oratory contest even as several judges made critical comments about her first name. She enrolled at Harvard over the objections of a guidance counselor who wanted her to choose a less competitive university, majoring in government. While in college she took part in protests against the lack of black professors and against school officials allowing a white student to hang a Confederate flag from his dorm window, but she also advised other black students to focus on their main goals, saying that “what the student who had hung the flag really wanted: For us to be so distracted that we failed our classes and thereby reinforced the stereotype that we couldn’t cut it at a place like Harvard.” One black classmate remembered her as a “person trying to find the middle ground” and “always asking, ‘What are the facts we can use to persuade,’” while another said “Ketanji was a lawyer before she went to law school, always thinking of every side of an issue.” She also took part in improv theater and wrote a senior research thesis about how the criminal justice system unfairly pushed defendants towards accepting plea deals. After graduating with honors, she worked as a reporter and researcher for Time magazine, then enrolled at Harvard Law School, where she served as editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduated with honors in 1996.

Like many other distinguished law school graduates, Jackson spent several years as a law clerk for federal judges: one on the U.S. District Court, one on the U.S. Court of Appeals, and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer from 1999 to 2000. Her work with Breyer led her to engage with cases about abortion, separation of church and state, and LGBTQ rights. She then entered the private sector and worked for several prestigious law firms in Washington D.C. and Boston, taking on such clients as the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts, the League of Women Voters, and NARAL Pro-Choice America. In 2005 she became an assistant public defender, handling cases that went before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and, in the words of the Washington Post winning “uncommon victories against the government that shortened or erased lengthy prison terms.” In 2009 President Barack Obama nominated her as vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the federal agency that creates sentencing guidelines for federal crimes. During her four years in that role, the Commission amended its guidelines to correct the disparity that gave longer sentences to (predominantly black) crack cocaine dealers than to (predominantly white) powdered cocaine dealers. Her career on the bench began in 2012 when Obama nominated her to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia; the Senate confirmed her with no official opposition, and she was sworn in by her former boss Justice Breyer.

From 2013 to 2021, Judge Jackson wrote more than 600 opinions for the D.C. district court, gaining a national reputation as a careful, brilliant decisionmaker who held liberal views but followed the law rather than a desired political outcome. One such case was Pierce v. District of Columbia (2015), in which she ruled that the D.C. Department of Corrections failed to accommodate the needs of a deaf inmate under the Americans with Disabilities Act; in her words, prison officials “figuratively shrugged and effectively sat on their hands with respect to this plainly hearing-disabled person in their custody, presumably content to rely on their own uninformed beliefs about how best to handle him and certainly failing to engage in any meaningful assessment of his needs.” She came under consideration for the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 when Justice Antonin Scalia died, but Obama ultimately nominated Merrick Garland. His choice became moot when the Republican-controlled Senate refused to even give Garland a hearing, hoping that a Republican would win that year’s presidential election and then fill the seat with a conservative judge. That did in fact happen, and now Jackson was called on to adjudicate cases under the Donald Trump administration. She and other federal judges frequently ruled against the new administration, which showed an unprecedented failure to follow established decision-making rules. When the Department of Health and Human Services terminated funding for teen pregnancy prevention programs without offering any explanation, Jackson ruled that this decision was arbitrary and capricious. In American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO v. Trump (2018), Jackson struck down three of Trump’s executive orders that limited the power of labor unions. In Guam v. United States (2018), the U.S. territory of Guam had requested the Navy to help pay for environmental damage caused by a military chemical landfill, but the federal government asked to have the case dismissed. Jackson allowed the case to go forward, and although the D.C. Court of Appeals reversed her decision, the U.S. Supreme Court vindicated Jackson’s decision by allowing the suit to go forward. Her 2019 ruling in Center for Biological Diversity v. McAleenan (2019), on the other hand, dismissed a complaint by an environmental group that the Department of Homeland Security was violating environmental laws by building Trump’s border wall, not because Jackson supported the law but because the group had not met technical requirements for its suit. That same year, Jackson blocked the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to expand “fast-track” deportations because DHS had not followed proper policy. Her most famous decision, though, came in Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives (2019). As the U.S. House of Representatives investigated Trump for withholding aid from the Ukrainian government unless it investigated Joe Biden’s son, Trump ordered former White House Counsel Don McGahn to not comply with a House subpoena to testify. In a 118-page decision, Jackson ruled that senior-level presidential aides subpoenaed by Congress had to testify even if the president ordered them not to, writing that “per the Constitution, no one is above the law” and “the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.”

Jackson gained increased public attention in 2020 due to that year’s presidential election. Candidate Joe Biden was struggling to become the Democratic nominee, losing two of the first three state primaries. South Carolina was the next state to hold a primary and the first with a large black population, and Biden announced that if elected president he would nominate a black woman to fill the first Supreme Court seat that came open. Jackson’s name was one of several mentioned as a possible nominee. Biden won the South Carolina primary, the Democratic nomination, and the general election, and because his party also won a majority in the Senate, he was able to get forty federal judges confirmed. This was the largest number of any president since the 1980s, and the judges themselves were the most diverse in U.S. history, including the first openly LGBTQ woman, the first Muslim American, and more black women than any other president. The latter group included Jackson, who was nominated to the D.C. Court of Appeals in March 2021. This is generally considered the second-most important federal court in the country, second only to the U.S. Supreme Court, and many of its members have eventually become members of the Supreme Court. During Jackson’s confirmation hearing she reflected back on her work as a public defender and trial judge, noting that because many of her clients had limited understanding of the legal process, when she sat on the bench she took “extra care” to make sure that defendants were aware of what was happening; in her words, “I think that’s really important for our entire justice system because it’s only if people understand what they’ve done, why it’s wrong, and what will happen to them if they do it again that they can really start to rehabilitate.” Some Republican senators objected to her nomination because of her rulings against the Trump administration, but others supported her, and she was confirmed by a vote of 52-46 in June 2021. Her first decision struck down a Trump-era restriction on the bargaining power of unions. She also served on advisory boards at Harvard, the American Law Institute, and several K-12 schools, as well as a judge for mock trials at Drexel University, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, and the Historical Society of the District of Columbia. Jackson continued to draw attention as a potential member of the Supreme Court, based in part on events of the previous decade. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s health declined in the early 2010s, progressives encouraged her to retire so that Obama could fill her seat, fearing that if she died with Republicans in control of the Senate and/or the presidency, her seat would be filled by a judge who would undo her legacy and help take the Supreme Court in a right-wing direction. Ginsburg did not retire, and her death in 2020, along with the other seat that Jackson had been considered for in 2016 and a third seat that opened up, enabled conservatives to take a 6-3 majority on the Court. Remembering that lesson, in 2021 progressives called on 83-year-old Justice Breyer to step down so that history would not repeat itself and conservatives would not increase their majority. In January 2022, Breyer announced that he would retire later that year.

A month later, Biden announced that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was his choice to replace Breyer, saying “For too long, our government, our courts haven’t looked like America.  And I believe it’s time that we have a Court that reflects the full talents and greatness of our nation with a nominee of extraordinary qualifications and that we inspire all young people to believe that they can one day serve their country at the highest level.” This was historically significant for an institution that had long been one of the least diverse in American society. The ninety-five justices confirmed between 1789 and 1966 were all white men, including five of Jewish faith. In 1967 Thurgood Marshall became the first black justice, and in 1991 he was replaced by Clarence Thomas, who shared his racial ancestry but whose judicial philosophy sharply differs from that of most black legal experts. The first woman justice was confirmed in 1981 and has been followed by five others. The first and only Latinx justice, Sonia Sotomayor, was confirmed in 2009. There have never been any justices of Asian or Native American ancestry, of religious faith outside the Judeo-Christian traditions, or of known LGBTQ identity. In short, of the 115 justices who have served in the Supreme Court’s 233 years of existence, 108 were or are white men, and Jackson would be only the third African American, the fourth of any racial minority background, and the seventh woman of any race. She would also be the first since Marshall with significant experience representing criminal defendants. Jackson made reference to this legacy in her first public remarks as a nominee, noting that she shared a birthday with Constance Baker Motley, who in 1966 had become the first black woman to serve as a federal judge; in Jackson’s words, “Today, I proudly stand on Judge Motley’s shoulders, sharing not only her birthday but also her steadfast and courageous commitment to equal justice under law.” Vice President (and fellow attorney) Kamala Harris echoed this in her own remarks several days later at the commemoration of the 1965 Selma March, saying “As she makes history, Judge Jackson, like all of us, stands on the shoulders of giants. She and we are their legacy.” Support for Jackson’s confirmation came from across the political spectrum, including fellow attorneys and judges, law enforcement agencies, public education groups, and politicians. Some were especially hopeful about her background as a public defender and relative of a convicted felon, given that the Supreme Court often has to consider matters of criminal law but is dominated by people of privilege with no personal experience in these matters. A number of conservatives urged Republicans to support her confirmation because it would do nothing to damage their Court majority and would avoid reinforcing their image of being hostile towards minorities. This advice was not taken. Republican lawmakers claimed that she had helped increase crime rates by defending accused criminals. One of the twenty-seven Republican senators who had supported her previous judicial confirmations now claimed that she came from the “radical Left.” Others complained that because Biden had promised to nominate a black woman, white men were being victimized by reverse racism and she was an unqualified beneficiary of affirmative action. The right-wing television host Tucker Carlson mocked her name and demanded to see her law school admission scores. As of March 2022, her nomination is pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has the responsibility of considering all nominations to federal judges. As with all current Senate committees, the Democrats currently have a majority on the Judiciary Committee. If it votes to recommend her, she will go before the full Senate.

