FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The Role of Race in Our Nation’s Founding--Nikole Hannah-Jones and Janai Nelson In A Riveting and Typically Brilliant Conversation About What This Country Really Is And Means From Two of the Most Formidable and Important Public Intellectuals, Authors, Teachers, Activists, Visionaries, and Scholars In Not Only the United States but Globally As Well--Nikole Hannah-Jones and Janai Nelson

The Role of Race in Our Nation’s Founding


The Legal Defense Fund

July 6, 2026

VIDEO: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFFpdRtNTHw

 

Justice Above All Podcast

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Most Americans are familiar with these famous words at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence. However, far fewer people are familiar with the racist words later in the Declaration, labeling Native Americans “savages” and warning of “domestic insurrections” from enslaved individuals. These phrases laid bare the role of race in the founding of the United States. This episode of Justice Above All dives into history and probes how America’s promise of equality remains unfulfilled for so many today. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence calls us to write a new chapter: a multi-racial democracy where power is shared, dignity is sacred, and thriving is the standard for everyone.

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The Intimate Legacies of a White-Supremacist Coup --A racist takeover in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, has reverberated across generations as a reminder of American democracy’s terrifying vulnerability.

"What’s Past is Prologue…”

 
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-south/the-intimate-legacies-of-a-white-supremacist-coup
 

The Intimate Legacies of a White-Supremacist Coup

A racist takeover in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, has reverberated across generations as a reminder of American democracy’s terrifying vulnerability.

by Lauren Collins
July 3, 2026
The New Yorker

[This is adapted from “They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy by Lauren Collins, Penguin Press  2026]


Illustration by Matt Williams

Cynthia Brown first heard about the terror of 1898 as a child in the mid-nineteen-sixties. Her parents had taken her to visit her great-grandmother Athalia Howe Whitfield (Grandma Thalia), a native of Wilmington, North Carolina, who by then was living in Pennsylvania. Brown remembered going into the bedroom where Grandma Thalia lay dying. She began speaking to Brown in an agitated, almost hallucinatory tone. “Never let it happen again,” Grandma Thalia said. Brown wasn’t sure what her great-grandmother meant. As her parents hustled her out of the room, Grandma Thalia caught her wrist and squeezed it: “You have to know,” she whispered. “If it ever happens—run.”

When Brown was older, she learned that Grandma Thalia was a teen-ager when it happened, living with her parents and sisters in the Wilmington neighborhood of Brooklyn, just a few wide, quiet blocks from the house where Brown spent part of her childhood. As Brown later wrote, memories of the violence that day tended to be “quietly kept and held by family historians.” Her father had imparted bits of knowledge over the years, describing how white men had rampaged through town, killing Black people and seizing the city government. But, in general, the subject elicited private reticence and public omertà. As a high-schooler, Brown had gone to the county library in search of more information. At the time, material regarding 1898 was literally kept under lock and key. White librarians meted out access sparingly, denying anyone they thought might “make a stink.” When Brown asked to see the cache of papers, the librarian grilled her about her motives. “What do you need it for?” she asked. Brown left empty-handed.

Another long-term consequence of the coup, a lack of professional opportunity for Black people in Wilmington, sent Brown packing after high school. A stylish dresser, with a honeysuckle voice and a smattering of freckles, she spent almost fifteen years in Chicago in high-flying jobs with the University of Illinois system and Illinois Bell. But she longed for “that cozy feeling” she got in Wilmington, where she could trace her line back seven generations, where her family worshipped in churches that their forebears, who founded a local construction dynasty, had raised with a protractor and parallel rule; where her grandmother had created a garden and taught her that a can of beer poured into strategically placed saucers would stop the slugs from destroying the azaleas. The front porch of Brown’s childhood home had been framed by a pair of live oaks, a reminder of the importance of perseverance and deep roots.

Brown decided to move back. She had just accepted a job as the city of Wilmington’s first-ever director of human resources, in 1993, when she was invited, by an old teacher, to a luncheon at the home of a woman she’d never met. Brown had been expecting soup and sandwiches, but the ladies had made a fuss. They had set up card tables and dressed them with linens as heavy and smooth as cream. Each table had a floral centerpiece. Each seat had a calligraphed place card. A sideboard heaved with pitchers of sweet tea, platters of tuna salad, and poundcake dripping with peach preserves. In the sunroom, a boy played concertos on the violin, signalling that this was not an ordinary weekday lunch.

