Tag: American Politics Page 2 of 4

When Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, we imagine fireworks, flags, and a dramatic reading of the Declaration of Independence. We think we know the story—The Continental Congress selected Thomas Jefferson to write the declaration. He labored alone to produce this famous document. Congress then approved it unanimously and it was signed on the 4th of July.

But the truth is far different and more complex. The story behind this iconic document—the how, who, and why of its creation—is just as explosive and illuminating as the day it represents. Far from a spontaneous outburst of rebellion, the Declaration was the product of political strategy, collaborative writing, and a shared sense of urgency among men who knew their words would change the course of history.

Setting the Stage: Why a Declaration?

By the spring of 1776, the American colonies were deep in conflict with Great Britain. Battles at Lexington and Concord had already been fought. George Washington was attempting to transform the continental army into a professional fighting force. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense had ignited widespread public support for full separation from the British Crown. The Continental Congress had been meeting in Philadelphia, debating how far they were willing to go. By June, the mood had shifted from reconciliation to revolution.

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduced a resolution to the Continental Congress declaring “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” The motion was controversial—some delegates wanted more time to consult their colonies. But most in Congress knew that if independence was going to happen, it needed to be explained and justified to the world, so they created a committee to draft a formal declaration.

The Committee of Five

On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed a “Committee of Five” to write the declaration. The members were:

Thomas Jefferson of Virginia
John Adams of Massachusetts
Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania
Roger Sherman of Connecticut
Robert R. Livingston of New York

This was not a random selection. Each man represented a different region of the colonies and had earned the trust of fellow delegates. Jefferson was relatively young but already known for his eloquence. Adams was an outspoken advocate of independence. Franklin brought wisdom, wit, diplomatic experience, and international prestige. Sherman brought New England theological perspectives and legislative experience, while Livingston represented the more moderate New York delegation and brought keen legal insight.

Jefferson Takes the Pen

Although it was a group project on paper, the heavy lifting fell to Thomas Jefferson. The committee chose him to draft the initial version. Why Jefferson? According to John Adams, Jefferson was chosen for three reasons: he was from Virginia (the most influential colony), he was popular, and, Adams admitted, “you can write ten times better than I can.”

Jefferson wrote the draft in a rented room at 700 Market Street in Philadelphia. He leaned heavily on Enlightenment ideas, especially those of John Locke, emphasizing natural rights and the notion that government derives its power from the consent of the governed. He also borrowed phrasing from earlier colonial declarations, including his own A Summary View of the Rights of British America and borrowed extensively from George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights.

The Editing Process: Group Work Gets Messy

After Jefferson completed the initial draft (likely by June 28), he shared it with Adams and Franklin. Both men suggested revisions. Franklin, ever the editor, softened some of Jefferson’s sharpest attacks and corrected language for flow and diplomacy. His most famous contribution was changing Jefferson’s phrase “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” to the more secular and philosophically precise “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

Adams contributed to structural suggestions and to tone. He also contributed to the strategic presentation of grievances against King George III, understanding that the declaration needed to justify revolution in terms that would be acceptable to both colonial readers and potential European allies.

Sherman and Livingston played more limited but still meaningful roles. Sherman, with his theological background, helped ensure the document’s religious references would appeal to Puritan New England, while Livingston’s legal expertise helped refine the constitutional arguments against British rule. Otherwise, their involvement in the actual content of the declaration was likely minimal.

The revised draft was presented to the full Continental Congress on June 28, 1776. What followed was a few days of intense debate and revision by the entire body.

Congress Takes the Red Pen

From July 1 to July 4, the Continental Congress debated the resolution for independence and edited the Declaration. Jefferson watched as more than two dozen changes were made to his prose. The Congress cut about a quarter of the original text, including a lengthy passage condemning King George III for perpetuating the transatlantic slave trade that would have sparked deep division among the delegates, especially those from Southern colonies.

Other modifications included strengthening the religious language, toning down some of the more inflammatory rhetoric, and making the grievances more specific and legally grounded. Congress made 86 edits, removing about a quarter of Jefferson’s original content. Jefferson was reportedly frustrated by the changes, calling them “mutilations,” but he recognized that compromise was the cost of consensus

Approval and Promulgation

Despite the extensive revisions, the core of Jefferson’s vision remained intact and on July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted in favor of Lee’s resolution for independence. That’s the actual date the colonies officially broke from Britain. John Adams even predicted in a letter to his wife that July 2 would be celebrated forever as America’s Independence Day. He was close—but the official adoption of the Declaration came two days later.

On July 4, 1776, Congress formally approved the final version of the Declaration of Independence. Contrary to popular belief, most of the signers did not sign it on that day. Only John Hancock, as president of Congress, and Charles Thomson, as secretary, signed then. The famous handwritten version, now in the National Archives, wasn’t signed until August 2. But the document approved on July 4 was immediately printed by John Dunlap, the official printer to Congress.

These first copies, known as Dunlap Broadsides, were distributed throughout the colonies and sent to military leaders, state assemblies, and even King George III. George Washington had it read aloud to the Continental Army. This rapid dissemination was crucial to its impact, as it was needed to rally public support for the revolutionary cause and explain the colonies’ actions to the world.

Legacy and Impact

The Declaration wasn’t just a break-up letter to the British Crown—it was a manifesto for a new kind of political order. Its assertion that “all men are created equal” would echo through centuries of American history, invoked by abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights leaders, and more.

The creation of the Declaration of Independence demonstrates that even the most iconic documents in American history emerged from collaborative processes involving compromise, revision, and collective wisdom. While Jefferson deserves primary credit for the document’s eloquent expression of revolutionary ideals, the contributions of his committee colleagues and the broader Continental Congress were essential to creating a text that could unite thirteen diverse colonies in common cause.

This collaborative origin reflects the democratic principles the declaration itself proclaimed, showing that American independence was achieved not through the vision of a single individual, but through the collective efforts of representatives working together to articulate their shared commitment to liberty, equality, and self-governance. The process that created the Declaration of Independence thus embodied the very democratic ideals it proclaimed to the world.

Today, the Declaration of Independence is enshrined as one of the foundational texts of American democracy. But it’s worth remembering that it was created under immense pressure, forged by committee, and edited by compromise. Its authors knew they were taking a dangerous step. As Franklin quipped at the signing, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

America’s First Constitution

By John Turley

On June 26, 2026

In History, Politics

The Articles of Confederation: Birth, Failures, and Legacy

The United States Constitution, ratified in 1788 and implemented in 1789, is often treated as the nation’s true founding framework. Yet before it, there existed another governing document, one far less celebrated but no less essential to understanding the early republic. The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union served as America’s first constitution from their adoption by the Continental Congress in 1777 to their replacement just over a decade later. Imperfect, fragile, and ultimately unsustainable, the Articles nevertheless provided the institutional bridge between revolution and nationhood.

To understand why the Articles were structured as they were—and why they ultimately failed we need to step back into the mindset of the revolutionary generation. The men who drafted them were not political theorists operating in calm conditions; they were wartime leaders grappling with uncertainty, scarcity, and deep suspicion of centralized authority. They had just rebelled against British tyranny, and they were determined not to allow such power on American soil. The result was a system deliberately designed to restrain national authority, even at the cost of efficiency. The Articles represented both a solution to immediate wartime needs and a reflection of deeply held ideological fears. Their story is not merely one of failure, but of experimentation, adaptation, and political learning.

Revolutionary Context and the Need for Union

The intellectual origins of the Articles stretch back well before independence. Colonial leaders had long recognized the potential benefits of intercolonial cooperation. Benjamin Franklin’s Albany Plan of Union in 1754 proposed a centralized colonial government capable of coordinating defense and managing relations with Native nations. Though ultimately rejected by the colonies, the plan foreshadowed later efforts at union by raising the fundamental question of how semi-autonomous political entities might cooperate without surrendering their independence.

That question became urgent during the American Revolution. When the Second Continental Congress convened in 1775, it functioned as a provisional government, but its authority was ambiguous and largely dependent on voluntary compliance. As the war intensified, it became increasingly clear that thirteen separate colonies could not effectively wage a coordinated struggle against the British Empire without some formal political structure. Congress needed legitimacy—not merely as a gathering of delegates, but as a governing body with recognized authority over military, diplomatic, and financial matters.

On June 11, 1776, Congress appointed a committee to draft a plan of confederation, even as another committee worked on the Declaration of Independence. The parallel timing was no coincidence. Independence required not only separation from Britain but also the creation of a new political order. The Articles were intended to provide that order, a framework through which the states could act collectively while preserving their individual sovereignty.

Drafting Under Pressure

The drafting process unfolded under extraordinary circumstances. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, a respected lawyer and political thinker, chaired the committee and produced the initial draft in July 1776. Debate over its provisions, however, proved slow and contentious. Congress was simultaneously managing a war, and immediate military concerns often took precedence over constitutional deliberation.

Disagreements over representation, taxation, and western land claims delayed progress for more than a year. It was not until November 15, 1777, while Congress was in exile in York, Pennsylvania, following the British capture of Philadelphia, that the Articles were finally approved. Even then, the document was widely understood as a compromise rather than an ideal solution.

Ratification presented an additional challenge. Because the Articles required unanimous consent, any single state could delay their implementation. The principal obstacle came from disputes over western lands. States with expansive territorial claims, such as Virginia, were reluctant to relinquish them, while smaller states like Maryland insisted that such lands should be held in common for the benefit of the union. Only after Virginia agreed to cede its claims did Maryland ratify the Articles on March 1, 1781, bringing them into full effect.

Structure and Principles

The Articles of Confederation established a national government that was intentionally limited in scope. At its core was a unicameral Congress in which each state, regardless of size or population, held a single vote. This arrangement reflected the primacy of state sovereignty: the union was conceived not as a single nation but as a “league of friendship” among independent states.

The national government possessed certain powers, including the authority to declare war, negotiate treaties, coin money, and manage relations with Native nations. However, these powers were constrained by critical limitations. Congress could not levy taxes directly, regulate interstate commerce, or enforce its decisions upon the states. Instead, it relied on requisitions, little more than requests for funds, which states frequently ignored or, at best, only partially fulfilled.