David Brodnax, Sr., Professor of History, Trinity Christian College

Bud Fowler

Bud Fowler (1858- ), baseball player, manager, and executive. John W. Jackson, Jr. was born in the upstate New York town of Fort Plain, the son of a homemaker mother and a barber father who taught this trade to his son. At the time of his birth, he and his parents were among the only 10% of African Americans not held in bondage. When he was two they moved to the nearby city of Cooperstown, where he attended school and began playing a rapidly growing sport. “Base ball,” as it was then known, had developed in New York City in the early 1800s and spread around the country during and after the Civil War. The first professional team started in 1869, and within a few years the National Association and then National League (which included the team now known as the Chicago Cubs) was formed, along with dozens of lower-level leagues in mid-sized and small towns; these various leagues became collectively known as Organized Baseball. Along with college football, this was America’s first major team sport of non-Native American origin, quickly joining boxing and horse racing as the most popular athletic endeavors in the country. Some of the rules were noticeably different in those early years; for instance, base stealing was forbidden, batters were out if the fielder caught a hit ball on one bounce, and pitchers threw underhand. In 1878, Jackson began playing for an amateur team in Chelsea Massachusetts as Bud Fowler, the name that he would be known by thereafter. “Bud” came from the fact that he called everyone else by that name, but although the origins of “Fowler” are less certain, there is one possible explanation. Professional athletes were often looked down upon by members of the middle class. Fowler’s parents might have been even more disappointed with this career choice, as sons of barbers and other artisans were expected to learn the family trade or complete their formal education rather than enter the less predictable and respectable path of professional sports. For these reasons, he may have taken on the name of Bud Fowler to avoid embarrassing his parents, perhaps choosing Fowler in particular because it was also the name of a prominent Cooperstown businessman.

Fowler first gained notoriety by pitching in an exhibition game against the National League champion Boston Red Caps (now Atlanta Braves), giving up only three hits against a team whose roster included three future Hall of Famers. In a time before radio and television, this feat and many of the others that Fowler and other baseball players accomplished were known to the general public at the time and to historians since then through newspaper articles. Later that season he was signed by the Lynn (Massachusetts) Live Oaks of the International Association. This made him the first black player in Organized Baseball. In a sign of things to come, he won his first game with Lynn, but the game was declared a forfeit when the other team walked off the field, possibly in part due to the players’ objection to black players. When he played for the Guelph (Ontario) Maple Leafs two years later, the local newspaper reported that some of his new teammates “are ill-natured enough to object to the colored pitcher.” In 1882 he played for the all-black New Orleans Pickwicks and then became player-manager for the Richmond Black Swans. Both of these were barnstorming teams: clubs that existed outside of Organized Baseball without league membership or a regular schedule but instead traveled around the country to play exhibition games. He then made plans with a black businessman in St. Louis to form a black professional league, with teams in eleven cities and Fowler – described in the local press as “the renowned colored pitcher of the east” – set to play for and manage the St. Louis team, but the league never formalized. While playing for Stillwater (Minnesota) in 1884, he won five of his team’s first seven victories. That was also the year, though, that pitchers transitioned from throwing the ball underhand to an overhand delivery, and the increased strain on his arm induced him to stop pitching full time. He played catcher, second base, and outfield, and he led the league in hits, with one local paper reporting that “the crowed showed their appreciation of his work by applauding him every time he went to bat.” He was also suspended, however, for refusing to catch one of Stillwater’s pitchers, possibly for racial reasons. Baseball catchers had the responsibility of deciding what the pitcher would throw, and some white pitchers were resistant to taking such orders from black catchers. That same year, for instance, Moses Fleetwood Walker became the first openly black player in the major leagues (a light-skinned player named William Edward White had passed for white and played in 1879), but his team’s star pitcher intentionally ignored Walker’s signs, even though this jeopardized the team’s chances of winning.

In 1885 Fowler signed with the Keokuk (Iowa) Westerns of the Western League, making him the only black player in the entire league. Aside from his brief stints in the South, up to this point he had played in overwhelmingly white cities. Keokuk, on the other hand, was around 10% black, and it is thus possible that the team owner signed Fowler in part to draw black fans. Although this city also had a reputation for racial hostility, Fowler became popular with fans of both races. One local newspaper, for instance, described him as “a good ball player, a hard worker, a genius on the ball field, intelligent, gentlemanly in his conduct and deserving of the good opinion entertained for him by base ball admirers here.” He also openly advocated for player rights, criticizing the reserve clause policy that banned free agency and kept player salaries down; “when a ballplayer signs a league contract,” he asserted, “they can do anything with him under its provisions but hang him.” Before the 1885 season was even over, though, the entire league disbanded due to financial troubles. He played the remainder of the year with teams in St. Joseph (Missouri), Portland (Maine), and Pueblo (Colorado), also opening a barber shop in the latter location. Despite his success in numerous leagues, a chance to play in the National League or the other major leagues of that time did not materialize. The Sporting Life, which at that time was the nation’s leading sports publication, opined that Fowler was “one of the best general players in the country, and if he had a white face would be playing with the best of them…The poor fellow’s skin is against him.”

Fowler led the reorganized Western League in triples in 1886, then played for black teams in St. Louis and New Orleans. In 1887 he helped organize another black league, helping to write the constitution for the League of Colored Base Ball Players and signing with the Cincinnati Browns, but this organization disbanded after only ten days. He then moved to Binghampton (New York) of the International League, which also had several other black players, including his teammates William Renfro and Frank Grant and Newark's star pitcher George Stovey. Here he faced the greatest racial hostility of his career thus far. A Toronto paper noted that “A number of colored players are in the International League, and to put it mildly their presence is distasteful to the other players,” while another writer mockingly proposed that the International League relabel itself a “colored league.” Pitchers intentionally threw at the black players, while one umpire openly made biased calls against Binghampton and the other integrated teams. Fowler and Grant began wearing shin guards because white opponents used their cleats to cut them while sliding into second base; this was in an era when not even catchers had begun regularly wearing this protection. Nine white Binghampton players refused to take the field unless Fowler and Renfro were fired. When the Newark team was scheduled to play an exhibition game against the Chicago White Stockings (now Cubs), Chicago’s star player-manager Cap Anson refused to play unless Stovey was kept off the field. Even team officials who attempted to defend Fowler also used racist language, telling the Sporting Life that “Some say that Fowler is a colored man, but we account for his dark complexion by the fact that…in chasing after balls has become tanned from constant and careless exposure to the sun.” In spite of all this, Stovey won 33 games, Grant led the league in home runs, and Fowler hit .350. When the season was over, International League officials banned its teams from signing any more black players. One newspaper cheered, “Gone coons – Fowler and Renfroe [sic].” All of this was part of growing racial hostility around the country, as southern black men lost the ability to vote, lynchings increased, legalized segregation became entrenched in the South, and northern whites banned African Americans from many professions without fear of legal action. Moses Fleetwood Walker and his brother Weldy had played one season in the National League in 1884, for instance, but after that league officials agreed that no more black players would be allowed. Fowler later remembered this by saying that “There were six of us in the International, back in ’87, and the white players sent in a protest to the League Directors, who passed a rule that in the future no colored players other than those then under contract should be signed...That is how the color line was sprung by a lot of boot-legs.”

Although the major leagues and most minor leagues now banned black players, Fowler continued his career wherever he could. He next played for Montpelier (Vermont) of the Northeastern League, where he became the first African American to serve as captain of an integrated team, and then for a team in Laconia (New Hampshire), where he drew further attention with strong play in exhibition games against Boston’s National League team; once again, though, his ability to prove that he could compete against major leaguers did not manifest in a major league contract. A team in Lafayette (Indiana) signed him but then released him when, in the words of a local reporter, “the Lafayette players discovered that he was a genuine darkey.” He played the rest of the 1888 season for clubs in Crawfordsville and Terre Haute, leading a Sporting Life reporter to write that “I shall be very much surprised if the ‘coon,’ as he is called, does not have a record equal to any in [the National League] in his position.” Later that year he played for Santa Fe, where after being banned from a hotel dining room, he declared “[Black players] are ‘drawing cards’ and add to the receipts of the game wherever we play” and also argued that if white team owners in general gave more support to black players, the overall quality of play and attendance would improve. After the season, he barnstormed throughout the southwest with a black team. Over the next few years he played with Greenville (Michigan), Galesburg (Illinois), Sterling (Illinois), Burlington (Iowa), Denver, Beloit (Wisconsin), Findlay (Ohio), Watertown (Wisconsin), Milwaukee, and Lincoln (Nebraska), gaining notoriety not just for his quality of play but also for the tall tales that he told about his travels through the west. The Dubuque Daily News noted his passionate following amongst the city’s black residents and quoted the league president as saying that “if only he had been painted white, he would be playing with the best of them.” At the same time, some of the white players in Nebraska left the league when it became integrated, he also sued a hotel in Ottumwa (Iowa) that had refused to serve him in its dining room, and he got into a fistfight with an opponent who tried to spike him at second base.

