By Ben Jealous, OAKLAND POST
It occurs to me that the days we are living in are an allegory for our country’s predicament. On the schedule, Jan. 6 and the weight of history that date bears are in the rearview mirror. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideal is still being celebrated.
America’s existential task is to permanently leave the former behind us so that we can eventually be what we swear allegiance to — one country under God, indivisible, with liberty and fairness for all. After the Capitol assault, I sat down to work out how we could finally do that, and my solutions could fill a book.
My mother’s family has lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line for four centuries, near to the Chesapeake Bay, which was a real superhighway for enslavement. Conversations about the possibility of another Civil War are common at my favourite waterside pub. When you add in the political fault lines that run through many households and alliances (including mine), we feel more divided than indivisible. It’s easy to see why so many people are concerned about the future of our country.
I’ve always been a believer in America. Witnessing a thwarted coup shook my normally upbeat perspective. Like many people with strong Southern roots, I frequently look to the past for solutions. What I found when I questioned our present differences reaffirmed my belief that the United States will always surmount our difficulties and emerge better on the other side.
In the 1880s, formerly enslaved males and former Confederate troops banded together in Virginia, the Confederacy’s capitol, to battle for the future of their children. They formed the Readjusters political group. Their proposal was straightforward: restructure the conditions of the Civil War debt so that we can continue to provide free public education to all.
Not only did they win that victory, but they also took control of the state government and accomplished several other goals, including the abolition of the poll tax, the abolition of the public whipping post, the establishment of the first public Black college in the South, and the expansion of Virginia Tech to make it the working-class rival to the University of Virginia. The Readjusters’ short-lived biracial populist movement was ultimately brutally attacked by white racists and politically vanquished by wealthy special interests disseminating repulsive misinformation; their party is almost completely expunged from history books.
Nonetheless, they determined the future of Virginia and our country by sowing the seeds of FDR’s New Deal alliance and leaving a bold legacy in public education that continues to this day. Furthermore, their example tells us that the spirit that inspired Dr. King to aspire for Black and white children has always run deep in our country and will continue to do so. When we lose confidence in our neighbors, that hope tells us that the road to a stronger country is to remember that we still have more in common than we don’t, and to act on our shared values.
If imprisoned men could find common cause with men who battled to keep them slaves in order to create a better future for all their children, we should never abandon confidence in our ability to unify for the sake of ours.
Ben Jealous is the incoming executive director of the Sierra Club, America’s biggest and most powerful grassroots environmental organisation; a former NAACP national president; and a University of Pennsylvania professor of practise. His latest work, “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” was recently released.
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