Equally significant was the absence of both an executive branch and a national judiciary. There was no president to enforce laws or coordinate policy, and no federal court system to interpret them. Administrative functions were handled by committees and departments accountable to Congress, resulting in a diffuse and often ineffective system of governance.

Amending the Articles required unanimous consent, a provision that made meaningful reform nearly impossible. While intended to protect state sovereignty, this requirement ensured that structural weaknesses could not be easily corrected.

Achievements Under the Articles

Despite their limitations, the Articles of Confederation were not without success. Most importantly, they provided a legal framework that enabled the colonies to prosecute and ultimately win the Revolutionary War. The Continental Congress, operating under the authority of the Articles, secured crucial alliances, most notably with France, and negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which formally ended the conflict and recognized American independence.

The Confederation government also achieved lasting success in western land policy. The Land Ordinances of 1784 and 1785, followed by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, established a systematic process for surveying, selling, and governing western territories. These measures ensured that new states would enter the union on equal footing with the original thirteen and prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory. This framework not only facilitated orderly expansion but also set important precedents for federal authority over territories.

The Articles also fostered a sense of national identity, however fragile. They affirmed the name “United States of America” and maintained a formal union during a period when regional differences might easily have led to fragmentation.

Structural Weaknesses and Growing Crisis

The weaknesses of the Articles, however, became increasingly apparent in the postwar period. Financial instability was among the most pressing issues. Without the power to tax, Congress struggled to pay war debts, fund the military, or support basic governmental functions. Inflation, currency devaluation, and economic dislocation further compounded these difficulties.

Interstate economic conflict added another layer of instability. In the absence of federal regulation, states imposed tariffs and trade barriers against one another, undermining economic cohesion. Competing currencies and inconsistent policies created an environment of uncertainty that hindered recovery and growth.

The lack of enforcement mechanisms proved equally problematic. Congress could pass laws and enter into treaties, but it had no means of compelling compliance. States frequently ignored national directives, and often violated provisions of the Treaty of Paris, particularly regarding the treatment of loyalists and British creditors. This inability to enforce national policy damaged American credibility abroad.

These structural deficiencies reflected the underlying philosophy of the Articles: a deep distrust of centralized power. By the mid-1780s, it was becoming clear that excessive decentralization carried its own dangers.

Shays’ Rebellion and the Turning Point

The crisis reached a breaking point with Shays’ Rebellion in 1786–1787. Economic hardship, particularly among farmers in western Massachusetts, led to widespread unrest. Burdened by debt and high taxes, many farmers faced foreclosure and imprisonment. When legal and political remedies failed, they turned to direct action, closing courts and attempting to seize the federal arsenal at Springfield.

The Confederation government was effectively powerless to respond. Lacking both funds and military authority, Congress could offer no assistance. The rebellion was ultimately suppressed by a state militia supported by private funds, underscoring the inability of the national government to maintain order.

The implications were profound. For many leaders, including George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, Shays’ Rebellion demonstrated that the existing system was untenable. A government that could not enforce laws or ensure domestic tranquility was doomed to collapse.

Toward a New Constitution

Efforts to address these problems began modestly. The Annapolis Convention of 1786, initially convened to discuss trade issues, concluded that broader reforms were necessary and called for a general convention in Philadelphia. In February 1787, Congress endorsed this proposal, though officially only to revise the Articles.

The Philadelphia Convention, however, quickly moved beyond revision. Delegates recognized that the Articles’ fundamental structure, particularly the reliance on voluntary state compliance, could not support an effective national government. The solution was to become an entirely new framework: the United States Constitution.

Ratified in 1788 and implemented the following year, the Constitution addressed the central weaknesses of the Articles by establishing a stronger federal government with the power to tax, regulate commerce, enforce laws, and operate through separate executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

Legacy and Historical Significance

It is tempting to view the Articles of Confederation solely as a failure, a flawed experiment quickly discarded in favor of a superior system. Such a perspective, however, overlooks their broader significance. The Articles represented a necessary first step in the creation of the American republic. They reflected the political realities and ideological commitments of their time, particularly the pervasive fear of centralized authority.

Their shortcomings provided invaluable lessons. The Constitution did not emerge in a vacuum; it was shaped directly by the experience of governing under the Articles. The framers understood, from hard experience, the dangers of both excessive centralization and excessive decentralization. The resulting system sought to balance these concerns, creating a government strong enough to function yet constrained enough to preserve liberty.

The Articles also demonstrated that political systems can evolve. They were not the final word on American governance, but an early chapter in an ongoing process of constitutional development. Their legacy lies not only in what they achieved, but in what they revealed about the challenges of building a nation.

In this sense, the Articles of Confederation were not a failure so much as an experiment, one conducted under extraordinary pressure, with limited precedent, and with stakes that could scarcely have been higher. They held the union together long enough for a more durable system to emerge. That alone secures their place in the story of American constitutional history.

Image generated by author using ChatGPT.

Sources

National Archives: Articles of Confederation (1777) — Primary Document

Library of Congress: Articles of Confederation — John Dickinson (1778)

HISTORY.com: Articles of Confederation — Weaknesses, Definition, Date

George Washington’s Mount Vernon: The Articles of Confederation

U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian: Articles of Confederation, 1777–1781

Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia: Articles of Confederation

Encyclopaedia Britannica: John Dickinson

Wikipedia: John Dickinson

Historical Society of Pennsylvania (via Panorama/SHEAR): The John Dickinson Draft of the Articles of Confederation

National Archives: John Dickinson Writings

University of Delaware Library: John Dickinson — Penman of the Revolution

EBSCO Research Starters: Analysis — Articles of Confederation

Wikipedia: Articles of Confederation

Wikipedia: Shays’s Rebellion

National Constitution Center: Summary of Shays’ Rebellion

American History Central: Articles of Confederation

SLCC Press / Attenuated Democracy: Chapter 12 — Articles of Confederation, Shays’ Rebellion and the Road to the Constitution

GovFacts.org: Why the Articles of Confederation Failed

Who Gets to Decide? The Modern Battle Over Books in America

By John Turley

On June 19, 2026

In Commentary, Politics

If you thought book banning was a relic of the past, think again. The United States is experiencing the most intense wave of book challenges in modern memory. Over the last four years, thousands of books have been removed from school and library shelves, sparking a national debate about parental rights, free expression, education, and the role of government.

At the center of the controversy is a simple but powerful question: Who gets to decide what children and communities are allowed to read?

We were casually looking for books to read with our grandson this year. He loves baseball so we were looking for books on that topic. Somehow we got on a site about banned books and, yes, there was a baseball story on the list, curiosity got us. The book is Baseball Saved Us by Ken Mochizuki and Dom Lee. This is the story about a baseball field that was created in a Japanese internment camp in during World War II and the prejudice they faced when they returned home after the war. The story, written on a fourth grade reading level, is about how the boys played baseball during their internment and how it helped them to survive. This is a banned book?? Why??

This made us wonder what it means to be on a “banned book list”. Just because it’s on the list does every library or school have to ban it? The answer is no, thank goodness. Members of library boards and school boards and parents play an important role and they have a lot to consider. Here are some interesting details about book banning in its current evolution.

The Scale of the Movement

The numbers are striking. According to PEN America, nearly 23,000 book bans have occurred in public schools since 2021. During the 2023–24 school year alone, more than 10,000 individual book bans were recorded. The following year saw nearly 7,000 additional bans affecting more than 3,700 unique titles.

Florida has led the nation in book removals for three consecutive years, followed by Texas and Tennessee. The American Library Association (ALA) documented more than 4,200 unique titles challenged in 2025, making it one of the highest years ever recorded.

Not every challenge results in a permanent ban. Some books are removed temporarily while review committees evaluate complaints. Others are eventually restored to shelves. Yet the sheer volume of challenges has significantly reduced access to books for many students and library users.

Supporters argue these actions protect children from inappropriate material. Critics view them as a growing campaign of censorship.

Which Books Are Being Targeted?

The books most frequently challenged share common themes.

According to the ALA, many complaints focus on books that discuss race, racism, gender identity, sexuality, or LGBTQ+ experiences. Others involve sexual content, abuse, violence, or mental health issues.

Among the most challenged books in recent years are Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Looking for Alaska by John Green, and several novels by Sarah J. Maas.

Classic works have also been caught in the controversy. Schools and districts in several states have removed or restricted books such as The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and even George Orwell’s 1984.

Critics of the banning movement note that many of these books have been available in schools for years or even decades. They argue that the current challenges are less about newly discovered concerns and more about broader cultural and political disagreements.

Who Is Driving the Challenges?

One of the most significant developments is the changing source of complaints.

The ALA reports that in 2025, 92 percent of book challenges originated from organized groups, government officials, or political activists rather than individual parents. Twenty years earlier, most challenges came from local citizens raising concerns about specific books.

This shift suggests that book challenges have become part of a larger political movement rather than isolated local disputes.

Among the most visible organizations is Moms for Liberty, founded in Florida in 2021. Originally focused on opposition to COVID-19 school policies, the group later turned its attention to curriculum issues and library books. It now claims chapters in dozens of states and has become a major force in school board elections and library controversies.

Other organizations, including No Left Turn in Education, Citizens Defending Freedom, and various state-based groups, have pursued similar goals. These organizations often share lists of books to challenge, provide guidance to local activists, and coordinate campaigns across multiple communities.

Supporters describe these efforts as parental advocacy. Critics see them as organized attempts to impose political and ideological restrictions on public education.

The Political Connection

The book-banning movement has become closely associated with broader conservative politics, particularly the MAGA movement.

Moms for Liberty has maintained ties with the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that developed Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation has sponsored Moms for Liberty events and honored the organization with awards recognizing its activism.

The relationship became even more visible when Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice left the organization to lead the Heritage Foundation’s parental-rights initiative.

Former President Donald Trump has also embraced many of the same themes. He appeared at a Moms for Liberty national summit and has frequently criticized educational institutions, libraries, and schools that he believes promote what he describes as inappropriate or politically biased material.