Most of the other guests were women of Brown’s parents’ generation. Like her mother, many of them had been public-school teachers. “I know your family,” one guest told Brown. She figured that the woman was referring to the tight-knit world of Black educators. Then, Mrs. Harris, her old teacher, turned to her. “We want you to get to know us, and to know more about who you are,” she said, fixing Brown with a bright smile and a dauntless look. A part of Brown bristled at being thrust back into the classroom, involuntarily enrolled in this school of self-discovery. She was a grown woman with three children, who’d made efforts of her own at understanding where she came from. But a deep-seated sense of decorum made acquiescence a given. “My brain said, ‘What’s going on here?’ ” she recalled. “My soul answered, ‘Sit back, relax, and be a good student.’ ”

After the meal, the ladies went through to the sunroom for coffee. Near the end of the gathering, the hostess stood up and identified herself as a distant cousin. “I have a gift for you,” she said, handing Brown a spiral-bound booklet. It was a family history written by another relative, a cousin of Brown’s paternal grandmother and the longtime head librarian of the Wilmington Colored Library. The author, Nada McDonald Cotton, had punctuated the neatly typed memoir with pencilled-in carets. One read:

We were saved from being slaughtered and our home was left intact. Many, many Negroes were killed, marched out of town, and their life-savings taken from them. This outrage, which resulted in rule by white supremacy, is called the Wilmington riot. It was really the Wilmington massacre.

The female elders were giving Brown the facts she needed to make sense of an event that had reverberated in her family for almost a hundred years, shaping generations in ways that history books failed to account for and even actively denied, if they mentioned 1898 at all. As educators, the women may have hoped that Brown, one of only a few Black people in a position of power within the local government, would be able to influence the way the event was remembered in the larger community. Or they may just have wanted to entrust their knowledge to someone who they knew would recognize its importance, who felt the pull of keeping counter-history alive.

I was born in Wilmington and lived there until I was eighteen, but I didn’t know much about 1898 until 2016, when I watched a documentary called “Wilmington on Fire,” directed by Christopher Everett. The film showed how white Democrats murdered Black men in the streets, banished Black leaders and their white Republican allies, and overthrew the city’s democratically elected biracial government, establishing a precedent of impunity for racial terrorism and solidifying Jim Crow. It also demonstrated that the incident had been overlooked and even actively suppressed. (“Before Rosewood. Before Tulsa. A massacre kept secret for over one hundred years,” the film’s tagline read).

In recent years, thanks to the work of scholars, artists, and local activists, public awareness of the violence of 1898 has increased. During one trip back to Wilmington in 2016, I went with Everett to visit a memorial that had been underwritten by the descendants of both white perpetrators and Black survivors, including Brown’s father, James. It features six paddle-shaped bronze pillars in a semicircle and an inscription explaining plainly that “Wilmington’s 1898 racial violence was not accidental” but, rather, part of a campaign to “create a system of legal segregation which persisted into the second half of the twentieth century.” The memorial was erected in 2008 on the outer limit of Wilmington, where the street turns into a highway and whisks you out of town. A few fancy lampposts that the city installed only emphasized the loneliness of the site. During our visit, we were the sole pedestrians around, but a trace of human presence caught my eye: a piece of plywood nailed high on a telephone pole. We could just make out a message, against the hot blue sky, stencilled on the board in red and black letters: “1898 WAR CRIME.”

The two signs spoke in eloquent juxtaposition: one a handsome, official monument tidily summarizing the events of 1898 and what they meant; the other, a homemade, guerrilla effort that challenged the neat closure of that narrative. Together, they suggested that the event is still being adjudicated, with high stakes for people living today. It’s not hard to see how 1898—a period of white backlash against Black success, the violent harassment of elected officials, the undermining of democratic norms, the weaponization of misinformation—relates to our current political moment. There is no more explicit example of the vulnerability of American democracy, and of the magnitude of the task of repairing it once it is breached.

After the Civil War, what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “mystic years” of Reconstruction, a time of political possibility and economic opportunity for Black people, lasted longer in Wilmington than almost anywhere in the nation. By 1898, Black people and white people were living side by side in all five wards, making Wilmington arguably the most integrated city in the South. Black people made up nearly sixty per cent of the city’s population, and a thriving Black middle class—of dyers, pharmacists, architects, lawyers, doctors, wheelwrights, oystermen, ten of the city’s eleven restaurateurs—gave the city a nationwide reputation as a “Mecca for Negroes.” This was due to a unique political experiment called Fusion, which, in the eighteen-nineties, brought white Populists and Black Republicans in North Carolina together under the banner of common class interest. In 1898, the Fusionists controlled Wilmington’s municipal government. Three of the city’s ten aldermen were Black, as was the justice of the peace, the coroner, and a member of the influential board of audit and finance. According to one historian, Wilmington represented “the heart of Black political power in the state.”

