When I was a small child, my great-grandmother would tell me stories about slavery. Not that she was enslaved because she was born in 1900. I thought that was so long ago; how can she know anything about it? One day in second-grade math, we worked on subtraction, and I thought I would do a little self-examination using my family. To my horror, I realized my great granny was born only 37 years past the ravages of slavery. So when she told me of sitting at her grandmother’s feet and seeing her gnarled toes from working in a St. Mary’s County, Maryland field from sunup to sundown, it was not of family legend but of witness. From that moment on, I sat at her inherited feet, acknowledging the realness of the history I had read about and she had seen.
She told me of nightmares from stories of relatives bashed, beaten, and killed after Reconstruction and into Jim Crow. I realized she was three when the Wright Brothers first took flight. Charles and Frank Duryea’s forerunner to the modern automobile was barely a used car when she was nine. After I was born, she saw the Civil Rights and Voter Rights Act, and I became a father. She lived through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and watched then Virginia Governor Thomas Bahnson Stanley establish the Gray Commission meant to ‘defy Brown.’ Stanley was in lockstep with then-Senator Harry F. Byrd, who said, “If we can organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order I think that, in time, the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South.”
There was no subtlety in Byrd’s words or deeds. The U.S. entered a period in the late sixties and into the 70s where outward racial bigotry prompted frowns and gasps. Teens and young adults wanted to turn on, tune in and drop out of societal norms, one of which was open racism. Unfortunately, we are in reverse, backtracking on roads lots had hoped were in the rearview of the horse and buggy. The wanton destruction of black history in schools and the reversal of Affirmative Action are not enough for conservative politicians and pundits. Senator J.D. Vance(R-OH) warned several schools that presidents who view diversity as a positive would be put on notice. If Vance’s warning was insufficient, former Trump official Stephen Miller promised it.
Miller, whose history of alleged bigotry dates back to high school, notified any law school he deemed out of compliance with the new Court ruling would be sued by his organization America First Legal. “Today, we sent a warning letter to the deans of 200 law schools around America, telling them that they must obey the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down illegal racial discrimination and affirmative action,”Miller said in a video. Of course, neither Miller nor Vance mentions the affirmative action of legacy admissions. Maybe had either talked with my great granny, they would remember that her people had no opportunity at legacy.
Vote Against Guns.