Supporters view these alliances as part of a broader effort to restore parental control over education. Opponents argue they demonstrate that book challenges have become deeply intertwined with national political agendas.

Project 2025 and Libraries

Much attention has focused on Project 2025, the policy blueprint produced by the Heritage Foundation.

The document calls for stronger action against what its authors characterize as inappropriate materials in schools and libraries. Critics have highlighted language suggesting that educators and librarians who provide access to certain materials could face legal consequences.

Supporters argue that such proposals are intended to protect children from explicit content. Opponents contend that they would create a chilling effect, discouraging educators and librarians from offering books dealing with controversial subjects.

The debate reflects a broader disagreement about where the line should be drawn between protecting minors and preserving intellectual freedom.

How Libraries and Schools Are Responding

Responses vary widely across the country.

Some school districts remove challenged books immediately. Others establish review committees consisting of teachers, librarians, administrators, parents, and sometimes students. These committees examine books in their entirety before making recommendations.

Public libraries have generally been more resistant to removing books. Most rely on formal collection-development policies and challenge procedures designed to balance community concerns with principles of intellectual freedom.

Many libraries have retained challenged books after review, arguing that public libraries serve diverse populations and that parents should make reading decisions for their own children without limiting access for others.

At the same time, librarians in some states report increasing pressure from elected officials and advocacy groups. Concerns about funding, employment consequences, and potential legal liability have led some libraries to avoid purchasing controversial titles altogether.

Critics refer to this phenomenon as “preemptive censorship” because books disappear before formal challenges even occur.

State Governments Enter the Fight

Several states have moved beyond local challenges and enacted statewide policies.

Utah, South Carolina, and Tennessee have adopted mechanisms that allow certain books to be removed from schools statewide. Florida has expanded parental authority over educational materials and library collections.

Supporters argue these measures provide consistency and protect children across entire states. Critics counter that statewide restrictions eliminate local decision-making and reduce access to books for students whose families may have no objections to the material.

The controversy has occasionally reached dramatic levels. In Randolph County, North Carolina, county commissioners dissolved the public library board after it refused to remove a children’s book featuring a transgender character.

Such disputes illustrate how library policy has become a flashpoint in cultural conflicts.

The Courts Push Back

Many of these policies have faced legal challenges and the results have been mixed.

In Iowa, a federal judge blocked portions of a state law that prohibited books containing descriptions of sexual activity, ruling that the restrictions likely violated First Amendment protections. In the Rutherford County, Tennessee case, the first legal challenge to that state’s expanded book statute — a federal judge declined to issue a preliminary injunction, writing that a school board “has not prohibited students from reading the books or acquiring them elsewhere; instead, it has merely opted not to carry them on school library bookshelves.”

Courts have often struggled to balance competing interests. School boards possess significant authority over educational materials, while students have constitutional protections related to access to information.

The legal outcomes remain uncertain, but the judiciary has become one of the primary battlegrounds in the debate.

Voters Respond

School board elections have become another arena for the conflict.

In several Texas districts during 2025, voters removed incumbents who had championed aggressive book-removal policies. Similar results appeared in other states, suggesting that many voters are uncomfortable with the scope of current restrictions. At the same time, candidates supporting stricter controls continue to win elections in other communities.

The mixed results indicate that Americans remain deeply divided on the issue.

A Growing Countermovement

Opposition to book bans has generated its own political response. Organizations such as PEN America, the Authors Guild, the ALA, and numerous local advocacy groups have organized campaigns defending intellectual freedom. Several states have considered legislation designed to make book removals more difficult.

Minnesota, for example, has considered legislation that would prohibit the removal of books based primarily on ideological objections and would place greater authority in the hands of professional librarians.

Supporters argue such laws protect access to information. Critics contend they diminish parental influence and local control.

The Bottom Line

The modern book-banning movement is unlike anything seen in recent decades. Its scale is unprecedented, its organization is sophisticated, and its connections to broader political movements are well documented.

Supporters view the effort as a legitimate exercise of parental rights and community standards. Critics see it as an organized campaign to restrict access to ideas, experiences, and viewpoints that some groups find objectionable.

The debate is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. It touches fundamental questions about education, democracy, free speech, and the role of public institutions.

Who should decide what belongs on library shelves? Parents? Librarians? Teachers? School boards? Legislatures? Courts?

Americans have not reached a consensus on those questions. Until they do, the battle over books is likely to remain one of the most visible fronts in the nation’s ongoing culture wars.

Illustration generated by author using Chat GPT

Sources

PEN America — Book Bans Overview

PEN America — The Normalization of Book Banning (2024–25 Report)

American Library Association — Censorship by the Numbers

ALA — Most Challenged Books

NPR — ALA Releases 2025 Most Challenged Books

NPR — PEN America 2024–25 Report

Authors Guild — Voters Reject Book Restrictions, 2025

Washington Post — Trump, Moms for Liberty, Heritage Foundation

New Jersey Monitor — M4L Summit and Project 2025 Ties

GLAAD — Moms for Liberty and Book Bans

EveryLibrary Institute — Project 2025 and Libraries

I Love Libraries — Book Challenges Update

Freedom to Learn Foundation — 2025 State of Book Banning

America at 250: A Revolution Remembered, Forgotten — or Rewritten?

By John Turley

On June 1, 2026

In Commentary, History

I’m old enough to remember the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution. Bicentennial symbols were everywhere — Liberty Bells, eagles, and that ubiquitous red, white, and blue stylized five-point star logo slapped on hats, T-shirts, socks, soft drink cups, beer cans, and even a special “Spirit of ’76” edition of the Ford Mustang II. Commemorative events were springing up everywhere, and people had full-blown bicentennial fever.

The 250th anniversary is a different animal entirely. Even the official name — Semiquincentennial — sounds like something you’d need a medical degree to pronounce. But the tongue-twisting label is the least of its problems.

The bicentennial came after a decade of national trauma: Vietnam, Watergate, and the civil rights struggles had left the country battered. By 1976, most Americans were ready to feel good about themselves again, and the bicentennial became a giant, colorful celebration of “American resilience.” The 250th arrives in a different kind of trauma — one that is arguably more confusing because it comes dressed as patriotism.

A Celebration Gets Complicated

While the 250th is being marked by numerous events, commemorations, and official proclamations, it has not yet captured the national imagination the way 1976 did. The official nonpartisan U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, established by Congress in 2016 and supported by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama as Honorary Co-Chairs, has been working toward what it calls the “largest and most inclusive” anniversary celebration in American history. But its efforts have increasingly been overshadowed — and, critics argue, undermined — by a parallel White House effort with a very different philosophy about what American history should look like.

Shortly after taking office in January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday,” creating his own body — Task Force 250 — to coordinate anniversary plans and promising “a grand celebration worthy of the momentous occasion.” A full year of festivities was planned, beginning on Memorial Day 2025 and running through July 4, 2026. On paper, more attention on the anniversary sounds like good news. In practice, the story is more complicated.

When “Restoring History” Means Removing It

Two months after launching his anniversary task force, Trump signed a second executive order — this one titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” — directing Vice President Vance to eliminate what the order calls “divisive race-centered ideology” from Smithsonian museums, educational and research centers, and the National Zoo (the Zoo??). The Smithsonian, one of the world’s great repositories of American history, was accused by the president of having come “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” that portrayed “American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”

That executive order set off a chain of events that has complicated the 250th anniversary in ways the founding fathers would have found darkly ironic, given that the Revolution was, at its core, a fight against the arbitrary exercise of executive power.

At Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park — one of the most historically significant sites in the country — National Park Service employees abruptly removed exhibits about the nine people George Washington held in slavery while Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital. Passersby reportedly heard an employee repeating, “I’m just following orders” as the displays came down. The city of Philadelphia promptly sued the federal government, arguing that the removal violated a cooperative agreement for the site’s development.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. According to reporting from Poynter and PEN America, National Park Service employees were ordered to survey all signage and interpretive materials across the nation’s 400-plus parks and monuments, flagging anything “negative about either past or living Americans.” Exhibits about slavery, Indigenous history, women’s rights, and climate change were all swept into the review. At Fort Sumter in South Carolina — where the Civil War began — even a sign explaining the risks the site faces from rising sea levels was removed.

The Interior Department issued a November 2025 memo ordering National Park Service gift shops to remove items promoting DEI or “gender expression.” Free admission days that had previously honored Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth were dropped; June 14 — Flag Day and President Trump’s birthday (does anyone thinks that’s a coincidence?) — was added instead.

Meanwhile, a proposed commemorative dollar coin design featured President Trump on the obverse and the words “Fight! Fight! Fight!” on the reverse — evoking the imagery from the July 2024 assassination attempt. The Commission of Fine Arts, whose members Trump dismissed in October 2025 and replaced with his own appointees, subsequently recommended the design.

The Money Problem

The nonpartisan America250 Commission hasn’t just faced ideological headwinds. It has also faced financial ones. By early 2026, the Commission had received only $25 million of its congressionally appropriated $150 million, with the remainder at risk of being redirected to Trump-aligned Freedom 250’s “Freedom Trucks” — six state-of-the-art mobile museums traveling the country telling a version of American history that aligns with the administration’s vision. Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman raised concerns about the funding diversion, though the Commission stated it had enough to continue its core programming.

What Actually Happened at Lexington and Concord

Against this backdrop, the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 2025, became a preview of what the full anniversary might look like. The battle reenactments drew large crowds, along with protesters carrying signs reading “No Kings” and “Resist Like It’s 1775,” explicitly drawing parallels between opposition to King George III and what they saw as autocratic tendencies in current leadership.

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey told the crowd at the North Bridge ceremony that “we see things that would be familiar to our Revolutionary predecessors — the silencing of critics, the disappearing people from our streets, demands for unquestioned fealty.” Whether one agrees with that characterization or not, the spectacle of Americans invoking the Revolution to oppose their own government at a Revolution commemoration is at minimum historically interesting — and arguably points to the enduring vitality of Revolutionary ideals.