In 1893 he and a black teammate named Grant “Home Run” Johnson formed the black barnstorming team Page Fence Giants, so named for their sponsor the Page Woven Wire Fence Company. This became one of the first successful black barnstorming teams, signing other stars like Sol White. With Fowler serving as captain, in 1894 they won 118 of 156 games, two of their only losses coming against the National League team Cincinnati Reds. They traveled around the country in a custom railroad car, drumming up publicity in each town by wearing firefighter’s hats, by riding bicycles through the streets, and through Fowler’s exaggerated tall tales. In 1896 he created a new team called the Muncie Londons, but it disbanded after a week because white teams refused to play them. Similar efforts to form an all-black league in Texas, where Fowler would have been player-manager for the Galveston Flyaways, were also unsuccessful. In 1899 he served as player-manager for a new team in Findlay, but the Sporting News reported that “the white members of the Findlay ball club have drawn the color line and have demanded…that Bud Fowler, colored, be ousted from the team. They will quite if their demand is not heeded.” This was the end in Organized Baseball for Fowler and for all African Americans. In addition to the Walker brothers’ brief major league career (and that of the white-passing William Edward White), more than fifty other blacks played in the minor leagues between 1878 and 1899, but by the turn of the century every league had agreed not to sign them. Fowler himself commented on this by saying that “My skin is against me. If I had not been quite so black, I might have caught on as a Spaniard or something of that kind. The race prejudice is so strong that my black skin barred me.”

He spent the next ten years playing for and managing the barnstorming teams Findlay All-American Black Tourists, (Pittsburgh) Smoky City Giants, Kansas City Stars, and Cincinnati Black Tourists. He also tried to create another black league but failed to find enough financial backing. In 1909 he retired from baseball after thirty years as a player, manager, owner, promoter, and publicist. The Berkshire Eagle commemorated the event by writing that “For 16 years he was a pitcher and for 12 years a second baseman, and he never wore a glove, taking everything that came his way with bare hands. He was considered the equal of any man who ever covered the position.” He moved to Frankfort, New York, where he worked as a barber until his death from a red blood cell disorder in 1913. Several years later, his dream of a viable black baseball league finally came to fruition. Although there had long been strong black teams like his Page Fence Giants and the Chicago American Giants, the Great Migration brought more than 500,000 African Americans to northern cities and made possible the creation of the Negro National League in 1920. Meanwhile, although several black players got to the major and minor leagues by passing for white or Native American, there were no more openly black players until Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Ironically, this also led to the demise of the Negro Leagues because black fans started patronizing white teams and because white teams signed black players without financially compensating the Negro League teams. Meanwhile, the Hall of Fame (which, ironically, is located in his hometown of Cooperstown) would not induct individuals from black baseball because they had not played in the major leagues, even though they had been barred from doing so, until public pressure finally forced the Hall to change this policy in the 1970s. Between 1971 and 2006, thirty-three black players, managers, and owners from the Negro Leagues and the pre-Negro League era (along with two white owners of black teams) were inducted, including Fowler’s former teammates Frank Grant and Sol White. Fowler himself was overlooked, in part because of the long passage of time and in part because he had never played in either the major leagues or the Negro Leagues. The Society for American Baseball Research placed a tombstone on his previously unmarked grave in 1987 and later gave him its “Overlooked 19^th Century Base Ball Legend” award. In 2013 the city of Cooperstown held a day in his honor and renamed a street for him. In 2021 he was finally selected for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, 112 years after his retirement and 163 years after his birth.

David Brodnax, Sr., Professor of History, Trinity Christian College

Councilwoman Andrea Jenkins

Councilwoman Andrea Jenkins (1961- ), artist and politician. Andrea Jenkins was born male-presenting in the Chicago neighborhood of North Lawndale and lived in what she later described as “some pretty rough places.” African Americans on the West Side of Chicago faced challenges like run-down and overpriced housing, a lack of employment opportunities, underfunded schools, crime, and police brutality, and all of this was made worse by the rioting that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King and then the assassination of local activist Fred Hampton a year later. Jenkins’ father was largely absent due to drug addiction and incarceration, but her mother was “very loving and very much concerned that we get a good education.” She became interested in poetry from a young age, remembering that “I’ve always been in love with words,” and this interest was amplified in first grade when Gwendolyn Brooks visited her class and proclaimed that “everyone can be a poet.” She was also taught by the poet Haki Madhubuti, who she described as “a believer that you must use poetry for social justice, and all Black artists should be using their art to uplift the race.” Throughout her childhood she struggled with her gender identity. “In many ways a lot of my life was really trying to hide from what I knew to be true inside myself,” she later recalled. “I played football in high school. I joined a fraternity. Even younger, I was in the boy scouts. Because, you know, I didn’t want to be a girl. I knew I was a girl, but I didn’t want people to reject me.”

Jenkins attended the University of Minnesota until her fraternity brother and roommate caught her being intimate with a man and outed her to the rest of the chapter, which expelled her from their home, forc-ing her to return to Chicago. She worked on Harold Washington’s 1983 mayoral campaign and began identifying as bisexual, thinking that her family would accept this more than the transgender identity that she felt internally. She married a woman and had a daughter, but when she divorced at the age of thirty, she finally came out as a transgender woman; “I just really realized that I can’t go on anymore, hiding the truth from myself,” she later recalled, “Hiding the truth from those who I love. If I am going to thrive in life, I have to come to grips with who I am, and I have to accept it.” Her family initially struggled with this but eventually accepted her; in her words, “people were willing to work through it, people stayed engaged. They did not banish me from existence, which is a lot more than what some families give.” She returned to Minnesota and completed her bachelor’s degree at Metropolitan State University, later earning master’s degrees in creative writing and community economic development from Hamline University and Southern New Hampshire University. After finishing school, Jenkins became a vocational counselor and entered the worlds of art and politics, doing this work in intersectional ways that, in her words, “is a tool for speaking out because it has the ability to transform people. I try to use my art to give agency and dignity to Transgender people and Black people all over the world.” In 2006 she became co-curator of the Queer Voices reading series, which eventually became the longest running LGBTQ reading series in the country. In 2010 she won the Naked Stages grant from the Jerome Foundation and the Pillsbury House Theater, using the money to create “Body Parts: Reflections on Reflections.” Her other creative work includes the poem collections Tributaries: Poems Celebrating Black History, Pieces of a Scream, and The T Is Not Silent: New and Selected Poems, as well as contributions to the anthologies Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota, A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, and Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose and Pride. Additionally, her visual art has been exhibited in numerous venues around Minneapolis. In 2015 she began working at the University of Minnesota’s Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies, one of the largest LGBTQ archives in the country, and became curator for the Transgender Oral History Project. This has involved hundreds of hours of recorded interviews with transgender people, helping to expand the Tretter Collection beyond its previous focus on white gay men. “One of the reasons we take that approach,” she has commented, “is because transgender people have been undercover for so long. They didn’t have…artifacts and factual records,” she said. “We had to go out and collect those stories, digitize them and make them available online.”

Jenkins also joined the staff of Minneapolis City Council member Elizabeth Glidden, establishing the Transgender Issues Work Group and a Council summit that highlighted transgender issues. This work began in a time when an increasing number of Americans came to support same-sex marriage, LGBTQ representation in popular media, and other aspects of LGBTQ equality, while the number of African Americans in political positions also increased, even as this progress also led to a conservative backlash. Jenkins commented on this by saying that “Being African-American is being a political statement in our society, certainly being transgender is a political statement. Wearing my hair locked, has become a political statement. So if my body is political, if my identity is political, if my hair is political, then I must be engaged in politics for my survival, I need to be able to operate in that oppressive environment. Personally, I’ve been able to manifest a lot of goodwill and support for my family and community and colleagues, but that’s not the reality for most black trans women. So that pushed me into a sense of giving back, reaching back, making space for the people who don’t get to sit at those tables, to bring their issues to the forefront and advocate.” After twelve years as a Council aide, in 2016 Glidden chose not to seek reelection, and Jenkins ran for her seat. She later recalled that while running, “We didn’t shy away from my identity as a black woman, as a trans woman. I have lived firsthand the oppressions that others only talk about, only think about.” Her platform featured the slogan “Leadership. Access. Equity,” received assistance from a political campaign committee that she had co-founded to help transgender political candidates, and called for equity in public safety, transportation, housing, and other issues. She won the election with 73% of the votes, becoming one of the first black members of the Minneapolis city council and the first openly transgender black woman elected to any public office anywhere in the country. In her victory speech, she stated “As an out African American trans-identified woman, I know firsthand the feeling of being marginalized, left out, thrown under the bus. Those days are over. We don’t just want a seat at the table – we want to set the table.” 