But Black success provided ammunition to the Fusion coalition’s opponent, the North Carolina Democratic Party—the home of states’ rights and social conservatism. In their view, the state was reverting to the social and racial anarchy that had characterized the bad old years of Reconstruction, when Black people walked and sat and voted as they wished, and Black politicians strode the halls of power. Desperate to lure white Fusion voters back to the Party, Democratic leaders chose to center their 1898 election campaign on “the all-absorbing and paramount question of WHITE SUPREMACY.” Party leaders barnstormed the state’s hundred counties, bankrolled by business barons, whose taxes they promised to cut. Newspapers fulminated against “Negro domination” and printed sensational articles: “Negro on Train with Big Feet Behind White,” “Stole Cheese: Negro Man Boldly Purloins a Cheese.” For the illiterate, there were racist cartoons. A typical production depicted a winged, taloned Black man as the “vampire that hovers over North Carolina,” snatching up white women and kids.

As the elections approached, Democrats were especially intent on “redeeming” Wilmington from Fusion control. In August, 1898, local newspapers printed a grotesque speech in which a prominent white woman characterized Black men as habitual rapists, urging her male peers to “lynch, a thousand times a week, if necessary.” Alexander Manly, the editor of the Wilmington Daily Record, the state’s only Black-owned newspaper, published an unblinking rebuttal, in which he argued that white women’s sexual encounters with Black men were often consensual. He furthermore confronted the ultra-taboo subject of white men’s sexual violence against Black women during slavery and since.

The Democrats pounced, calling the piece “a horrid slander” that white men were duty bound to avenge. Members of white government clubs hassled their white neighbors into political lockstep and advertised physical and financial retribution for any Black person who dared to vote. The patriarchs of élite white families banded together, organizing secret paramilitaries that could be activated on a moment’s notice. One aristocrat took the stage at City Hall and thundered, “Shall we surrender [our heritage] to a ragged rabble of Negroes?” He continued, “No! A thousand times no!” White men had a “right to rule” and they would exercise it, he vowed, “if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses.”

The white-supremacy campaign worked: Democrats swept the elections on November 8th, taking the state legislature by outlandish margins. The Fusion-dominated city government, however, wasn’t up for reëlection until the following year, and success at the polls had made the Democrats only greedier for power. Unwilling to wait, or to take their chances with the democratic process, they initiated the takeover that they’d been covertly plotting for months. On November 9th, nearly five hundred white men signed a document that came to be known as “The White Declaration of Independence.” It proclaimed, “We, the undersigned citizens of the city of Wilmington and the county of New Hanover do hereby declare that we will no longer be ruled, and we will never again be ruled by men of African origin.”

The office of the Daily Record occupied a two-story wood-framed building on South Seventh Street. A mob of white men mustered at the headquarters of the Wilmington Light Infantry (W.L.I.), a socially élite volunteer military organization, then arranged itself into military columns and marched to the newspaper’s offices, any class distinctions within the group effaced by a shared sense of racial superiority. “The lawyer and his clients were side by side,” one eyewitness wrote. “Men of large business interests kept step with the clerks.”

When the white supremacists got to the Record, they doused the office with kerosene and watched it burn. They would have lynched the paper’s editor, but he had already fled town. A photograph taken that day shows dozens of white men—they’re in suits and derbies, long rifles slung over their shoulders—posing with flushed satisfaction in front of the building’s charred frame.

As word of the violence at the Record spread, Black workers around the city put down their tools and ran home, many of them to the Brooklyn neighborhood. The white mob flocked there, too, joined by Red Shirts—white-supremacist paramilitaries connected to the Democratic Party—and a W.L.I. unit, which careened around town in a horse-drawn wagon. In the lead-up to the election, white business owners had ordered a state-of-the-art machine gun that could fire more than four hundred rounds a minute. The W.L.I. men mounted it on the back of their wagon and rampaged through the neighborhood, killing at least a dozen Black men. At the same time, Democratic leaders, backed by a rabble, stormed City Hall and seized control of the local government. They forced sitting officials to resign and installed their own men in office, completing what is thought to be the only successful coup d’état on American soil. That Sunday, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, the same church in which I was baptized and confirmed, ascended the pulpit and boasted, “We have taken a city.”

Cynthia Brown’s great-grandmother, Athalia, was likely in the middle of the morning’s chores when the terror came to her doorstep, confusing at first and then so clear that its memory marked her for life. William, her father, had started work at the break of day, down at the docks, where he was employed at the Sprunt Cotton Compress as “boss stevedore.” Athalia, the second of William’s three daughters, had risen early that morning. Bustling around the house, she took a moment to watch a neighbor heading out to work. A few hours later, looking out the window of her house, she saw the same man running back toward his yard. Before he made it there, a white man on horseback stopped him and then shot him in the street as Athalia watched. Athalia called to her mother, who quickly understood what was happening. Mary gathered her daughters and headed out the back door, toward St. Stephen’s Church.