Historians have noted that the Revolution itself was messier and more ambiguous than either side of today’s debate wants to acknowledge. As University of South Carolina professor Woody Holton observed, most colonists in April 1775 weren’t seeking independence — they wanted better treatment within the British Empire and a return to pre-1763 arrangements. The revolution was improvised, contentious, and full of people who disagreed about its meaning even while it was happening. Sound familiar?

The Founding Fathers Were Not a Monolith

Here is what is genuinely troubling about selectively sanitizing Revolutionary history: the founders themselves would not have recognized the sanitized version. George Washington, the hero of the Revolution, held people in slavery, including at the presidential residence in Philadelphia — the very site where exhibits were just torn down. Benjamin Franklin, who helped draft the Declaration of Independence, owned enslaved people and only became an abolitionist late in his life. Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” while holding more than 600 people in bondage over his lifetime.

Removing this history doesn’t honor the founders. It patronizes them by pretending their contradictions didn’t exist — and it patronizes us by suggesting we can’t handle the full truth. Even they recognized the contradictions. The founders were brilliant, flawed, and human. That’s what makes the Revolution worth studying.

Resistance in the Courts and in the Institutions

It’s worth noting that the administration’s efforts have met significant resistance. Federal courts have blocked some removals. Scholars, activists, and historians have pushed back forcefully. A coalition of groups filed suit in February 2026 arguing that the Interior Department’s mandate to strip historical information from national parks violated the Administrative Procedure Act. Philadelphia’s lawsuit over the Washington slavery exhibit is ongoing.

Northwestern University historian Leslie M. Harris, author of five books on American slavery, has said that no previous presidential administration has interfered with historic sites in this way, and warned of a potential long-term consequence: public distrust of government-maintained historical sites, or outright avoidance of them.

What We Can Do

I wrote earlier about a friend on the West Virginia 250th committee who told me their initial meeting accomplished nothing and, almost two years later, they’ve had not had a further meeting. They have only just in the past few weeks announced their plans for America 250. That’s disappointing, but in some ways, it underscores the larger point: the commemoration of this anniversary is going to be shaped by whoever shows up.

Here in West Virginia, we showed what’s possible when citizens take the lead. In October 2024, without any state or national organizational or financial help, the City of Point Pleasant and the West Virginia Sons of the American Revolution organized a commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Point Pleasant — a battle many consider a precursor to the Revolution. It worked. People came. History was honored.

We can do more of that. We don’t need to live in Massachusetts to commemorate Lexington and Concord. We don’t need federal approval to mark the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Battle of Saratoga, or the crossing of the Delaware. We don’t need the government’s permission to tell complete history — including the parts about who was left out and who fought to be included anyway.

All across the country, individuals and small groups are working to recognize the revolution. In West Virginia, we’ve organized commemorations of the Boston Tea Party, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Continental Navy and the Continental Marines, George Washington’s Birthday, and a special America 250 Memorial Day service at the West Virginia Veterans Memorial, all without any governmental support or funding. There have been presentations at local libraries and civic groups about the lives of average people during the time of the revolution, the origin of the American flag and even demonstrations of cooking and foods from the time of the revolution. If we had waited for state or national support these activities never would have happened. Just because your event may be small doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.

The Revolution, after all, was not a government program. It was a citizen uprising.

The Stakes

The American Revolution matters to world history precisely because it planted ideas — self-governance, the rule of law, the consent of the governed, the equality of all people before the law — that were genuinely radical ideas in 1776 and remain contested in much of the world today. Those ideas were aspirational when they were written. They remain aspirational now. The gap between the ideal and the reality is not a reason to hide the history; it is the history.

If the 250th anniversary is remembered primarily as a moment when the federal government selectively curated which parts of the founding era the public was allowed to encounter, that will itself become a significant historical footnote — and not a flattering one.

It will be our great shame if we allow the commemoration of an event so significant in both American and world history to be used — by anyone, of any political stripe — to divide us rather than to strengthen our common bond. The Revolution was imperfect, contentious, and incomplete. So is the republic it created. That is not a cause for despair. It is a call to engagement and improvement.

We the people. Still the operative phrase.

Illustration generated by author using ChatGPT.

—

Sources

America250 Commission — https://america250.org/
White House Freedom 250 page — https://www.whitehouse.gov/freedom250/
AASLH on the 250th — https://aaslh.org/the-250th-anniversary-and-the-road-ahead/
PBS NewsHour: A divided nation battles over the Revolution’s legacy — https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/250-years-after-the-start-of-the-american-revolution-a-divided-nation-battles-over-its-legacy
NPR: Trump executive order targets Smithsonian — https://www.npr.org/2025/03/27/nx-s1-5342914/smithsonian-president-trump-executive-order
The American Prospect: Whitening American History — https://prospect.org/2026/02/23/whitening-america-black-history-trump-slavery-dei-philadelphia/
Poynter: Trump reshaping Black history — https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2026/trump-administration-altering-black-history/
PEN America: Purging history from national parks — https://pen.org/purging-history-from-national-parks/
Courthouse News: Groups sue over park history removals — https://www.courthousenews.com/trump-administration-accused-of-erasing-history-from-national-parks/
Wikipedia: Semiquincentennial coinage — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Semiquincentennial_coinage

The Memorial Day Nobody Taught You About

By John Turley

On May 27, 2026

In History

Library of Congress Photography Collection

Here’s a story that most Americans never learned in school and it’s one worth knowing.

When we think about Memorial Day, we typically picture a date set by Congress, a general’s order, or some official act of government. What we don’t picture is a group of newly freed Black Americans in post-Civil War Charleston, South Carolina, quietly reburying the dead and making sure they weren’t forgotten. But that’s exactly what happened — and it may be the closest thing we have to the true origin of Memorial Day.

A Racetrack Turned Prison Turned Cemetery

Before the Civil War, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston was the kind of place where the Southern planter class went to be seen — horse racing, socializing, a symbol of antebellum wealth. By the war’s final year, the Confederate Army had repurposed it into something far grimmer: an open-air prison for captured Union soldiers.

The conditions were brutal. More than 257 Union prisoners of war died there from disease and exposure, and when the Confederates abandoned Charleston in early 1865, they left the bodies in a hastily dug mass grave in the infield. It was an ugly end for men who had fought to hold the country together.

What Happened Next Was Extraordinary

Less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered, a group of roughly two dozen Black volunteers did something remarkable. They went to that racetrack, exhumed the bodies one by one, and gave each man a proper individual burial. Then they built a ten-foot white fence around the entire site. Above the entrance, they hung a hand-painted sign that read: “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

They didn’t stop there. Together with Black schoolchildren, mutual aid societies, Union troops, Black ministers, and white northern missionaries, the community organized a formal ceremony for May 1, 1865. Nearly ten thousand people showed up — mostly freedmen — and most of them brought flowers.

The New York Tribune was there to cover it, describing the scene as “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before,” with gravesites that looked like “one mass of flowers.”

Why It Matters

Historian David W. Blight, who uncovered this story in a Harvard archive in the late 1990s, framed the significance of that day in striking terms: “What you have there is Black Americans recently freed from slavery announcing to the world with their flowers, their feet, and their songs what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.”

That’s not a small claim. And yet it’s grounded in documented newspaper accounts, archival records, and careful historical research. Blight laid it all out in his 2001 book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory — a work that brought this story back from near-total obscurity.

The moment that perhaps best captures the weight of this rediscovery came after Blight gave a talk at the Smithsonian. An older Black woman approached him afterward. “You mean that story is true?” she asked. “I grew up in Charleston, and my granddaddy used to tell us this story of a parade at the old racetrack, and we never knew whether to believe him or not.”

How the Story Got Buried

The Charleston ceremony didn’t disappear by accident. During the post-Reconstruction era, groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy worked systematically to reshape public memory of the Civil War. Books were rewritten, narratives were shifted, and the Black-led origins of what would become Memorial Day were quietly erased from the historical record. White organizers were credited in their place.

This wasn’t unusual. It fits a much broader pattern in American history in which Black contributions to the nation’s military and civic life — from the Revolutionary War through both World Wars — were minimized or simply left out of the story that got told in schools and textbooks.

A Note on Competing Claims

It’s worth being fair about the history here: towns like Waterloo, New York, and Columbus, Georgia also claim early Memorial Day commemorations, and historians continue to debate which event was truly “the first.” Waterloo, in fact, holds the official congressional designation as the birthplace of Memorial Day.

But the Charleston ceremony of May 1, 1865, stands as one of the most thoroughly documented early observances — and arguably the most meaningful in its context. What makes the Charleston ceremony especially significant is that it linked remembrance of the war dead directly to emancipation and Black citizenship. To the participants, honoring fallen Union soldiers also meant honoring the destruction of slavery itself. It was organized by people who had the most personal stake in honoring those deaths: the men and women who had been enslaved, and who understood better than anyone what those Union soldiers had given their lives for.

The Bottom Line

Memorial Day didn’t begin with an act of Congress. One of its earliest and most powerful expressions came from a community of recently freed Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, who spent two weeks exhuming the dead, burying them properly, and organizing a ceremony that ten thousand people attended.

They did it with flowers, hymns, and their presence — and then history buried the story much as the Confederates had buried the soldiers. It took a box of old newspaper clippings in a Harvard archive to bring it back.

That’s worth remembering, too.

Sources

History.com — One of the First Memorial Days Was Held by Freed Slaves

African American Registry — The First American Memorial Day Is Commemorated

Time Magazine — The Forgotten Black History of How Memorial Day Started

The Black Wall Street Times — The True Story of Memorial Day

EURweb — The First Memorial Day Was in Charleston, Led by Freed African Americans

New York Historical — The First Memorial Day with David W. Blight

SDARJ — Black History of Memorial Day

Charleston ASALH — Decoration Day & Charleston’s Gullah Community

Is the Roberts Court Biased? The Pattern Speaks for Itself

By John Turley

On May 19, 2026

In Commentary, Politics

Chief Justice John Roberts keeps telling Americans the Supreme Court is not political. He recently complained that people “view us as purely political actors,” and insisted that’s just not how the Court works. That might have been plausible twenty years ago. After the decisions of the past decade, it sounds less like reassurance and more like spin.

