You Can’t Talk About Trump’s Georgia Case Without Talking About Racism
As the final bars of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” filled the room, former President Donald Trump took the stage in Windham, N.H. The audience, many of them white New Englanders and veterans, chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A” had to settle a bit before Trump could launch into a winding, military-themed speech at the August 8 campaign rally.
50 Years of Republican history in a convincing, chilling thumbnail
Why have only a few elected Republican officials rejected Trump? Columnist Jamelle Bouie highlights scholarly views that “strong loyalty to an institution like a political party might lead a dissenting or disapproving individual to hold on to his or her membership even more tightly, for fear that exit might open the door to even worse outcomes.”
Continue reading Jamelle Bouie Nails the GOP’s Criminality & Contempt for Law & the Constitution
When I landed on Nantucket in the fall of 1976, I had a head full of the [American] Revolution, enough cash for a cramped bedroom in an unfashionable boardinghouse, but no nanny. So my two daughters, Annika (self-nicknamed “Kiki,”) age 7 and Molly, a precocious 4, were back in San Francisco with their mother, from whom I was quietly getting divorced.
By Stephen W. Angell
We don’t know the exact date, or the place, when Richard Bradshaw (“Brad”) Angell (1918-2010) had his encounter with the Klan. All the participants are dead, and the story has been passed on orally.
But we know the time and season: 1951, likely early spring. And the place, if not the exact location: Tallahassee, in northwest Florida. Continue reading Exclusive: A Quaker Was Noticed By the Florida Klan in 1951. It Didn’t Go Well. (But It Could Have Been Much Worse.)
[NOTE: Kudos to the Post & Timothy Egan. The good news here is that when the Klan faced the Law for real, the law won. But in its bloody heyday, in the 1920s & after, it was repeatedly abetted by the connivance, corruption or cowardice of those charged with upholding it.
The bad news also includes something Egan neglects: the widespread Quaker connection. Indiana, the mass Klan’s heartland, was also the state with the most Quakers after Pennsylvania. And Indiana Quakers joined the Klan in droves (also elsewhere). The head of the hugely influential Klan Women’s unit was a prominent Quaker pastor.
Continue reading Klan Rising: Are The Media (& the Law) Finally Going to Pay Attention? (And, How About Quakers?)