The women figured they would be safe in a house of worship. But when they got there, more white men on horseback aimed a machine gun at the front entrance, threatening to “blow a hole” through it if the reverend didn’t let them in. Athalia and her mother watched as the pastor was hauled off at gunpoint, and they knew that their survival was in their own hands. They ran back in the direction of their house and past it, continuing until they had reached the damp, rustling expanse of Pine Forest Cemetery, where they had buried generations of kin. It sat on the edge of town, it was densely wooded, and it was a place where few white people had ever set foot. Hundreds of Black refugees of the violence found one another there, sharing information and aid.

Athalia’s family returned home a few days after the massacre. She lived there for most of her life, raising two children and spending her working hours cooking for white people. But one of the most immediate and visible consequences of 1898 was the diminution of the city’s Black population. Many men were run out of town and told they’d be killed if they ever set foot in Wilmington again. Other Black families tried to hold on under the new regime but ultimately found Wilmington untenable and moved north, joining a local exodus that prefigured the Great Migration. They and their families scattered across the country, a diaspora of diverted potential and unresolved grief. Their exile effectively eliminated political opposition in the city, sending a lasting message to anyone who might seek to challenge the white regime. White supremacists thereafter dominated political life in Wilmington and much of North Carolina, which would not elect another Black person to Congress until 1992.

Back home in Wilmington, Cynthia Brown built community the way her forebears had built houses—tirelessly and elegantly in the course of years. She tended to graves at Pine Forest Cemetery and organized luncheons to draw attention to heart disease, which had claimed the lives of her mother and other family members. The cause dearest to her, however, was historical education: the work that her great-grandmother Athalia had urged her to continue, of giving back by telling truth. She started joining committees and giving interviews, putting information that had so long been suppressed and hoarded into the public domain. In 1996, she told the story of what had happened to her at the library in the city newspaper. Two years later, on the coup’s centenary, she published an essay gently taking “local gatekeepers of information” to task and imploring them to correct this “legacy of deceit.” She urged her fellow-citizens to “gird ourselves with an awareness of the causes, and not just the effects.” Brown believed that the truth would set us free, as the Bible promises. But someone had to set the truth free first.

In 2010, Brown was serving on the board of the Historic Wilmington Foundation, an old-line preservation organization. As a rare Black board member, she tried to promote a more capacious view of local history and to remind her peers of the rich patrimony of Black communities which they often overlooked. To fund its projects, the organization held an annual black-tie fund-raiser. When the venue for that year was announced, Brown gasped. The gala was to be held at Live Oaks, a coquina-encrusted mansion on Masonboro Sound, where Grandma Thalia had worked as the head cook, an accomplishment that had endured as a source of family pride. Named for the magnificent trees that presided over its grounds, trailing Spanish moss in perfect evocation of Southern cliché, the house belonged to descendants of the lumber-company owner Walter Linton Parsley, who had been deeply involved in planning the 1898 takeover.

Brown bought a ticket to the gala and laid out her fanciest dress. But, when the day arrived, she was consumed by ambivalence. Her husband had come down with a fever, and she didn’t really want to go to Live Oaks alone. She didn’t really want to go to Live Oaks at all, except maybe to reclaim Grandma Thalia’s territory, as an honored guest. She called her father and told him that she was going to sit the party out, that the thought of going gave her an uneasy feeling in her soul. But he insisted that she attend and call him back the next morning to hash over every detail. Ever the dutiful daughter, Brown enlisted her adult son P.J. to accompany her. Fortunately, his father’s tuxedo fit him perfectly.

As they drove to the party, Brown talked to P.J. about Grandma Thalia, the Parsleys, and 1898. The car ride was to her as the luncheon years before had been to her elders—a moment to impress on the next generation the consequences of this history, to bestow it upon P.J. intentionally, as a gift, albeit a heavy one, rather than just leaving it moldering in the attic, hoping that somebody, someday, would open it. They pulled up the long oak-lined drive. A valet parked the car, and they stepped out into the crisp air. P.J. took his mother’s arm and led her up a pathway and through the columned portico into the party.

Brown remembered that Sarah Parsley, the octogenarian matriarch of the family, greeted partygoers from a wheelchair, assisted by a Black nurse. Brown and P.J. said hello and thanked Parsley for her hospitality. A few minutes later, the nurse approached Brown.

“She thinks she knows you,” the nurse said of her employer.

“Well, she might,” Brown replied. “My great-grandmother was down here as a young woman.”

Brown didn’t know what to make of the fleeting encounter. Had Sarah Parsley known Thalia and recalled her features or even just her aura so distinctly that she was able to identify Thalia’s great-granddaughter, more than half a century later, at first sight? Was the comment just a freak coincidence? Or could it have emanated, as fact fuzzed into folklore, from some subconscious place between memory and happenstance? Could a place remember? Live Oaks seemed to know that Brown’s family and the Parsleys were linked by violence, work, mutual dependence, and the partial yet lasting intimacy that decades of these shared experiences produced.