The Roberts Court started out conventionally conservative. Then came the turning points: Anthony Kennedy’s retirement in 2018 and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in 2020. Donald Trump replaced them with Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, locking in a 6–3 conservative supermajority. Since then, on the biggest fights of our time—voting, money in politics, reproductive freedom, presidential power—the Court’s answers have marched almost uniformly to the right.

One analysis of the Court’s work through 2018 found more than seventy cases where the conservative bloc formed a majority in areas like voting rights, campaign finance, corporate accountability, and civil rights where the conservative justices either bent precedent or quietly shelved their own stated doctrines to get where they wanted to go. That is not happenstance. That is a method.

Look at the decisions that define this era.

In Citizens United, the Court announced that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited money in elections, destroying what remained of campaign finance law and supercharging the power of wealthy donors and corporate interests. In Shelby County, it gutted a core provision of the Voting Rights Act, inviting a wave of state-level restrictions that predictably hit minority voters hardest. In Rucho, Roberts openly acknowledged that partisan gerrymandering is “incompatible with democratic principles”—and then declared the federal courts powerless to stop it. The Court saw a threat to democracy and chose to shrug.

Dobbs went further. For nearly fifty years, Roe v. Wade recognized a constitutional right to abortion. In 2022, that right vanished in a single 6–3 decision that tracked partisan lines. The majority did not just reject Roe; it rewrote the understanding of liberty in a way that puts other long‑standing rights on shakier ground.

Then there is Trump v. United States, which discovered sweeping criminal immunity for presidents found nowhere in the Constitution’s text or structure. Contrast that with New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, where the same Court insisted modern gun laws must mirror 18th‑ and 19th‑century regulations. History is mandatory when it narrows gun regulation. History is optional when it might constrain a president. The “neutral” principles somehow keep landing on the same ideological side.

The real indictment of the Roberts Court is not that the justices are conservative; conservative legal thought has serious intellectual roots. It is that the Court’s philosophy behaves like a trapdoor: originalism when it helps, textualism when that works better, “judicial restraint” when restraint freezes progressive policies, and muscular judicial power when restraint would get in the way. The tools keep changing. The destination does not.

The shadow docket has only deepened the concern. Using unsigned, unexplained emergency orders, the Court has green‑lit sweeping policy changes—on immigration, civil rights, and executive power—while lower courts were still sorting out legality. Normally, dramatic changes to national policy come with full briefing, oral argument, and written opinions. Under Roberts, some of the most consequential decisions arrive in the dead of night, with no reasoning the public can read and no guidance lower courts can follow.

To be honest, the story is not all one-way traffic. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion which held that federal employment law protects LGBTQ workers. Roberts has occasionally voted to preserve precedent he personally disliked. There are a handful of high‑profile cases where the conservative justices have broken ranks or rejected expansive claims of presidential power, but those cases are rare.

In the high‑stakes political questions of the last decade the line is brutally clear: when democracy is at stake, money wins; when voting rights are at stake, restrictions win; when women’s bodily autonomy is at stake, state power wins; when presidential accountability is at stake, the president wins. That is not a random walk through neutral legal doctrine. It is a pattern.

Roberts is right about one thing: it is simplistic to call justices “politicians in robes.” Asking whether the Roberts Court is “biased” is not the point. Regardless of label, we have a Supreme Court whose decisions on the most contested issues overwhelmingly favor one political side. The law requires consistency and when the Court keeps changing its rules but not its results, the public is not fooled.

The Chief Justice can insist that is just how the law shakes out. The rest of us are entitled to look at the record and draw our own conclusions.

The Persecution Brand: How Trump Turns Grievance Into Political Currency

By John Turley

On May 14, 2026

In Commentary, Politics

“They’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just in the way.” —Donald J. Trump

Introduction

Donald Trump has turned political victimhood into something remarkably durable: a brand. Since his first term, Trump has consistently advanced a narrative that he is the unfair target of a corrupt establishment — not because of anything he has done, but because of who he is and the threat he poses to entrenched power. That narrative, far from fading, has deepened and accelerated in his second term, propelled by a relentless series of legal maneuvers, institutional confrontations, and rhetorical provocations that seem engineered to keep the grievance machine running. Whether the cause is a leaked tax return, a photograph of seashells on a beach, or a comedian’s joke at a press dinner, Trump and his allies have shown a remarkable ability to recast every controversy as evidence of persecution. The result is a political identity built less on policy than on shared victimhood — one that has proven more resilient to contradiction than almost anything else in modern American politics. I first wrote about this several months ago, but recent events have motivated me to update the topic.

The Anatomy of a Persecution Story

At the heart of Trump’s messaging is the claim that nearly every major American institution is rigged against him: the judiciary, the press, federal agencies, social media companies, and even fellow Republicans who fail to show sufficient loyalty. He doesn’t stop at personal grievance. His signature rhetorical move is to project that persecution outward — to his supporters — insisting that the forces targeting him are really targeting them, and that he alone stands in the way. Strongmen throughout history have used this populist inversion to build fierce loyalty, but Trump has refined it for the digital age, where every legal setback can be instantly monetized through fundraising appeals and turned into rally fodder before the ink is dry on a court filing.

Suing His Own Government: The IRS Lawsuit

Few episodes illustrate the paradox of Trump’s persecution narrative more sharply than his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury Department, agencies he controls as president. Filed in January 2026, the suit alleges that a government contractor wrongfully leaked his tax records to the press during his first term — a legitimate grievance in isolation, since the contractor did plead guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. But the spectacle of a sitting president suing his own executive branch for a payout that would come from taxpayers has raised serious legal and ethical flags. Florida District Judge Kathleen M. Williams questioned whether Trump and the agencies are “sufficiently adverse to each other” for the case to proceed at all, noting that Trump’s own executive orders require the Justice Department to follow his legal interpretations. In plain terms: the president would be suing the government he runs, defended by lawyers who must take his side, with any settlement check written to him by American taxpayers. Trump’s lawyers and the IRS have meanwhile entered settlement talks, requesting a 90-day pause in proceedings. Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill to prohibit the president, vice president, and their families from collecting any such settlement. The episode is vintage Trump — a genuine underlying grievance amplified into a high-profile conflict that simultaneously reinforces his victimhood and generates favorable headlines.

The Pursuit of James Comey: Retribution as Policy

The Trump Justice Department’s second criminal indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, announced April 28, 2026, reads like a case study in how prosecution can become an instrument of political narrative. The charges stem from an Instagram post Comey made in May 2025 showing seashells on a beach arranged to spell “86 47” — a formation Comey said he simply found and photographed. Prosecutors interpreted it as a threat against the 47th president, an argument that First Amendment scholars have called legally dubious. Stanford First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh told CNN: “This is not going anywhere. This is clearly not a punishable threat.” The indictment is the second attempt to prosecute Comey; the first, built on allegations that he lied to Congress, collapsed when a judge ruled that the prosecutor handling the case had been unlawfully appointed. Trump had publicly urged then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to move against Comey, and Bondi was fired in April 2026 after reports that the president was frustrated that she wasn’t pursuing his critics aggressively enough. Her successor, Todd Blanche — Trump’s own former personal defense attorney — moved quickly. The pattern is hard to miss: an allegation, a prosecution, a dismissal, another allegation, a second prosecution. Whether or not the charges succeed, the process itself delivers the message Trump wants delivered.

Perhaps his fear of seashells has caused him to forget that he posted a picture of then President Biden bound and gagged on the back of a pickup truck. Certainly, that was more of a threat than someone’s beachside graffiti, yet Trump was not prosecuted. I wonder why.

The Ballroom and the Bullet: Security as Metaphor

On the evening of April 25, 2026, shots were fired near the security screening area outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton, where Trump was attending his first such dinner as a sitting president. The suspect, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, was arrested; no attendees inside the ballroom were struck. It was, by any measure, a frightening episode, and the third reported attempt on Trump’s life. What followed, however, quickly illustrated Trump’s talent for turning crisis into confirmation of his narrative. Within two minutes of beginning his press briefing that night, Trump pivoted to arguing that the incident proved the wisdom of his plan to build a new ballroom on White House grounds — a project historic preservationists have challenged in court as unlawful. His administration immediately pressured the National Trust for Historic Preservation to drop its lawsuit, with the acting attorney general writing that the preservation group’s case “cannot possibly justify delaying the construction of a secure facility for the President.” Critics pointed out that Trump’s own administration had given the Correspondents’ Dinner a lower security classification than other events he attends — a detail that complicated his argument. But in Trump’s telling, the shooting was simply the latest proof that enemies lurk everywhere and that his foresight is perpetually vindicated.

The Widow Joke: Melania, Kimmel, and the Media Enemy

Two days before the Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, comedian Jimmy Kimmel delivered a mock roast on his late-night program that included the line: “Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” Kimmel later said it was an obvious joke about the couple’s age difference. The timing — the joke aired before the attempted shooting — became fuel for a firestorm after the incident. First Lady Melania Trump, called on ABC to “take a stand” against Kimmel and President Trump wrote on social media that Kimmel should be “immediately fired by Disney and ABC,” calling his comments “beyond the pale.” FCC Chair Brendan Carr had previously threatened ABC affiliates over Kimmel’s coverage of an earlier controversy. Kimmel pushed back on his Monday night broadcast, calling the joke a “light roast” and denying any connection to the shooting, but the episode had already served its purpose in the persecution playbook: a comedian’s punchline reframed as an incitement; the president and first lady as targets of a corrupt, hostile media; and a federal regulator positioned to remind a broadcast network of who holds the license.

The Nobel Grievance: Peace Prize as Persecution

Trump’s relationship with the Nobel Peace Prize offers perhaps the purest distillation of his persecution aesthetic: a prestigious honor he was not given becomes evidence of institutional bias against him. In January 2026, Trump sent a text message to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre that, as reported by PBS and confirmed by Norwegian officials, declared: “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.” The message was sent in the context of Trump’s threats to acquire Greenland by force and his tariff pressure on Norway. The factual problems were substantial. PolitiFact reported that the prize is awarded by an independent Norwegian committee, not the Norwegian government — a distinction Støre himself spelled out in a public statement — and Trump’s claim to have “stopped 8 wars” was not supported by evidence. The Nobel Committee separately clarified that a medal gifted to Trump by Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado did not legally transfer the prize to him. None of these corrections appeared to land with Trump’s base, for whom the image of a deserving president snubbed by a foreign establishment is emotionally resonant regardless of the technical details or even the truth.