Jenkins’ historic victory made her not only the representative for her predominantly black, low-income district but also the unofficial representative for transgender people all over the country. Even as acceptance of LGBTQ rights continued to increase, African Americans of all genders and transgender people of all races continued to face higher rates of violence at the hands of police and civilians, and this was amplified by the simultaneous election of President Donald Trump. In spite of this, she insisted that “I’ve got to be optimistic that things can change, right? I’ve got to maintain hope. That’s the only thing that has really kept Black people in survival in this country; hope.” She was elected Council vice president by her peers, helped create a community-based advisory committee on racial equity, and worked to revitalize businesses at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, only a few blocks from her home. It was there that in May 2020 George Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin. She saw the infamous video of the murder only a few hours later, later remembering “The first thing was the callousness. The sort of relaxed cockiness. The sunglasses on the top of his head. Hands in his pockets. You know, it just reeked of racism,” she says. “Literally he knew he was being filmed…and he just didn’t stop. To me that goes beyond police brutality. It enters into the realm of just pure, unadulterated racism. And that, unfortunately, is at the core of our society. We can’t fight what we don’t name. We can’t cure what we don’t name. And so my whole point in declaring racism as a public health crisis is because racism is killing Black people.” In one of her first public addresses, she declared “Over the past seven days in Minneapolis, I’ve witnessed chaos and pain, prayer and pleas, anger and grief, and organized demands for systemic change. I’m exhausted. I feel emotionally drained. But as an elected official, a community member, and a black trans woman, I am determined to seek justice for George Floyd and for all the people who have been harmed by state violence. Justice for Breonna Taylor. Justice for Ahmaud Arbery. I’m in pursuit of justice. This is an emergency. I’m not talking about the coronavirus. I’m talking about racism. As all the universities in the world scramble to try to find a cure for the coronavirus, that same level of concern and action is needed to rid our society of the virus that is racism. I am calling for a declaration of a state of emergency for black people. Racism is a public health crisis…Systemic change would look like making sure that every dollar that we spend – whether as the state, the county, or the federal government – that it has an equity framework that is intended to help the most marginalized people…I know people are really distrustful of the government, and I think rightfully so, but we have to stay engaged. America is an experiment. We are continuously trying to figure out how to be Americans. And we have to stay engaged in the process. We have to continue to lift up democracy. Black women have been doing that since the beginning of this country, and I pray that that we have the strength to continue.”

She initially called for the Minneapolis police department to be abolished, but then shifted to a plan that would reallocate resources. “Defunding the police,” she declared, “means, in my mind, creating a new public safety mechanism that doesn’t require people with a gun to be able to respond to every need that our community has.” The city council did in fact shift nearly $8 million into new mental health teams that would replace police as the first responders to certain 911 calls, and it also created more transparency for law enforcement and reallocating nearly $8 million into new mental health teams that will respond to certain 911 calls. She has also advocated for national change, calling on Congress to pass the Equality Act, which would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. “The reality that there are more than two binary gender identities will be,” she stated, “widely accepted and widely realized by people in the world. It’s only a matter of time. This whole conservative movement…is a last gasp to hold on to power and authority.” She also lamented the hypocrisy of senators who voted to acquit Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection, saying “The United States Senate said that white supremacy is OK. That breaking the rules for white men is fine…But if you so much as sneeze in the wrong direction, Black man, we will kill you in the streets.” For all of this, Queerty magazine named her one of its fifty heroes “leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people.” Shortly after George Floyd’s murderer was found guilty, she reflected that “I try to see the humanity in every person that I encounter and recognize that we are part of a universe. As a poet, a universe is one line in a poem: Uni-Verse. So we all have the exact same lineage, we are all part of the exact same verse. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. So first you’ve got to love yourself. So my spiritualness is about loving myself and recognizing what I call the ‘Creator.’ I know that deep spirituality is in each of us, and so if I love myself then I am loving the Divine Spirit and recognizing that that Divine Spirit is in each and every one of us.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Officer Eugene Goodman

 

Officer Eugene Goodman (1980-), law enforcement official. Eugene Goodman has lived an intensely private life, so information about him is relatively limited. He grew up in southeast Washington D.C. and served in the U.S. Army from 2002 to 2006. During the Iraq War he saw combat with the 101^st Airborne Division, which helped train Iraqi security forces, attacked terrorist cells, captured a major airport, and fought in the Battle of Karbala. Goodman rose to the rank of sergeant and was awarded a combat infantryman badge. After leaving the military he joined the United States Capitol Police (USCP), which is charged with protecting members of Congress, their family members, and the U.S. Capitol Building and other congressional buildings. Washington D.C. and the city police department are both around 50% black, but African Americans comprise only 29% of the USCP. The relatively few black officers have often been denied promotions and forced to contend with acts of racism from fellow officers such as a hangman’s noose in a locker, racial slurs directed at themselves and Barack Obama, and seeing black people harassed outside the Capitol. Goodman himself told a colleague that he always felt “too Black for the badge, but too blue for the brothers.” This racism was part of D.C.’s broader historical legacy. Although the city was partly designed by the black scholar Benjamin Banneker, many of its buildings were constructed with slave labor, and slavery was legal there until 1862. In the late 1800s it became a majority black city, including one of the nation’s largest black middle-class populations, but these residents of “Chocolate City” lacked the autonomy and Congressional representation of states and the local power of cities that were in states. During the Depression, for instance, one congressman justified cuts in welfare and education by saying that “my constituents wouldn’t stand for spending money on niggers.” During the 1960s and 1970s D.C. residents won the ability to vote in presidential elections and to elect a House representative, mayor, and city council, but the House member cannot actually vote on legislation, and the local government lacks meaningful authority over federal property within the district. In spite of these two centuries of marginalization, the capital became a powerful symbol for black empowerment by hosting events such as Marian Anderson’s 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert, the 1963 March on Washington, the 1995 Million Man March, and Obama’s 2009 inauguration.

These historic conflicts and contradictions were amplified in November 2020 when Joe Biden defeated incumbent Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election. Although Biden won the Electoral College 306-232 (the same margin by which Trump had won four years earlier) and the popular vote by more than seven million, Trump and his supporters claimed that the election had been stolen due to voter fraud in several swing states. This was part of a larger pattern for Trump, who had first risen to political prominence in 2010 by falsely claiming that Obama was ineligible to serve as president, then in 2015 said that a Republican rival was committing fraud, and in both 2016 and 2020 asserted that he could only lose if he was cheated. All of these claims were racially charged, with the 2020 accusations in particular based on the lie that fraudulent votes had come from Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and other cities with large black populations. This in turn was based on an even older tradition. Before the Civil War, white politicians denied voting rights to blacks on the grounds that they could be bought off, and although black men got the right to vote after the war and elected more than 1,000 African Americans to public office, white southerners used violence and fraud to take away that right on the grounds that black politics was corrupt. Trump and his allies used numerous tactics to promote their claims of fraud, including pressure on state election officials, statements on social media and television, and eighty-six lawsuits. He also considered seizing voting machines and declaring martial law in order to conduct a new election under military supervisions. Even Republican government officials refused to carry out these orders, and he lost all but one of his lawsuits, but many Republicans in Congress openly supported his efforts or refused to publicly criticize them. Finally, on 6 January 2021, Congress met to certify the Electoral College results from each state. Although this was normally a formality that got little attention, Trump and his allies believed that Vice President Mike Pence could reject the certification (he could not) or that members of Congress could object to the state results (they could), and so they saw this as their last chance to stave off defeat. Trump called on his supporters to come to the capitol in his defense, tweeting “Big protest in D.C. on January 6^th. Be there, will be wild!” Thousands of people answered the outgoing president’s call, including members of extremist groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Q-Anon. Trump allies gave speeches with language like “trial by combat” and “start taking down names and kicking ass,” while Trump himself used the word “fight” or “fighting” twenty times, including the statement “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He then told his supporters to march to the Capitol and demand that Pence refuse to certify the Electoral College results, telling the vice president “I hope you're going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if you're not, I'm going to be very disappointed in you.” Hundreds of Trump supporters did in fact go to the Capitol. They constructed gallows, destroyed police and media equipment, fought with law enforcement officials, and broke through police barriers. About 800 of them invaded the Capitol, where they further clashed with USCP officers and spread throughout the building. When news came that Pence had refused to follow Trump’s command, the president tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” and the rioters began chanting “Hang Mike Pence” while they looked for him and members of Congress.

One of the USCP officers who stood against these insurrectionists was Eugene Goodman. While other officers secured the Senate chamber, Goodman found himself alone as a crowd approached it. He briefly looked at the chamber, then pushed the lead person in the crowd away and quickly walked in the opposite direction. The crowd followed him up the stairs until they all reached a room with other officers, where the rioters called them “traitors” and yelled other taunts but did not physically attack. Several hours later, Goodman led Senator Mitt Romney (a Republican who had often drawn criticism from Trump and his supporters) and his staff to safety from another crowd. Thanks to Goodman and other USCP officers, the vice president, all members of Congress, and their staff and families were safely escorted from the Capitol; Pence in particular had avoided crossing path with the rioters by only sixty seconds. The insurrectionists stole congressional documents, defaced other equipment and decorations, and caused additional property damage. Several Confederate flags were hung, making this the first time that the Rebel flag had ever flown in the Capitol. Police officers were attacked with improvised weapons such as fire extinguishers, toxic sprays, and American and “Blue Lives Matter” flags. Pipe bombs were also found near the headquarters of both major parties. Throughout all of this, Trump watched on television while his aides in the White House and his allies in the Capitol begged him to record a message or send a tweet calling off the riot. Instead, he refused to do so, would not authorize additional law enforcement assistance, and was pleased by the support from the rioters, telling one Senator who called him “I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” He finally issued tweets and videos that called for peace but also praised the insurrectionists and insisted that the election was stolen. After several hours, the Capitol and outside grounds were finally cleared. Four rioters and one USCP officer were dead, two other officers committed suicide several days later, and 140 officers suffered injuries, including spinal damage and the loss of an eye and fingers.