Brown and P.J. slipped away from the tent that had been set up on the estate’s grounds for the gala. It was so cold outside that it was just them and their smokelike breath, under a heavy moon encircled by a halo. For Brown, the evening, though tinged with melancholy, amounted to a small triumph of transmission. “My parents always taught me that you must know your history to understand where you’re going (or possibly where you don’t want to go back to),” she later wrote. Visiting Live Oaks with her son, seeing the place where their forebear had once cooked biscuits and cheese straws and angel-food cakes for an architect of 1898, she felt “a divine assurance that the legacy of documenting, pre-serving, and telling our family’s history would not be lost to the winds of time.” She died in 2023 and is buried with her ancestors in Pine Forest Cemetery. ♦

This is adapted from They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy

 

by Lauren Collins

Penguin Press,  2026 

 

[Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 14, 2026]

  

In this ambitious and groundbreaking history, Lauren Collins weaves together stories of four Wilmington, North Carolina, families over 125 years to create a full accounting of the long-term effects of the 1898 white supremacist massacre and coup and its critical role in subverting American democracy

After the Civil War, Reconstruction ushered in an era of political equality and economic opportunity for Black people, and it lasted longer in Wilmington than almost anywhere else. In 1898, Wilmington was a bastion of Black success: Black cultural life flourished, while a thriving Black middle class brimmed with lawyers, educators, and elected officials. The city became a symbol of Black hope—only for all of it to come to a violent end on November 10, 1898.

In this epic, multigenerational narrative, Lauren Collins traces the fates of four Wilmington families: the Howes, the Halseys, the Moores, and the Bellamy/MacRaes, all of whom were present on the day when a mob of white supremacists launched a murderous coup to “take the city.” After issuing a “White Declaration of Independence,” white men gunned down scores of Black men, chasing their families into hiding. Then they marched to city hall, where they overthrew the democratically elected, multiracial local government at gunpoint in what is thought to be the only successful coup d’état on American soil. No one knows exactly how many Black citizens they murdered—surely dozens, likely hundreds—while driving thousands of survivors and their white allies out of town. Folklore among both Black and white Wilmingtonians holds that the Cape Fear River ran red. While the effects of this episode of racial terrorism would ricochet through the next century of our nation’s history, no one was ever prosecuted or punished, and many of the details have been largely—and deliberately—forgotten.

In collaboration with living descendants of Black and white families, Collins seeks to create a more complete understanding of 1898 than can be drawn solely from the archives. She follows these four families and their descendants through the eras of segregation and Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Civil Rights movement, and school desegregation, all the way up to the Black Lives Matter and racial justice protests in 2020, emphasizing the lasting and consequential effects of 1898 on the city and people of Wilmington.

Weaving together each generation’s reckoning with their past and how it has imprinted on their present, They Stole a City is an ambitious and revelatory examination of American racial terror as it has played out in one Southern city, written in the conviction that the story of the 1898 Wilmington massacre and coup is, in fact, a story about America in 2026.  

REVIEWS:

“An excellent new history out this summer that considers how the past lives in the present . . . Collins’s history is deeply researched and astonishing in its breadth . . . Her willingness to explore how a great injustice reverberates in both the perpetrators’ and the victims’ lives, as well as the lives of their descendants, pushes past what many people imagine a history might be. For Collins, revisiting shameful events in the past is important not for the meaningless exercise of self-flagellation but because one cannot understand one’s present day without this understanding.” —Kaitlyn Greenidge, Harper's Bazaar

“A scathing history of an infamous act of racial violence . . . Collins’ narrative takes [the 1898 coup and massacre], with ‘dozens and perhaps hundreds of Black citizens’ killed, and extends it to a larger legacy of racial oppression . . . An urgent work of reportage and historical research that lays bare structural racism past and present.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“With moral clarity and narrative precision, Lauren Collins has crafted a searing account of the 1898 Wilmington massacre that is as analytically rigorous as it is emotionally resonant. By centering the interwoven lives of four families, They Stole a City exposes the calculated architecture of white supremacist violence while illuminating the enduring strategies of Black resistance, survival, and community-making. Collins refuses the comfort of historical distance, instead insisting on the intimate and structural continuities between past and present. The result is a work that not only deepens our understanding of a singular American atrocity, but also sharpens our recognition of the forces that continue to threaten democratic life. This is essential reading for anyone committed to reckoning honestly with history—and to confronting its living legacies.” —LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, author of Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee People.