THE BOARD OF PEACE: TRUMP’S PERSONAL PEACE PRIZE

The Board of Peace offers perhaps the most grandiose expression of Trump’s persecution narrative — not a complaint about being snubbed, but an institutional response to it. When Trump texted Norway’s prime minister in January 2026 linking his Greenland threats to the Nobel Committee’s failure to award him the prize, he was voicing a grievance he had already begun to act on. The Board of Peace, formally established at the World Economic Forum in Davos that same month, designated Trump as chairman for life — an arrangement that inverts the Nobel dynamic entirely: rather than waiting for an independent body to recognize his peacemaking, Trump created his own institution where recognition is structural and permanent. On the anniversary of his inauguration, Trump cited the United Nations never having helped him as a justification for the Board’s existence, suggesting it might eventually replace the UN altogether. The persecution logic runs cleanly through both episodes: the institutions that should have honored him failed him, so he built alternatives he controls. That no other G7 nation joined the Board, including Norway — the very country Trump blamed for the Nobel snub — will almost certainly be absorbed into the same narrative as further proof of establishment resistance to a leader they refuse to recognize.

Why the Narrative Works

Trump’s persecution story endures because it performs several functions simultaneously. It flips accountability into loyalty — every legal charge or critical headline becomes not evidence of wrongdoing but proof of how threatening Trump is to the establishment. It mirrors the genuine anxieties of his base, many of whom feel overlooked by media and government institutions. And it delegitimizes opposition before opposition can speak — if the system is rigged, then any ruling, verdict, or investigation against Trump is by definition corrupt. The narrative also has deep theological resonance for evangelical supporters who see Trump’s legal and political battles as a form of spiritual warfare, reinforcing the language of martyrdom that has surrounded his campaigns since 2016. For many supporters, belief in Trump’s victimhood has become identity, not analysis — and identity is far more resistant to factual challenge than any ordinary political position.

The Profitable Persecution

Trump’s persecution narrative is not merely persuasive — it is a business model. Every new indictment, investigation, or hostile media segment has historically triggered an immediate fundraising surge. His platform, Truth Social, serves simultaneously as megaphone and monetization engine. He has sold branded merchandise and Bibles invoking themes of embattlement and martyrdom. And now, with his IRS lawsuit, the grievance machinery has potentially come full circle: a complaint about institutional victimization that — if settled favorably — would result in a taxpayer-funded payout to the president himself. The architecture is durable precisely because it converts every attack into a resource, every setback into a rally cry, and every enemy into a fundraising opportunity.

After the Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, Republican senators moved to authorize $400 million in federal funding, with Senator Graham suggesting private donations could remain in play for furnishings or other expenses. What will happen to the hundreds of millions already raised and sitting in a private nonprofit shielded from standard conflict-of-interest review? That has not been addressed by the legislation or the White House and given the lack transparency in the ballroom fund it is reasonable to speculate on the probability of diversion to other uses.

Trump transferred $1.2 billion of US funds to the Board of Peace. He has pledged to transfer a total of $10 billion. These are taxpayer funds that will be totally under his personal control and can be used at his discretion. There is no public accountability for these funds.

For those who wonder about Donald Trump’s motivation for his persecution narrative, his personal wealth has almost doubled in little more than a year since his inauguration.

The Authoritarian Parallels

Scholars of democratic backsliding have noted that Trump’s strategy tracks closely with patterns seen in other countries where elected leaders have gradually dismantled independent institutions. The elements are recognizable: vilify the press as the enemy of the people; claim that legal proceedings against you are politically motivated; replace career officials with personal loyalists; and promise retribution against those who prosecuted or opposed you. In Trump’s second term, those patterns have sharpened. The firing of an attorney general perceived as insufficiently aggressive toward critics, the second indictment of a former FBI director on a legally thin — some say imaginary — theory, the use of regulatory threats against a broadcast network that aired an unflattering joke, are not isolated incidents. They form a coherent approach in which the persecution narrative both justifies and accelerates the consolidation of power.

Critiques and Contradictions

The persecution narrative has real vulnerabilities. Legal scholars have consistently argued that Trump mischaracterizes how due process works and overstates the degree to which prosecutions against him were politically directed. Fact-checkers have documented numerous false claims woven through his victimhood rhetoric — including the Nobel Peace Prize claim, the “8 wars” assertion, and the repeated charge of a “weaponized” Justice Department that, critics note, he now controls and is actively using against his own perceived enemies. The second Comey indictment, built on a social media photo that First Amendment experts regard as clearly protected speech, has drawn criticism even from some conservative legal commentators. The IRS lawsuit’s fundamental conflict of interest — a president suing the agencies he runs for money from taxpayers — has no obvious precedent in American legal history. Whether these contradictions ultimately matter to Trump’s political standing is another question entirely.

Conclusion

Donald Trump’s persecution narrative has outlasted every legal challenge, every fact-check, and every prediction of its imminent collapse. In the spring of 2026, it is more operationally central to his presidency than ever. The narrative is the brand. It galvanizes supporters, raises money, provides cover for the use of government power against political adversaries, and makes every institutional constraint on presidential authority look like persecution rather than law. For many Americans who support Trump, his legal fate matters far less than the story his victimhood tells — and in that story lies a political power that has proven remarkably difficult to dislodge.

Illustration generated by author using ChatGPT

Benjamin Franklin and Slavery: A Complicated Legacy

By John Turley

On May 7, 2026

In History, Politics

Few figures in American history are as celebrated — or as contradictory — as Benjamin Franklin. Founding Father, inventor, diplomat, and philosopher. Franklin is remembered for just about everything except the uncomfortable truth that he was also, for much of his life, a slave owner. His relationship with slavery is a study in the slow, painful moral evolution of a brilliant but flawed man — one who spent decades benefiting from the institution he would spend his final years fighting to abolish.
The Slaveowner
Franklin was a slave owner beginning around 1735, and he owned enslaved people until at least 1785 when he freed two slaves after his return from France. Over the course of his life, there were up to seven named slaves in the Franklin household, including Peter, his wife Jemima, their son Othello, and George, John, and King.
Franklin’s complicity in slavery extended beyond personal ownership. As editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin benefited financially from advertisements for runaway slaves and slave auctions that were paid for by slave owners and traders. He also used his printing press to publish content that supported the slave trade and, as a British colonial agent, sought to have the British government accept Georgia’s slave code. In short, slavery wasn’t just a private matter for Franklin — it was woven into his professional and financial life. At the same time, he printed Quaker antislavery tracts, a sign that his professional role placed him at the intersection of both pro‑slavery commerce and early antislavery movements.
What little we know about how Franklin treated his enslaved people comes mostly from letters and financial records. In part this is because northern slaveholders kept fewer detailed records of slave families, births, and deaths than large southern planters. His enslaved servants lived within his household and were integrated into domestic routines, a common arrangement in urban slavery that still left them legally and socially unfree.
When Franklin traveled to London in 1757, he brought two enslaved men, Peter and King, who lived and worked at 36 Craven Street. Peter remained with Franklin until their departure in 1762, but King ran away sometime in 1758 and was later found living in Suffolk, having been taken in by a Christian woman who taught him to read and write. The fact that King fled at the first opportunity tells its own story about the nature of slavery, whatever Franklin’s personal demeanor may have been.
His Evolving Written Views
Franklin’s early writings on slavery were at best ambivalent and at worst openly racist. In his 1751 essay “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” Franklin argued that slave labor wasn’t economically efficient in part because enslaved people pilfered from their owners, writing that “almost every Slave [being] by Nature a Thief.” His concern about slavery in this period was largely economic rather than moral — he worried that it would hurt poor white laborers and enriched a wealthy elite, not that it was a profound violation of human dignity.
By the 1760s, something began to shift. His perspective began to change following a 1759 visit arranged by his friend Samuel Johnson to one of Dr. Bray’s schools for Black children. He also met Anthony Benezet, who had started a school in Philadelphia and would later co-found the Abolition Society. By 1763, Franklin wrote that African “shortcomings” were not inherent but came from lack of education, slavery, and negative environments — and that he saw no difference in learning ability between African and white children.
While in London in the 1760s, he supported black education projects and in 1770 anonymously published “Conversations between an Englishman, a Scotchman, and an American,” a piece that criticized both the slave trade and the broader institution. In 1782 he circulated “A Thought Concerning the Sugar Islands,” condemning the African wars that fed the trade, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and the “numbers that die under the severities of slavery,” arguing that even sugar was morally tainted by blood.
By the late 1780s, Franklin’s language had become openly abolitionist. In 1787 he signed a public antislavery appeal declaring that the Creator had made “of one flesh, all the children of men,” and in 1789–1790 he wrote essays insisting that slavery was an “atrocious debasement of human nature.” He also argued that formerly enslaved people needed education, moral instruction, and employment to make the transition from bondage to full participation in civil society.
This was a meaningful intellectual leap for the era. Franklin was moving from a view of enslaved people as economic units toward recognizing their common humanity and the role that oppression itself played in creating the inequalities he had previously attributed to nature.
Franklin the Constitutional Convention and the Three-Fifths Compromise
By the time of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Franklin. then 81 years old, was a delegate from Pennsylvania. The Three-Fifths Compromise — which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation and taxation — was one of the most contentious issues at the Convention. The compromise was formally proposed by delegate James Wilson and seconded by Charles Pinckney.
Franklin’s specific role in the Three-Fifths Compromise itself is limited. His more direct contribution to the Convention’s structural debates was to the Great Compromise about proportional representation and spending rather than the slavery count.
Notably, just weeks before the Convention began, Franklin signed a public antislavery appeal stating that “the Creator of the world” had made “of one flesh, all the children of men.” Yet he ultimately signed a Constitution that embedded protections for slavery, including the Three-Fifths Compromise and a provision preventing Congress from banning the slave trade until 1808. Franklin’s acquiescence reflected his broader pragmatic calculation, shared by many Northern founders, that preserving the Union required compromise with the slaveholding South, even at a terrible moral cost. This is partly speculative — Franklin left few direct written statements about his reasoning on this specific tradeoff at the Convention.
The Abolitionist
Whatever compromises Franklin made at Philadelphia, the years that followed saw him embrace abolitionism with increasing conviction and urgency. In 1787, he began serving as President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery — the oldest abolitionist organization in the country — which had originally formed in 1775 and was reorganized and incorporated by Pennsylvania in 1789.
In 1789, Franklin wrote and published several essays supporting abolition, including a public address dated November 9th of that year in which he called slavery an “atrocious debasement of human nature.” He called for practical support for emancipated people, including education and employment — ideas that were radical for the time and would remain largely unaddressed for generations.
His final public act was perhaps his most consequential. On February 3, 1790, Franklin signed a petition to the first Congress on behalf of the Abolition Society, asking lawmakers to “devise means for removing the Inconsistency from the Character of the American People” and to “promote mercy and justice toward this distressed Race.” The petition was immediately denounced by pro-slavery congressmen and referred to a committee, which ultimately concluded that the Constitution prevented Congress from acting on the matter until 1808.
Franklin died in April 1790, just weeks after these debates, leaving a legacy that combined early complicity in slavery with later, forceful advocacy for abolition and Black education. As part of his will, he directed all remaining enslaved people in his household be freed upon his death, although it is unclear if he still owned slaves at the time and this may have been a symbolic declaration that he hoped others would follow. His life illustrates both the pervasiveness of slavery in colonial America — even among its most famous reformers — and the possibility, however belated, of moral and political transformation on the issue.
What to Make of It All
Franklin’s association with slavery resists easy conclusions. He spent roughly four and a half decades owning enslaved people, profiting from the slave trade through his newspaper, and diplomatically defending slavery when it served colonial interests. His evolution toward abolitionism was real, but it was also late — and driven partly by visits to schools for Black children and Quaker friendships rather than a spontaneous moral awakening.
At the same time, his final years represent one of the most prominent Founding Fathers publicly and passionately challenging the institution while other contemporaries remained silent or actively defended it. As historian David Waldstreicher has cautioned, Franklin’s antislavery credentials have sometimes been “remembered backwards” and exaggerated — but that doesn’t mean the later evolution wasn’t genuine.
What Franklin’s story offers isn’t a story of redemption so much as a realistic portrait of moral growth under the weight of self-interest, social norms, and political pragmatism. He was, as one observer put it, a man who showed himself to be “thoughtful, open, teachable” — eventually. The tragedy is how long it took, how few followed his lead, and how much damage was done in the meantime.