Footage of Goodman’s actions near the Senate chambers immediately became some of the most widely viewed video from the insurrection. Although Goodman has not publicly commented on his actions, tactical experts noted that his act of shoving the lead person and then walking but not running ensured that the crowd would follow him but not trample him; he was simultaneously leading the rioters away from the Senate chambers, coordinating with his backup on the next floor, and exercising restraint to avoid injury to himself and the rioters. All of this, the experts further stated, was consistent with his military training, especially with regards to fighting terrorists. One colleague stated “I don’t know that many people who can think on their feet like that…His quick thinking enabled those senators to get to safety. I’ve always said, if bullets start ripping through, I’m finding Goodman. He’s been in hostile firefights, so he knows how to keep his head.” His former Army unit said more succinctly “An Iraq combat vet and member of this Corps, Eugene was a hero long before last Wednesday.” The director of the Black Law Enforcement Alliance expressed similar sentiments, declaring “He demonstrated rare courage and uncommon valor. His actions, in the face of a murderous mob, showed how a true professional police officer can operate clear minded in the midst of chaos and can show amazing restraint in the face of physical danger if you operate with a focus on the preservation of human life.” Other commentators believe that Goodman’s own racial identity further informed his decision, arguing that he knew that the crowd would be so triggered by the sight of a black man in uniform that it would follow him rather than hunting down politicians. In the words of one reporter, “He tricked them, willingly becoming the rabbit to their wolf pack, pulling them away from the chambers where armed officers were waiting, avoiding tragedy and saving lives. Lives which include their own...We saw the worst of our nature on display Wednesday. Many people immediately stood up and said, ‘This is not who we are!’ History tells us, this is exactly who we are. Running from this fact won’t change it. But at the same time, we’re also Eugene Goodman. A people who will put themselves in harm's way to protect others. Even those that wouldn’t do the same for us. It’s a constant fight for the soul of this nation.”

One week later, Congress voted unanimously to award Goodman the Congressional Gold Medal, which is the highest honor that it can bestow. One Representative stated that “If not for the quick, decisive, and heroic actions from Officer Goodman, the tragedy of last week's insurrection could have multiplied in magnitude to levels never before seen in American history. With this prestigious award, we can show our gratitude to Officer Goodman for saving countless lives and defending our democracy.” He received a standing ovation joined even by Republican lawmakers who had encouraged the insurrection. He was also given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the nation’s highest civilian award, and the Distinguished Public Service Award, which is given to those who contribute to the Army’s missions, by the Army’s secretary and chief of staff. Some historians noted that Goodman was following in the tradition of security guard Frank Wills (who stopped the 1972 Watergate break-in) and of James Benjamin Parker (who in 1901 tried to stop the assassination of President William McKinley) and insisted that he not suffer the same fate of those black men, both of whom eventually died forgotten and impoverished. The House also voted to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” This was the fourth impeachment in U.S. history and also the most bipartisan of the four, with ten Republicans joining their Democratic colleagues. Before Trump’s Senate trial began, Goodman was tasked with escorting new Vice President Kamala Harris to the inauguration under the title of acting deputy Sergeant at Arms of the Senate. When he stepped onto the inauguration platform, he received another standing ovation. Footage of his rescue of Romney was publicly seen during the trial, further increasing appreciation for his actions. In the time since the insurrection, inauguration, and trial, more than 500 people have been arrested for their actions, including many members of local law enforcement units. Congress formed a bipartisan commission, similar to the one created after 9/11, to investigate the insurrection. Members of the general public and even some elected officials have falsely claimed that the rioters posed no danger or were liberal activists disguised as Trump supporters. The former president himself has been banned from social media but still maintains a great deal of influence amongst Republican voters and politicians. Throughout all of this, Eugene Goodman has made no public statements and largely disappeared from the news. A friend indirectly shared his thoughts with the media: “He said he’d do the same thing again. He’s not looking for any accolades. But the attention is a little scary for him…My job is to protect and serve. And on that day, I was protecting.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Emma Coger

Emma Coger (1852-1924), schoolteacher and entrepreneur. Emma Coger was born in the Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois. Although her mother had been born into slavery, her family was prominent within the small but growing black community of the antebellum Midwest. Her grandmother had been a landowner in New Philadelphia, Illinois, a black town founded by former slaves in 1830, and her mother had helped founded Quincy’s first black church and owned a boardinghouse. One of Emma’s siblings married a blacksmith whose shop housed fugitive slaves, while another sister (who had been named for Zenobia, an ancient Syrian queen who had fought a war of independence against the Roman Empire) attended Oberlin, the nation’s first university to admit students regardless of race or gender. In spite of these accomplishments, the Cogers and all other black Midwesterners had to contend with state laws that banned African Americans from voting, attending public school, or settling in the state at all unless they posted a sizable bond. African Americans also faced the constant danger of being kidnapped into slavery, especially in places like Quincy that were just across the river from slave states. Additionally, African Americans throughout the country were banned from most restaurants and hotels and were restricted to segregated spaces on steamboats, trains, and streetcars; those who resisted this treatment were often arrested, physically assaulted, or both. All of these laws and attitudes applied to Coger despite the fact that her father was a white man and most of her grandmothers and great-grandmothers had given birth after being sexually assaulted by other white men, all resulting in Emma being extremely light-skinned and roughly seven-eighths white in ancestry. As a small child, she may have been present at the 1858 Quincy debate between U.S. Senate candidates Stephen Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, who spent much of their time discussing the issue of slavery, which was threatening to tear the country in two. That in fact did happen two years later when Lincoln was elected president, causing most slaveholding states to reject the election results, declare themselves a new nation, and attack U.S. military personnel. When the Civil War began, thousands of African Americans fled from the South to northern states like Illinois, and this helped lead President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which as of 1 January 1863 declared that all enslaved persons in the Confederate states were free. That day Emma and her family attended a “Grand Jubilee” celebration in Quincy. The end of the Civil War two years later helped bring about massive change for African Americans in the Midwest and around the country, as every state either created segregated black schools or in a few cases integrated their schools, while black men gained the right to vote. Coger herself was educated in Quincy’s public schools and completed high school as the only black student in a time when most African Americans did not go past the lower grades. After finishing school, in 1871 she was hired to teach in Quincy’s all-black elementary school. Thanks in part to examples like this, many African Americans saw this Reconstruction era as a time of great possibilities for racial progress and equality, but there were many whites equally determined to keep the former slaves in a subordinate position, and every step for progress brought violent backlash.

In 1872, the twenty-year old school teacher traveled about forty miles north to the town of Keokuk, Iowa. The details of what happened next vary between her court testimony, a letter written by a black Keokuk resident, another letter by her attorney, and an 1893 newspaper article. All of the accounts agree, though, that boat employees refused to sell her a first-class ticket, which would have entitled her to eat in the first-class dining room, but she finally managed to get one anyway. When she tried to sit down in the first-class dining hall, an employee pulled her chair away and declared “You shall not eat here.” She sat at another table, where the captain’s wife and two other white women said “I will not eat with a negro” and walked away, although two black workers served her soup and refused to help remove her while several other white women objected to her removal. Finally, the captain himself pulled her chair out from under her, struck her on the hands and head when she tried to hold onto the table, and dragged her from the room. She was taken to her cabin, where she stayed for the rest of the trip. Her treatment was typical for African Americans on public transportation – Emma’s own sister had suffered similar treatment during a trip to St. Louis – but her response led to atypical consequences. When she got back to Quincy, she sued the steamboat company Northwestern Union Packet Company (NWUP) for $5000 in damages for assault and battery. She chose to bring this suit in Iowa rather than in her home state because an Illinois court had recently ruled against another African American in a similar case, and several Quincy attorneys had refused to take her case. Iowa, on the other hand, had recently become one of the first states to desegregate its public schools and to grant black men the right to vote. Additionally, a prominent Keokuk attorney agreed to take her case. He was planning to run for mayor, and his decision may have been an effort to gain votes in a town with so many African Americans that several years later its minor league baseball team signed one of the first blacks in professional baseball. At the same time, his own account of the case suggests that he may have taken the case because he found Coger physically attractive and different from other African Americans.