“With startling directness and vivid prose based on original and deep research, journalist Lauren Collins retells the story of Wilmington, North Carolina’s darkest period. This sweeping saga featuring four families across generations lays bare a long, horrid history of racial oppression and political violence, revealing not only how anti-democratic, white supremacist forces organized and leveraged brutality, but also how targeted individuals defended their humanity and communities. They Stole a City is an immersive yet sensitive account that reminds Americans we need not look to twentieth-century Europe for examples of electoral corruption and autocratic consolidation reinforced by racist ideology, roving thugs, economic elites, and immoral politicians. This is an urgent, unsettling history that we need now.” —Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Collins eloquently renders spellbinding tales of the 1898 Wilmington racial massacre and the families whose lives it changed forever. Her meticulous research juxtaposes its bloody history with profound interpretations of the legacies that shaped such diverse figures as Michael Jordan and Lara Trump. They Stole a City proves that past is always present. An indispensable read for all of us in these times.” —Glenda Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History Emerita at Yale University

“Lauren Collins has written a deeply reported history and released it into this moment when history is dying, erased by lies and conspiracy, so that when reading I couldn't tell if this is a story of one city’s lynch mob in 1898 or an entire nation’s lynch mob in 2026. They Stole A City is at its core an investigation into one American mob, which makes it an investigation of all American mobs. This story happened 128 years ago. This story is happening now.” —Wright Thompson, senior writer for ESPN and the New York Times bestselling author of The Barn, Pappyland, and The Cost of These Dreams

“The brilliance of They Stole a City is not just that Lauren Collins grounds her sweeping, incendiary history of an infamous historical episode in the intimate lived experiences of four North Carolina families, but that she captures the 'prolific afterlife' of the massacre and coup in Wilmington, demonstrating in vivid, poignant, often painful detail the extent to which the past continues to shape and echo in our present day. An extraordinary book.” —Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of five books, including Empire of Pain

“They Stole a City is a brilliant rendering of a history buried in a shallow grave. Lauren Collins has not only measured the weight of a specific and tragic chapter of our past, she has charted the Wilmington Massacre’s bearing upon the present. The origins of our current crisis become more legible in these pages – as do the forces that would just as soon steal a nation.” —Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, winner of the Peabody Award in 2020 and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and author of Three or More Is a Riot

“Lauren Collins's 1898 Wilmington race-riot masterpiece ends with Donald Trump's second coming, thus bookending Reconstruction's democratic promise with our hard-fought diversity, equity, and inclusion dangerously mocked. They Stole a City is required reading.” —David Levering Lewis, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Lauren Collins was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1980. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of When in French: Love in a Second Language, which The New York Times named one of its 100 Notable Books of 2016. She lives in Paris with her family.

 

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Inside Trump’s Ideological Fight With the Smithsonian Institution--TYRANNY CENSORSHIP COERCION AND WHITE SUPREMACY

TYRANNY: A form of government where power is exercised in an oppressive, arbitrary, and unjust manner. It typically involves the violation of laws that define how authority is distributed and exercised within a state.

CENSORSHIP: Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments and private institutions.

COERCION: involves compelling a party to act in an involuntary manner through the use of threats, including threats to use force 

WHITE SUPREMACY: The belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society, typically to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups. The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/us/politics/trump-smithsonian-ideological-fight.html

Inside Trump’s Ideological Fight With the Smithsonian

Publicly and behind the scenes, the president continues to try to impose his own views of American history and culture, presenting an ongoing challenge to Lonnie Bunch, the institution’s leader.

 

President Trump and his allies have criticized what they call “improper ideology” in the Smithsonian’s presentation of American history and culture. Credit: Lawren Simmons for The New York Times

Listen · 13:15 minutes

by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
July 6, 2026
New York Times

 

[Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan cover the White House and are the authors of “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”] 

Coming from the leader of almost any other major museum, the comments made around the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary by Lonnie G. Bunch III, the head of the Smithsonian Institution, would have seemed almost self-evident truths.

The Smithsonian’s mission, Mr. Bunch told CNN last week, is to “ give you questions and answers that will make you understand the complexity of who we are as a nation” using “the best nonpartisan scholarship we have.” On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said the institution was like the glue that holds the nation together. “Red states, blue states — whatever your politics, you come to the Smithsonian,” he said.

But after more than a year of intense pressure from President Trump and his allies over what they term “improper ideology” in the Smithsonian’s presentation of American history and culture, Mr. Bunch’s comments amounted to a public glimpse into a far less diplomatic, behind-the-scenes battle for control of the institution.

The inside story of the fight for control of the Smithsonian underscores how Mr. Trump has tried, with varying degrees of success, to impose his own view of American history, erase “wokeness,” influence which artists are worthy of exhibits and oust top leaders of the institution.

Mr. Bunch spent much of the past year seeking to fend off or mitigate escalating demands from the administration to address what a White House report, issued on Saturday amid the July 4 festivities, characterized as a drive that “has moved the museum’s mission away from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”

The blistering report focused on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It followed a March 2025 executive order from Mr. Trump, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

Mr. Bunch, the first Black secretary of the Smithsonian, has largely avoided engaging publicly with Mr. Trump’s criticisms. Without mentioning the president, he told CNN on Friday: “It scares me when people aren’t brave enough to face their history. And in some ways you have to face it anyway.”