Illustration generated by author using ChatGPT.

Sources:
                Benjamin Franklin House – Franklin and Slavery
https://benjaminfranklinhouse.org/education/benjamin-franklin-and-slavery/

                Benjamin Franklin House – The Philadelphia Household 1735–1790
https://benjaminfranklinhouse.org/franklin-and-slavery-the-philadelphia-household-1735-1790/

                Online Library of Liberty – Benjamin Franklin and Slavery, Part One
https://oll.libertyfund.org/publications/reading-room/2023-07-05-ealy-franklin-slavery-part-one

                Benjamin Franklin Historical Society – Slavery and the Abolition Society
http://www.benjamin-franklin-history.org/slavery-abolition-society/

                National Archives – Benjamin Franklin’s Anti-Slavery Petitions to Congress
https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/franklin

                Penn & Slavery Project – Benjamin Franklin
https://pennandslaveryproject.archives.upenn.edu/2025/07/09/benjamin-franklin/

                Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life – Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the Founders
https://commonplace.online/article/benjamin-franklin-slavery/

                U.S. History – Ben Franklin and the Vexing Question of Race in America
https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/essays/franklin_race.htm

                Wikipedia – Benjamin Franklin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

                Wikipedia – Three-Fifths Compromise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise

                Britannica – Three-Fifths Compromise
https://www.britannica.com/topic/three-fifths-compromise

                U.S. Senate – Equal State Representation and the Great Compromise
https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-constitution/equal-state-representation.htm

                Wikipedia – Connecticut Compromise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise

                Teaching American History – The Constitutional Convention: The Three-Fifths Clause
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-constitutional-convention-the-three-fifths-clause/

“86” — A Little Number With a Big History

By John Turley

On May 2, 2026

In Commentary

Fifty some years ago when I was in the Marines, we used the term “86” to refer to something that should be ignored or discarded—in the colorful vernacular of the Corps, “shit canned”. That’s trashed to you civilians. The Marines have never been known as a peaceable lot and we had many colorful euphemisms for doing grievous bodily harm, but “86” was never among them.

So why is “86” suddenly everywhere in the news? Blame James Comey. The former FBI Director posted a beach photo on Instagram showing seashells arranged to spell out “86 47” — and the internet promptly exploded. Republicans argued it was a death threat against the 47th president. Comey said it simply meant he wanted Trump removed from office. That dispute has brought a piece of century-old American slang back into the spotlight, so it’s worth taking a look at what the term means and where it came from.

The Short Answer

Eighty-six is slang meaning “to throw out,” “to get rid of,” or “to refuse service to.” It most likely comes from 1930s soda-counter slang meaning that an item was sold out. This was part of a broader diner code that included: 13 “the boss is around,” 81 “glass of water,” and 95 “customer left without paying”. Over the decades it evolved from a kitchen noun into a verb with broader reach, and today it shows up everywhere from restaurant kitchens to Twitter and now worldwide headlines.

The Longer Answer

Here’s the honest answer: nobody knows for certain. Its etymology is unknown, but it seems to have been coined in the 1920s or 1930s. There are many theories about its origin — one article enumerates 18 possibilities, and another suggests there are “about 86 theories about 86.”

While the leading contender is the mundane diner option, there are several other more or less plausible and frequently more colorful options.

The most linguistically grounded explanation is that “86” is simply rhyming slang. The most common theory is that it is rhyming slang for “nix.” That’s the same “nix” meaning to reject or say no.

One of the more colorful stories involves a Prohibition-era speakeasy. Chumley’s, a bar with multiple entrances including one at 86 Bedford Street in New York. The story goes that the bar was supposedly warned by police before raids. Customers were told to “86 it” — meaning leave through the Bedford Street exit while cops came through the other door. It’s a great story, and if it’s not true it should be.

How It Evolved

First appearing in the early 1930s as a noun, it did not take long for the word to broaden its use beyond the realm of the soda counter. In the 1950s the word underwent some functional shift and began to be used as a verb — initially meaning “to refuse to serve a customer,” and later taking on the slightly extended meaning of “to get rid of; to throw out.”

It was quickly adopted and members of the military services who love slang, shortcuts, and inside terminology. It may just be a coincidence that Article 86 of the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice concerns Absence Without Leave, or AWOL.

By the 1970s it had moved well beyond the restaurant world. In the 1972 film The Candidate, a media adviser says to Robert Redford’s character, “OK, now, for starters, we got to cut your hair and eighty-six the sideburns.”

Where It Stands Today

These days, people use “86” when they cancel plans, dump something, or boot someone from a chat. Social media picked it up — Twitter and TikTok users will “86 a trend” or “86 a person” in a heartbeat.

In professional kitchens and bars, it remains “everyday lingo” — one hospitality industry veteran called it “probably the most overused word in hospitality.”

The Comey controversy also resurrected an older, arcane, and darker shade of the term. According to Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, “to 86” can alternatively mean “to kill, to murder; to execute judicially.” That said, Merriam-Webster notes this use is infrequent, and they do not include this sense due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.

The bottom line is that “86” is one of those wonderfully slippery pieces of American slang that started in a noisy kitchen, picked up mythology along the way, and is now flexible enough to mean anything from “we’re out of the salmon” to a loaded political statement — depending entirely on who’s using it and who’s listening.

Or, perhaps this entire tempest is just the response of one thin skinned man to his pathologic fear of seashells.

From Minstrel Stage to State Law: The History of Jim Crow

By John Turley

On April 27, 2026

In History

Source: Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Few phrases in American history carry as much weight as Jim Crow. It is shorthand for a century of systematic racial oppression — separate schools, separate water fountains, disenfranchisement and even terror. But the term itself has an origin that is both surprising and telling: it began not in a courthouse or a legislature, but on a minstrel stage in the 1820s, as the punchline of a song-and-dance act performed by a white man in blackface.

Jump Jim Crow: The Birth of a Slur

The story starts with Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, a struggling white actor from the Lower East Side of Manhattan who would go on to become one of the most famous entertainers of his era. Around 1828, Rice developed a stage character he called Jim Crow — a singing, dancing, shuffling caricature of a Black man, performed in blackface makeup made from burnt cork and wearing ragged clothes. The precise inspiration for the character is disputed and has, as historians put it, been lost to legend. Rice claimed to have based it on a disabled enslaved stableman he observed singing and dancing to amuse himself, though the time, place, and truth of this claim have never been verified.

What is not disputed is the impact. Rice’s “Jump Jim Crow” routine was a sensation. By 1832 he had turned the character into his signature act, touring from Louisville to Cincinnati to Philadelphia to New York, playing to sold-out houses. He eventually took the show to London and Dublin, where audiences were equally enthralled. Rice became known as “Jim Crow Rice,” the self-proclaimed “Father of American Minstrelsy.”

The character Rice created was deliberately degrading — a dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish caricature built to confirm the worst racial stereotypes white audiences held about Black Americans and to reinforce a racial hierarchy that portrayed Black people as naturally suited to servitude and exclusion from the rights of citizenship. He and his imitators spread these images across the country. By 1838, the term “Jim Crow” had crossed from the stage into everyday speech as a collective racial slur for Black people. The minstrel show had given American racism a catchy name.

It is worth pausing on the cultural mechanics of what minstrelsy did. It was not just entertainment — it was propaganda. Rice and his many imitators, including the wildly popular Christy Minstrels (for whom Stephen Foster wrote songs), systematically presented Black Americans as subhuman, unworthy of social participation, and fundamentally inferior and ridiculous figures. These depictions played to a stereotype that reinforced racial prejudice among white audiences and softened their moral resistance to segregation and violence long before those policies were ever written into law.