At trial, the NWUP argued that it had the right to maintain its “well established custom” of segregation, and it also accused Coger of being verbally and physically abusive towards its employees and of causing a disturbance just to get money; to that end, it countersued her for damage to the dining room. In defiance of these claims, Coger took the witness stand to describe her experience in a courtroom where the judge, jury, and attorneys on both sides were white men. Her attorney argued that steamboats and other common carriers could not discriminate against African Americans because they were now free voting citizens, that custom could not be used to justify racial discrimination when there was no law that required that discrimination, and that because all people were created by God they should be evaluated by their “moral and religious condition” rather than their race. The jury ruled in her favor, although it awarded her only $250, possibly as a compromise with some jurors who initially wanted to rule against her. After the trial, the NWUP appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court. The case now drew national attention among African Americans through Frederick Douglass’ New National Era newspaper, which printed a letter from Coger’s lawyer, a letter from a black Keokuk resident, brief comments from an Iowa legislator, and the jury instructions. Although the newspaper often focused on civil rights issues, Coger’s case was one of the only Midwestern events discussed in that issue and the only one that focused on a woman. All of the writers emphasized Coger’s education, refinement, and career, but while her attorney also highlighted her predominantly white ancestry and physical attractiveness, the black writer argued that if other African Americans “could be as bold and courageous…our rights would be gradually yielded to us.”

When the appellate trial at the Iowa Supreme Court began, Coger’s attorney tried a new tactic, saying that she was legally white because she was mostly white. This legal strategy was used to varying degrees of success by numerous African Americans of mixed ancestry, including civil rights activist John Mercer Langston and Homer Plessy of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. In most cases these plaintiffs were not trying to distance themselves from other African Americans but simply using a strategy that they hoped would force the judges to strike down all race-based laws. Her court testimony shows that she identified as an African American; additionally, if she genuinely wanted to disassociate from other African Americans and be treated as white, she could have moved away and passed for white somewhere else, rather than staying in her hometown and teaching at its black school. Aside from Aside from her testimony, the only known record of her own words is her statement about the small $250 jury award: “I did not sue for the sake of money, but to vindicate the rights of my race, and my character of womanhood.” Even so, her attorney may have seen this argument as more than strategy, telling the court that “a young lady of fine talents and good character, a teacher of music, and the head of one of the common schools in a city of the importance of Quincy, Illinois” should not be mistreated simply because “she is one eighth colored.” He also argued that racial discrimination on common carriers was unconstitutional under the 14^th Amendment, which had been ratified only four years earlier. The Iowa Supreme Court agreed, writing that African Americans were legally entitled to “every right arising in the affairs of life” and that forcing them into inferior accommodations deprived them of “the benefits of this very principle of equality.” Although it rejected the idea that Coger was white or that her mixed ancestry was legally relevant, it also stated that her “spirited resistance…defiant words…[and] pertinacity in demanding the recognition of her rights and in vindicating them” was “evidence of the Anglo-Saxon blood that flows in her veins,” and her “unwomanly courage” was a far cry from the “female delicacy and timidity so much praised.” Thus even as the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in favor of Emma Coger and all other African Americans, it also perpetuated race and gender stereotypes by stating that her courage came from her white ancestry and was not ladylike. In any event, Iowa now became the first state in the country to ban racial discrimination on common carriers. By contrast, most other states applied the “separate but equal” principle and ruled against black plaintiffs unless they had been given grossly inferior accommodations or been banned entirely. This turned out to be a sign of the future, as racial attitudes became more conservative, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down civil rights laws, southern and western states created new segregation laws, and even in northern states courts almost always ruled against black plaintiffs. By the early 1900s, “separate but equal” was the custom in the North and the law everywhere else.

After Emma Coger’s victory in court, she returned to Quincy and resumed her teaching career. In later years she moved to the town of Boonville, Missouri and taught at another black school there. During the 1890s she went back to Quincy and briefly taught again before retiring from the classroom. Her only appearances in the public record or newspapers after that were related to her substantial property investments that provided her a comfortable income. When she died in 1924, her will stated that her properties should be converted into a retirement home for African Americans. Although her dedication to black education, property ownership, and legal equality lived on in countless other educators, entrepreneurs, and plaintiffs, it would take several more decades before African Americans made real progress in the struggle against legalized segregation.

 

©David Brodnax, Sr.

John Jones

John Jones (1817-1879), entrepreneur and activist. John Jones was born in Greene County, North Carolina, the son of a free black woman and a German immigrant father. Although he was born with his mother’s free status, she feared that his white relatives would try to enslave him anyway, so she sent him away to learn the tailoring trade. The Apprentices like Jones were required to fund their training by working for their teachers without pay for a certain number, and so he fulfilled this requirement under his original teacher and then another white tailor in Memphis who purchased the right to his labor. While in Tennessee, however, he learned that the relatives of his first teacher planned to sell him on the false pretense that he was a slave, and he had to travel back to North Carolina to prove in court that he had been born free. After running his own business in Memphis for several years, in 1841 he moved to Alton, Illinois (near St. Louis) to be closer to his future bride and her family. Like all Midwestern states, Illinois had “black laws” which banned African Americans from voting, attending public schools, testifying in court against whites, or living in the state at all unless they posted a $250 bond (the equivalent of $6300 today). In order to pay the bond, Jones uses his entire savings and went back to Memphis for three years to make more money, then returned to Alton, married, and went further north to a growing city on Lake Michigan. Chicago had been incorporated in 1836 and by the late 1840s had around 30,000 residents, including a black community of only 300 free-born people like him, former slaves who had purchased their freedom, and fugitive slaves. Arriving with only $2 to his name (the equivalent of $55) today, he rented a home in what is now the West Loop and used a loan from another black entrepreneur to set up his tailor shop nearby on the present-day site of the James R. Thompson Center. His business quickly proved successful, and he used his earning to purchase real estate, which became even more profitable as Chicago’s economy and population boomed. By 1860 he was worth somewhere between $85,000-$100,000 ($2.4-2.8 million today) and had become the city’s most prominent black citizen, not only because of his wealth but because of his desire to fight for the millions of blacks in slavery and the thousands more denied equality in the North. As one historian later wrote, “In his life’s story, the fears and expectations of all persons who had experienced bondage recognized the precariousness of their existence.”

He and his wife purchased a much larger home on Dearborn Avenue and made it into a center for black activism. Fugitive slaves took refuge there when they arrived in Chicago; one continued on to Canada but sent her daughter back to attend school and begin her teaching career. The Joneses also hosted civil rights leaders like Frederick Douglass and John Brown, and they established connections with local white liberals, one of who taught John to read and write. The state government, though, was dominated by downstate residents who wanted to strengthen the black laws. Jones responded through the printed word, the political system, and black community institutions. In 1847 he wrote The Black Laws of Illinois and a Few Reasons Why They Should Be Repealed, distributing it in pamphlet form and by paying to have it printed in the newspaper. During the 1848 Illinois constitutional convention, Jones unsuccessfully argued that the black laws should be discontinued, saying that they violated the principles of democracy that blacks had fought for in the War of Independence. As African Americans began organizing conventions to collectively fight for equality, he served as vice president to a national meeting in New York State and as president of the first statewide meeting in Illinois. At one convention he called for black private schools, asserting “We want education and we want money. With these two potent instruments we have the [lever] with which we may turn the wicked institution of this country upside down, and pour Slavery into the pit below…Let us profit from the teachings of history until each one of us shall fully realize…that ‘Knowledge is power.’” One of his proposals endorsed the creation of an industrial school that would admit students regardless of race or gender; this idea was partly shaped by his own negative experiences as an apprentice and by the fact that many whites refused to take on black apprentices at all. Although the school was never built, Jones’ call for black industrial education and economic power was an early part of a movement that later grew more prominent under Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X. In 1850, Jones helped organize Olivet Baptist Church, which was the first black church of its denomination in Chicago and eventually became the largest church in the nation.

That same year Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it easier for whites to recapture fugitives and to kidnap free blacks into slavery. In response, Jones declared that blacks would “stand by our liberty at the expense of our lives.” He also co-organized a rally of 300 black Chicagoans and composed a list of resolutions which proclaimed his community’s “strong, deep resolve to resist every attempt to bring back to bondage any black” and willingness to “defend ourselves at all hazards, even if it should be to the shedding of human blood.” Like other black communities throughout the North, Jones and the rest of black Chicago put these words into action through “vigilance committees” that policed their neighborhoods to keep out slave catchers and kidnappers. Their efforts became even more difficult in 1853 when the state legislature strengthened its black laws by completely banning black migration. In spite of these setbacks, Jones continued to fight against slavery and racism, lead black institutions, and grow his business interests. When the Civil War began in 1861, Chicago grew even larger (by 1870 it was the fifth-largest city in the country), and he used one of his officers as a recruitment office for the 54^th Massachusetts Infantry. The wartime efforts of these black troops and black civilians like Jones helped win the war and change racial attitudes. Early in 1865 Illinois repealed its black laws, and Jones led the celebrations in Springfield. Several months later the North won the war, but shortly thereafter President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Jones was selected as an honorary pallbearer and as part of the group that accompanied the president’s body from Chicago to its final resting place in Springfield.