Vince Haley, the director of the White House’s domestic policy council, said that “the least we owe our founding fathers is an honest and inspiring account of who they were, what they did and what they built.” The Smithsonian declined to comment.

Lonnie G. Bunch III, the head of the Smithsonian Institution, has spent much of the past year seeking to fend off or mitigate escalating demands from the Trump administration. Credit: Caroline Gutman for The New York Times

This account of the backstage battle is drawn from reporting for the book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” and is based on documents and interviews with a wide range of people with knowledge of the events, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The struggle dates to Mr. Trump’s first term, when he and Mr. Bunch, a historian and museum curator who had overseen the National Museum of African American History and Culture and had taken over at the Smithsonian in 2019, quickly developed a difficult relationship.

Mr. Bunch described in his 2019 memoir the moment he took the new president on a tour of the African American history museum in early 2017. Mr. Trump appeared uninterested in the history of slavery in the United States, Mr. Bunch wrote. As they passed an exhibit on the Dutch role in the slave trade, Mr. Trump’s only comment was, “You know, they love me in the Netherlands.”

“I was so disappointed in his response to one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history,” Mr. Bunch wrote.

When Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, Mr. Bunch’s allies knew his criticism of the president could come back to haunt him. But at first glance, Mr. Trump seemed limited in what he could do.

Created by Congress in 1846, the Smithsonian is governed by a Board of Regents, made up of 17 members: The chief justice of the United States serves as chancellor and presiding officer, along with three senators, three members of the House and nine citizen members, plus the vice president. The board structure was designed to insulate the Smithsonian from partisan politics.

But a warning sign came just four days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration last year with the appointment of a new regent — a Trump ally, Representative Carlos Giménez of Florida. Mr. Giménez soon made his presence felt, at the traditional dinner in April that the regents held before the next day’s full board meeting.


The Smithsonian comprises 21 museums, the National Zoo and 14 research and education centers. Credit: Caroline Gutman for The New York Times

Seated two chairs to Mr. Bunch’s left at the dinner in the National Postal Museum on April 6 last year, Mr. Giménez listened as the regents, one by one, expressed support for Mr. Bunch. But when it was Mr. Giménez’s turn to speak, his principal message was: I don’t know you, and so I cannot support you. No one rose to defend Mr. Bunch, a painful point that he would make to some board members afterward.

At the board meeting the next morning, Mr. Giménez posed a seemingly benign question: Was there a process for reviewing exhibits?

The answer was complicated. Potential exhibitions had traditionally been assessed through a committee system, with major decisions finalized by Mr. Bunch and the regents. In recent years, the Smithsonian had developed additional reviews taking into account visitor preferences.

But the institutional sprawl of the Smithsonian — 21 museums, the National Zoo and 14 research and education centers — meant there was no flowchart or standard process.

As Mr. Giménez pressed for details of what filters exhibitions and acquisitions went through, it was apparent that the White House and its allies had found an opening.

Within weeks, Mr. Trump declared on social media that he was firing the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, calling her “highly partisan” and a “strong supporter of DEI.” It soon became clear that Mr. Trump was unhappy about a photograph of himself in the Portrait Gallery. It was awful, he would say to others. He objected strongly to the text on the wall noting his two impeachments.

On June 2 of last year, Mr. Bunch and the regents, including Vice President JD Vance, hastily gathered for an emergency videoconference meeting. Mr. Trump repeatedly phoned Mr. Bunch during the proceedings, forcing him to step away time and again as Mr. Vance and Mr. Giménez echoed the president’s demand for Ms. Sajet’s ouster.

Mr. Bunch eventually stopped taking Mr. Trump’s calls during the meeting, but nothing was resolved and the matter was postponed to a regular board meeting seven days later.


As a Smithsonian regent, Representative Carlos Giménez, Republican of Florida and a Trump ally, has questioned the institution’s review process for exhibits. Credit: Kenny Holston/The New York Times

There, at the Museum of American History, the tables were arranged in a U shape and at the closed end of the U configuration, Mr. Bunch sat with Mr. Vance and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., present in his role as the Smithsonian’s chancellor. The other regents sat along the sides, with Mr. Giménez at one end.

Mr. Vance advised the group that it needed to follow the president’s orders about firing Ms. Sajet, adding that it could not refuse him. “He signs the checks,” the vice president added pointedly.

“This should be an institution for everyone,” Mr. Vance said. “I am not demanding we hire someone with right-wing political views. I am merely asking that we not make the face of this institution a left-wing crazy person.”