Reconstruction and Its Violent Undoing

The Civil War ended in 1865 with the abolition of slavery, and the Reconstruction era that followed was a genuine, if incomplete, experiment in racial equality. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments abolished slavery, granted citizenship, and extended voting rights to Black men. For a brief window, Black Americans served in state legislatures and held federal office across the South.

That window slammed shut in 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the last federal troops from the South as part of a political compromise. Southern white Democrats — calling themselves “Redeemers” — systematically retook their state legislatures using violence, voter fraud, and paramilitary terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Red Shirts. Republican officeholders were run out of town or worse. Black voters were lynched as a warning to others.

Once back in power, Southern legislatures began passing the laws that would become known as Jim Crow — a name borrowed directly from Rice’s minstrel slur. The term had traveled from the stage to common speech and then into the legal codebook and reflected the same racist assumptions embodied in the minstrel character: that Black Americans were inherently inferior and should occupy a subordinate social and legal position.

Beginning with Florida in 1887, states required railroads to maintain separate cars for Black and white passengers. Similar laws quickly spread segregation to schools, restaurants, hospitals, theaters, cemeteries, parks, waiting rooms, and virtually every other point of public contact between the races. Many facilities were marked with signs reading “White” and “Colored” to emphasize the exclusion of Black citizens. The laws varied by state but shared a common goal—racial separation and political exclusion.

Plessy v. Ferguson: The Supreme Court Blesses Segregation

In 1892, a group of Black and mixed-race citizens in New Orleans organized a deliberate legal challenge to Louisiana’s Separate Car Act. They recruited Homer Plessy — a man who was seven-eighths white but legally classified as Black under Louisiana law — to board a whites-only train car and refuse to move. He was arrested on cue, and his case wound its way through the court system to the United States Supreme Court.

In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court ruled 7-1 that racial segregation was constitutional as long as the separate facilities were nominally equal. The lone dissenter, Justice John Harlan, stated that the constitution should be color blind and warned prophetically that the decision would prove as pernicious as the Dred Scott ruling. He was right. The “separate but equal” doctrine became the legal foundation for a total apartheid system across the South — and, in many respects, well beyond it.

In practice, of course, the facilities were never equal. Black schools were chronically underfunded, with inferior buildings, used textbooks, and far lower teacher salaries. Black hospitals, where they existed at all, were understaffed and under-equipped. “Separate but equal” was a legal fiction that everyone understood as a polite cover for second-class citizenship.

Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states rewrote constitutions or passed amendments to systematically disenfranchise Black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests administered by white registrars, grandfather clauses, and outright violent intimidation. African Americans who had briefly held political power during Reconstruction effectively disappeared from public life.

The Long Arm of Jim Crow: Life Under the System

For the better part of a century, Jim Crow was not merely a set of legal rules — it was a total social order enforced by custom, economic pressure, and the ever-present threat of violence. A Black man who looked a white man in the eye too long, or failed to step off the sidewalk, or was accused of anything at all, could find himself facing a lynch mob. Between Reconstruction and World War II, thousands of Black Americans — men, women and even children — were lynched, often publicly and festively, with onlookers smiling while posing for pictures with the victim. Law enforcement often did nothing and at times even actively participated.

The Great Migration — the mass movement of Black Americans from the South to Northern and Midwestern cities beginning around 1910 — was driven in large part by Jim Crow. Millions fled to Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles in search of something approaching equal treatment. What they often found instead was a northern variant: informal segregation through redlining (systematic denial of mortgages in Black neighborhoods), discriminatory hiring, and residential segregation enforced by real estate covenants and social pressure.

The Legal Dismantling: Brown, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act

The legal edifice of Jim Crow began to crack in 1954, when the Supreme Court issued its unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Directly overturning Plessy, the Court held that segregated schools were inherently unequal and unconstitutional. The ruling did not end segregation — Southern states resisted fiercely, and desegregation proceeded at a glacial pace well into the 1970s — but Brown pulled the legal rug out from under “separate but equal.”

The civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s — marked by sit-ins, freedom rides, the Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington, and countless acts of individual courage in the face of brutal repression — built the political pressure that forced legislative action. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and employment. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 dismantled the machinery of Black disenfranchisement in the South, sending federal examiners into states with histories of discrimination to ensure that Black citizens could actually register and vote. By 1965 the majority of the formal Jim Crow laws had been overturned.

The Vestiges: Jim Crow’s Long Shadow

Ending Jim Crow legally is not the same as ending its consequences — or, as some argue, its functional successors. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander, in her landmark 2010 book The New Jim Crow, argues that mass incarceration has emerged as a new system of racialized social control. Black Americans are incarcerated at roughly five times the rate of white Americans. A felony conviction — often stemming from drug offenses prosecuted far more aggressively in Black communities despite similar rates of drug use across races — carries a cascade of legal disabilities: loss of voting rights in most states, exclusion from public housing and many jobs, and ineligibility for certain federal benefits. Nearly 30% of Black men carry felony records.

The racial wealth gap stands as perhaps the most stubborn vestige of a century of legal exclusion. The median Black family holds roughly one-tenth the wealth of the median white family — a gap driven not by individual choices but by generations of legally enforced exclusion from homeownership, inheritance, and wealth-building opportunities. Redlining — the systematic denial of mortgages in Black neighborhoods by federally-backed banks — was official federal policy from the 1930s through the 1960s and left neighborhood segregation patterns that persist visibly today.

Voting rights remain contested territory. The Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act, which had required states with histories of discrimination to get federal approval before changing election laws. Since then, a wave of new restrictions — voter ID laws, aggressive voter roll purges, reduced polling locations, and aggressive felony disenfranchisement — has fallen disproportionately on Black, Latino, and Indigenous voters. As of April 2024, 19 states require photo identification to vote, a requirement critics note functions as a modern poll tax for those who lack access to the required documents.

Residential segregation, too, endures. American neighborhoods and, by extension, their schools remain largely segregated by race — a product not of individual choice but of policies like redlining, racially restrictive housing covenants, and “white flight” that were actively promoted by governments at every level. These patterns mean that school quality, which is largely tied to local property tax revenues, continues to diverge sharply by race.

Conclusion

The arc of Jim Crow runs from the absurd to the tragic: from a white comedian in burnt-cork makeup doing a shuffling dance routine, to a legal apparatus that stripped millions of Americans of their dignity, their rights, and their lives for a century. The name itself tells you what the architects of segregation thought of their project — it was always a contemptuous slap in the face of Black Americans.

While the formal system was legally dismantled between 1954 and 1965 — which is rightly understood as a profound achievement — the legal end of Jim Crow is not the same as justice, and it is not the same as equality. The wealth gap, the incarceration gap, the voting access gap, and the education gap all bear the fingerprints of a system that successfully kept Black Americans subordinate for generations.

Understanding Jim Crow fully requires tracing it from its shameful origins in a minstrel song, through its deadly flowering as a legal regime, to its present-day aftereffects. The name may have disappeared from the law books, but the consequences have not and some critics of the current administration see the dismantling of DEI as an indirect form of Jim Crow revival or neo-segregation. They believe that race-neutral language is being used to reproduce racial inequality without openly naming race. This is sometimes described this as “Jim Crow 2.0” or “colorblind Jim Crow” and should be no more acceptable than its more blatant ancestor.

Sources

1. Wikipedia — Thomas D. Rice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_D._Rice

2. Wikipedia — Jim Crow (Character): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_(character)

3. Wikipedia — Jump Jim Crow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_Jim_Crow

4. Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University — Who Was Jim Crow?: https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/who/index.htm

5. Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University — The Origins of Jim Crow: https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/origins.htm

6. Britannica — What Is the Origin of the Term “Jim Crow”?: https://www.britannica.com/story/what-is-the-origin-of-the-term-jim-crow

7. Britannica — Jim Crow Law: https://www.britannica.com/event/Jim-Crow-law

8. National Archives — Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/plessy-v-ferguson

9. Wikipedia — Plessy v. Ferguson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson

10. Wikipedia — Jim Crow Laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

11. PBS — Jim Crow & Plessy v. Ferguson: https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/jim-crow/

12. Howard University School of Law — Reconstruction and Jim Crow Eras: https://library.law.howard.edu/civilrightshistory/blackrights/jimcrow

13. American Battlefield Trust — The Jim Crow Era: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/jim-crow-era

14. Michelle Alexander — The New Jim Crow (Introduction Excerpt): https://newjimcrow.com/about/excerpt-from-the-introduction

15. Economic Policy Institute — Voter Suppression Rooted in Racism: https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-voter-suppression/

16. American Academy of Arts and Sciences — Somewhere Between Jim Crow and Post-Racialism: https://www.amacad.org/publication/daedalus/somewhere-between-jim-crow-post-racialism

17. Yale Macmillan — History of Minstrel Shows and Jim Crow: https://macmillan.yale.edu/glc/history-minstrel-shows-and-jim-crow

Grumpy opinions about everything.

Tag: American Politics Page 2 of 4

Declaring Independence: The Origin of America’s Founding Document

America’s First Constitution

Who Gets to Decide? The Modern Battle Over Books in America

America at 250: A Revolution Remembered, Forgotten — or Rewritten?

A Celebration Gets Complicated

When “Restoring History” Means Removing It

The Money Problem

What Actually Happened at Lexington and Concord

The Founding Fathers Were Not a Monolith

Resistance in the Courts and in the Institutions

What We Can Do

The Stakes

Sources

The Memorial Day Nobody Taught You About

Library of Congress Photography Collection

A Racetrack Turned Prison Turned Cemetery

What Happened Next Was Extraordinary

Why It Matters

How the Story Got Buried

A Note on Competing Claims

The Bottom Line

Sources

Is the Roberts Court Biased? The Pattern Speaks for Itself

The Persecution Brand: How Trump Turns Grievance Into Political Currency

Benjamin Franklin and Slavery: A Complicated Legacy

From Minstrel Stage to State Law: The History of Jim Crow