The war had also encouraged massive growth in Chicago’s black population, and along with black men getting the right to vote in 1870, this created new opportunities for black political power. In 1869 the governor appointed Jones the first black notary public (someone given legal authority to serve as an impartial witness to the signing of important documents) in state history. That same year one of his many former mentees, Lloyd Wheeler, became the first African American to pass the Illinois bar exam, and the two later became business partners. Jones’ business interests suffered a significant setback in 1871 when many of his properties were destroyed in the Chicago Fire. This catastrophe was caused in part by city policies that underfunded the fire department, allowed most structures to be made of cheap wood, and enabled the dumping of waste in the river and the unsafe storage of flammable materials like coal and kerosene. In response, the Republicans reorganized as the Union Fire Proof Ticket. Their slate of candidates in the 1871 elections included Jones, who was seeking to fill a vacancy on the Cook County Board of Commissioners. When he won the election, he became the first African American elected to public office in Illinois. He was reelected in 1872 but then defeated several years later. At the same time, his advocacy helped lead to the desegregation of Chicago’s public schools in 1874. The man who had risen to wealth and power despite being denied the opportunity to attend school now donated land that was used for the Jones School (not related to the present-day Jones College Prep) and became the first African American on the Chicago school board. This service was among his final actions, as he died in 1879. John Jones did not live to see the Great Migration make Chicago a global center for black politics, economics, and culture (including many more who followed him by migrating from Tennessee), but his decades of leadership were essential in creating the path that led to this, as the city grew from a village to a metropolis and as African Americans transitioned from slavery and explicitly racist laws to emancipation and the promise, if not reality, of equality.

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Lieutenant Colonel Karen Wagner

 

Lieutenant Colonel Karen Wagner (1961-2001), military officer. Karen Wagner was born at Fort Riley in Kansas but spent most of her childhood at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Her grandfather had served in World War I, and her father was an Army medic who served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam and met her mother at a military funeral. One of her earliest childhood memories was the death of a close family friend in the Vietnam War. She grew up listening to military stories told by her father and his friends (one of whom was killed in Vietnam), including racial segregation, the way that medics were targeted by the enemy, and the Viet Cong efforts to get black soldiers to defect. In high school she was named to the National Honors Society, earned honors on the basketball and track teams, and joined the junior ROTC program. She graduated from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in 1984, then followed her father into the medical branch of the Army, focusing on administration. While serving as trainer for medical specialists at the 187^th Medical Battalion at Fort Sam Houston in 1987, her daughter Saundra was born with hydrocephalus and spina bifida. Wagner declared “This is my baby, and she needs me to care for her…I’m going to lean into this and trust the grace of God,” and cared for Saundra until she died just after her first birthday. Wagner moved on to the 67^th Evacuation Hospital in Würzburg, Germany to serve as chief of personnel. At that post and everywhere she was stationed, she earned praise from peers, superiors, and those who served under her for her attention to detail and uplifting personality. Her sister said that “She never met a stranger. She was the kind of person who, when you met her, she would never forget you. She would talk to you like she’d known you forever.” This was echoed by a biographical essay, which stated “If [her] duties were low in drama, their effect was not. Her focus was personnel, and the matters she dealt with – promotions, commendations, station assignments for families with two Army parents – were at the heart of a soldier’s Army experience…One person’s bad day will become a bad day for everyone who depends on him. But nobody ever saw Karen have a bad day.” When superior officers complained about minor details, for instance, she was able to defuse the situation with laughter by saying, with tongue firmly in cheek, “It’s a black thing, sir. You wouldn’t understand.” Wagner was also a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and in 1992 she earned a master’s degree in health administration at Webster University.

In 1997 Wagner was transferred to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C., which was the Army’s flagship medical center, to serve as brigade executive officer and deputy brigade commander. This placed her in charge of thousands of military personnel. While training one, she told him “You’ve got to demonstrate good leadership. And you’ll do that by showing the same level of respect to everyone, from the lowest civilian staffer to the highest-ranking surgeon.” She dealt with issues such as high-ranking officers misusing government credit cards, doctors who did not meet physical fitness requirements, and disciplinary cases. One such case involved a young private who was in danger of being dishonorably discharged for drug use, but Wagner called for him to get a second chance, saying “You have to trust the people under you. The Army trains them to do the right thing. So put your faith in the Army.” In 2000 she was made secretary to the general in charge of the North Atlantic Regional Medical Command, which included Walter Reed and nearly every other Army hospital in the eastern U.S. This was quickly followed by a 2001 promotion to lieutenant colonel and a transfer to the Pentagon, the headquarters for the U.S. Department of Defense in the D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia. There she served as medical branch representative to a deputy chief of staff. In this job she oversaw promotions and commendations for all Army medical officers, working with all levels of power from the chief of staff to the Senate and president. She did her usual excellent work but also spoke of retiring from the military when she reached her twenty years of service in 2004, then moving to an overseas base to teach military children. She also began looking into adopting a baby.

These plans were thwarted by the worst terrorist attack in American history. On the morning of 11 September 2001, Wagner was scheduled to meet with her superior officer and then attend a retirement party at Walter Reed for her former supervisor. Unbeknownst to any of them, terrorists had hijacked four planes that same morning. They were members of an Islamic terrorist group called al-Qaeda, led by a Saudi Arabian named Osama bin Laden. He believed that the U.S. had too much power over the government of his native Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East, he rejected what he perceived as decadent American culture, and he wanted Muslims who followed his interpretation of the Qu’ran to become a global power. He had coordinated suicide bombings on American targets in Kenya, Tanzania, and Yemen in the three previous years, but now he wanted to make an even bigger statement and cause greater damage and loss of life by carrying out an attack in the U.S. Two of the planes were deliberately crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. When the second plane hit, Wagner and other officers in the Pentagon realized that the crashes were not accidents and that the U.S. was under attack. She calmly said to the group that had gathered around the T.V. “Okay, let’s get back to work” and returned to her office. Several minutes later, the third plane crashed into the Pentagon, moving at 530 miles an hour and weighing more than 63 tons. One witness near the building later recalled “I looked out my window and I saw this plane, this jet, an American Airlines jet, coming. And I thought, 'This doesn't add up, it's really low.' And I saw it. I mean it was like a cruise missile with wings. It went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon.” The impact penetrated 310 feet into the building and created a 200-foot-tall fireball. Wagner survived the initial impact, but her office became pitch-black, filled with toxic air, and rose to temperatures above 1,700 degrees. She and one other survivor began crawling to safety, but she fell unconscious and could not continue. Karen Wagner became one of the 125 people killed inside the Pentagon, along with 59 victims on board the plane and a total of 2,976 victims killed in all four plane crashes. She was buried in Texas next to her daughter.

Tributes and memorials to Wagner came in from throughout the country, especially the places to which she had a personal connection. She posthumously received the Purple Heart and the Legion of Merit, the latter awarded to members of the armed forces who show “exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services and achievements.” The gym at Walter Reed was renamed the Karen J. Wagner Sports Center, and after the hospital closed in 2011, an outdoor memorial in her honor was relocated to the National Museum of Health and Medicine. In 2004 the Army established the Karen Wagner Leadership Award, which is annually given to an officer who shows excellence in medical human resources. In Las Vegas, the LTC Karen J. Wagner VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) Post 12119 was instituted in 2012, and a memorial plaque stands in UNLV’s office of veteran services. A medical building at Fort Sam Houston was renamed in her honor, and in 2005 Karen Wagner High School near San Antonio was built. Her name is listed on the Victims of Terrorist Attack on the Pentagon Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, the Pentagon Memorial outside the building, and the National September 11 Memorial in New York. Memorial services are still held every year to honor the third-generation veteran who, along with passengers, people in the Twin Towers, one pilot, and numerous others before and since, became African American casualties in acts of terrorism. 

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris

Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris (1964- ), attorney and politician. Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, the daughter of immigrants. Although laws dating back to the 1790s had discouraged or banned racial minorities from coming to the country or becoming citizens, people from the West Indies and Asia had come anyway. In Jamaica the black majority had created a tradition of entrepreneurialism and political activism, and this was carried on by Jamaican immigrants to the U.S., including an economist named Donald Harris. This spirit was also prevalent in the Indian American community, which grew primarily on the West Coast beginning in the late 1800s and featured many young people attending American universities, including a medical student of Tamil ancestry named Shyamala Gopalan. Although some Indian immigrants tried to assimilate or claim a white identity, Gopalan made connections with the black students at the University of California, Berkeley, where in 1958 she met Harris, who was pursuing a Ph.D. in economics. They married and had two daughters, naming the eldest Kamala after the Sanskrit word for “lotus,” which is associated with the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, and Devi, which literally means “goddess.” As a child Kamala took part in social justice protests with her family, later recalling that she “had a stroller-eye view of the Civil Rights Movement.” Her parents divorced when she was seven, and she was raised primarily by her mother, who instilled pride in her Indian heritage and an identity as a black woman; she later wrote that “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters…She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.” The Great Migration had brought millions of African Americans from the South to the West Coast, and Harris spent her early years immersed in this environment. She also remembered that her mother was sometimes mistaken for a domestic servant while they were shopping and that neighbors banned their daughter from playing with her because she was black. She attended both Hindu and Baptist religious services, and she visited family members in Jamaica and India, where she was inspired by her grandparents’ advocacy for women’s rights. She lived in Montreal during her middle and high school years, and this was the site of her first overtly political act: when she was ten, she and her sister convinced the managers of their apartment building to turn a courtyard into a playground, then raised money to build it.

In 1982 Harris began college at Howard University, one of more than one hundred Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). She chose Howard in part because she had been educated in predominantly white schools and, as a journalist later wrote, “[she] wanted to be surrounded by black students, black culture and black traditions at the crown jewel of [HBCUs].” While in college she interned for a California senator, led the debate team and economics society, took part in anti-apartheid protests, and joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s oldest black sorority. She later said of her alma mater that “Every signal told students that we could be anything – that we were young, gifted, and black, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of our success.” After graduating with a degree in political science and economics, she studied law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, where she served as president of her chapter of the Black Law Students Association. She was admitted to the California bar in 1990 and took a job as a deputy district attorney in Oakland. Focusing on child sexual assault cases, she helped reform the city’s efforts to fight teenage prostitution by viewing the girls as victims rather than as criminals. She also served on the state boards for unemployment insurance and medical assistance. Harris was then promoted to assistant district attorney and head of the Career Criminal Unit in San Francisco, but after disagreements with her supervisor due to his practice of trying juveniles as adults, she quit in 2000 and became chief of the Community and Neighborhood Division for the San Francisco City Attorney. Three years later she ran for office for the first time, seeking the office of District Attorney of San Francisco on a pledge to never seek the death penalty, combat gun violence, and make limited use of the “three-strikes” law that automatically gave life sentences to repeat offenders. She was elected and then reelected in 2007. During her seven years in this position, she kept her pledge against the death penalty even when more prominent politicians pressured her to use it. She combatted environmental problems by creating a special crime unit and by prosecuting printing companies that dumped hazardous waste in a poor black neighborhood. Her Hate Crimes Unit was created to protect LGBT students at school, and she combatted truancy by bringing charges against parents of chronically truant children, arguing that there was a direct connection between truancy in childhood and criminal behavior in adulthood. She also increased protections for the elderly against identity theft and reduced recidivism among ex-convicts through the “Back on Track” program. At the same time, an increased felony conviction rate led to accusations that she was tough on minority suspects (especially in the area of marijuana offenses), and misdeeds by a crime lab technician forced her to throw out around 1,000 drug-related cases. All of this helped make her one of the most notable DAs in the country, as did her work on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and her 2009 book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer.

In 2010, Harris ran for California Attorney General. The race was narrower than usual because she supported marriage equality only two years after Californians had approved a state constitutional amendment opposing it. In a foreshadowing of future events, her opponent did well in rural areas while the much larger number of urban votes were still being counted, but in the end Harris had the majority. This made her California’s first black and/or Asian attorney general and the first South Asian attorney general of any state. Upon taking office she began working to help the economy recover from the Great Recession, which had been caused in part by banking practices in home loans. She secured $20 billion in settlements from banks to help homeowners save their properties, having negotiated this amount after the banks initially offered only $4 billion. Her California Homeowner’s Bill of Rights further assisted homeowners and gave her office more power to prosecute financial fraud. She also increased Internet privacy, helped restore marriage equality, and again refused to seek the death penalty, arguing that “one of America’s greatest teachers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said ‘the old eye for an eye philosophy leaves everyone blind…the district attorney is charged with seeking justice, not vengeance.” Harris served as state attorney general until 2016, when she was elected to the U.S. Senate. This made her only the Senate’s tenth African American, the second black woman (following Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois), and the first from west of the Mississippi River. She was also the Senate’s eighth Asian American, one of three Asian American women, and only one of three from a state other than Hawaii; in the last two categories she was joined by Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. Additionally, although most Indian Americans voted Democrat, the most prominent Indian American politicians were the conservative Republicans Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley, who also used Anglicized names and generally downplayed their heritage. By contrast, Harris insisted upon the correct pronunciation of her name, and she was joined in Congress by progressives Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Raja Krishnamoorthi of the Chicago suburbs, along with two other Indian Americans already representing districts in northern California. Senator Harris was named to the Budget, Homeland Security, Judiciary, and Intelligence committees. Her public profile thus grew even higher as the Intelligence Committee investigated Russian interference in Donald Trump’s recent presidential victory and the Judiciary Committee evaluated his more than 200 nominations for federal judgeships. Harris put her background as a prosecutor to use in questioning witnesses and potential judges such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. She became one of Trump’s fiercest opponents by fighting his nominations, his immigration policies, and other actions, leading him to apply the “nasty” label that he often used on women who displeased him. When he was impeached in 2019 on charges of using military aid to pressure the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and of obstructing justice, Harris was one of the leading voices calling for a fair examination of the facts and then for Trump’s removal, writing “If – when – the Senate fails to hold this president accountable, it will represent a serious risk to the integrity of our system of justice. It will continue a shameful history of two systems of justice: one for powerful people like Trump and one for everyone else.” That same year she also published the children’s book Superheroes Are Everywhere and her biography The Truths We Hold.

2019 was also the year that Harris announced that she was running for president. This position had been sought by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and other women in previous years, by black candidates since the early 1900s, and by black major party candidates since the 1970s (including Shirley Chisholm in 1972 and Braun in 2004) but the only such victor had been Obama in 2008 and 2012. Harris paid tribute to this legacy by beginning her campaign on the same date that Chisholm had begun hers and by using a similar visual scheme in her campaign materials. The pool of Democratic candidates was the largest and most diverse in U.S. history but also included Obama’s former vice president Joe Biden. During the first Democratic debate in June 2019, Harris criticized Biden for having opposed the school desegregation program of busing in the 1970s, saying “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me!” This helped make her one of the leading candidates for a time, but over the next few months Biden pulled ahead of the field. Harris was seen by some as too moderate by some due to her record as a prosecutor and as too liberal by others due to her criticism of Trump and simply because she was a black woman from California. The majority of Democratic voters (including many African Americans) pragmatically decided that Joe Biden, a moderate white man with a history of working effectively with Republicans, was their party’s best chance to remove Trump from office. Although she had received a record $1.5 million in donations during the first 24 hours of her campaign, by December 2019 she announced that she did not have enough money to continue and that she would support whoever her party nominated. That proved to be Biden, and as the summer of 2020 rolled on, the massive support that he had gotten from black voters and the even more massive protests for social justice led him to openly propose choosing a black woman as his running mate. Several were considered, but in August 2020 he announced that he had selected Harris. This made her the third woman on a major party presidential ticket (following Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Republican Sarah Palin in 2008), the first African American, and the first Asian American. Because of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Harris conducted a mainly virtual campaign that became notable for mobilizing her AKA sisters and members of other black Greek-letter organizations. Trump and other Republicans mocked her and Biden for their infrequent public appearance and accused them of being socialists, although such claims had never been made earlier in their political careers. They also had to contend with backlash to the social justice protests and with the rising Q-Anon movement, which promoted the baseless conspiracy theory that Democrats were secretly carrying out a Satanic plot to kidnap and eat children. The same racist, xenophobic, and sexist attacks that had been used against other Democratic women and Obama were now used against her. Some Republicans claimed that she was not eligible to serve as president because her parents had not been American citizens at the time of her birth (people born in the U.S. are citizens at birth regardless of their parents’ status), while one of her Senate colleagues intentionally and mockingly mispronounced her name. Other conservatives stated that she wasn’t really black because some of her ancestors were white slaveholders, ignoring the fact that most people of African descent in the Americas have white ancestry due to the sexual assault of enslaved women. She was also accused of having used a personal relationship to advance her career, and it was further said that because of Biden’s advanced age, she would be the real president, which Trump himself called an “insult to our country.” Harris responded to all of this by focusing on Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic and other failings. During her debate with Vice President Mike Pence, which generated the second-highest TV ratings of any vice-presidential debate in history, Harris created one of the most memorable moments of the campaign by responding to Pence’s frequent interruptions with the sentence “Mr. Vice President, I'm speaking.”

On Election Day it was not clear who had won, but as the states counted millions of mail-in votes and early votes (in some states these could not be counted in advance) over the next few days, the outcome became apparent. Harris and Biden had won all of the same states as Hillary Clinton in 2016, recaptured Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, turned Georgia blue for the first time since 1992, and turned Arizona blue for only the second time since 1948. They won the Electoral College 306-232, and although their margin of victory in the swing states was close, they also won the popular vote by 7 million and nearly five percent. This was the widest percentage margin of victory over an incumbent president since 1932, and Trump was only the tenth of thirty incumbent presidents to be voted out. In a year which marked the 100^th and 150^th anniversary of constitutional amendments that removed gender and racial restrictions on voting, Kamala Harris had now broken through the same barriers in the nation’s second-highest office that she had previously smashed in other positions. In her acceptance speech, she declared that “When [my mother] came here from India at the age of 19, maybe she didn’t quite imagine this moment. But she believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible. So, I’m thinking about her and about the generations of women, Black women. Asian, White, Latina, and Native American women throughout our nation’s history who have paved the way for this moment tonight. Women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality, liberty, and justice for all, including the Black women, who are too often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our democracy…But while I may be the first woman in this office, I won’t be the last. Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.