Before the meeting, several regents had agreed to pass a resolution stipulating that the president had no standing to make personnel decisions. They wanted to make sure their resolution was put to a vote before Mr. Vance and Mr. Giménez could put forward their resolution calling for the dismissal of Ms. Sajet, who was still showing up for work.

Mr. Vance indicated again that if Ms. Sajet was not dismissed, the White House would explore the option of defunding the Smithsonian. The White House did not have the authority to do that, some regents shot back. John Fahey, the former head of Time Life Inc. and National Geographic, and Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan, were especially emphatic.

When Mr. Vance argued that the Smithsonian was politicizing the nation’s history, Mr. Peters retorted: You’re coming here threatening to cut off funding to the Smithsonian if we don’t paint the picture you want. That’s politicizing it. Mr. Vance disagreed.

The vice president at one point left the room briefly, leaving Ben Moss, his policy director, in his seat. Mr. Moss pulled up an image on an iPad of the Statue of Liberty depicted as a Black transgender woman holding aloft a lamp filled with flowers. It was a painting by Amy Sherald, a renowned Black artist who had painted Michelle Obama’s official portrait for the Smithsonian. It was set to be included in an exhibition of her work at the National Portrait Gallery in September.


Kim Sajet in 2022. She resigned as director of the National Portrait Gallery last year after pressure from Mr. Trump. Credit: Paul Morigi/Associated Press for the National Portrait Gallery

“This image,” Mr. Moss declared, “is also a problem.” He held up the digital image of the painting, “Trans Forming Liberty.” “This,” he said, “is not what Americans want to see. “

A stunned silence descended. Chief Justice Roberts steered the meeting to passage of the resolution affirming the board’s authority over personnel, defusing the crisis over Ms. Sajet for the moment. But four days later, Mr. Trump got what he wanted anyway. Ms. Sajet resigned, explaining in a note to staff that it was “the best way to serve the institution.” On July 23, Ms. Sherald abruptly canceled her exhibition; she said the Smithsonian had privately tried to open the painting up to public debate over trans rights.

A few weeks later, the White House sent a letter to the Smithsonian, outlining a top-to-bottom assessment of everything from wall texts on exhibitions to websites and social media content. Current and future exhibitions would be reviewed with particular focus on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The Smithsonian Executive Committee scheduled an emergency meeting for the next day. Chief Justice Roberts, Mr. Bunch, the three-person executive committee, senior staff and lawyers were all in attendance.

Mr. Bunch proposed issuing a public letter, making plain that any review was the responsibility of the institution alone. But executive committee members promptly voiced concern that this would pit them all directly against the president and would almost certainly become a political fight with Mr. Trump, one that could damage the Smithsonian.

It became clear that the chief justice, who appeared mindful of taking a long-term approach to protecting the Smithsonian’s interests, shared those concerns. His colleagues thought such a letter in this case would set the chief justice himself against the president, and not on points of law, but on cultural interpretations of how a country should see itself. Mr. Bunch’s proposal was put aside.

Mr. Bunch would tell allies he felt disrespected by Mr. Vance and Mr. Giménez. He was also quietly pressed by supporters either to quit or be more outspoken in opposition to the White House. In the end, he chose a less confrontational approach intended to sidestep the immediate tensions while protecting the institution far beyond Mr. Trump’s tenure in office.

But the White House has been biding its time, too. The board has been missing two members since their terms expired in March. The administration, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions, has been hoping to sway who will be chosen as replacements.

The exhibit that Mr. Bunch went on to curate for the 250th anniversary, titled “American Aspirations,” highlighted American ideals such as liberty, fairness, democracy, hope, defending freedom and progress. The pieces included Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech,” Thomas Jefferson’s writing desk and the astronaut Sally Ride’s flight gear.


The “American Aspirations” exhibit curated by Mr. Bunch at the Smithsonian in May. Credit: Caroline Gutman for The New York Times

The exhibit includes explicit references to the nation’s history of slavery and inequality: a hymnal used by Harriet Tubman; a reminder that the Statue of Liberty was originally a gift to celebrate America’s end to the brutal practice, with broken chains hidden beneath her robes; and a Plymouth Rock fragment accompanied by words from Malcolm X.

“I love the Smithsonian, and I love thinking creatively about, how do you protect the Smithsonian?” Mr. Bunch said in an interview with The New York Times in May.

“When you’re Black in America, you’ve got to figure out how to get through, right? You’ve got to figure out how to build allies, when to stand firm, when to bang the table,” he said. “So in some ways, all of that prepared me for this moment.”

Robin Pogrebin contributed reporting.


ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.

Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter for The Times, covering the administration of Donald J. Trump.

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Ta-Nehisi Coates One of the Finest and Most Courageous And Thus Truly Profound Public Intellectuals, Journalists, Authors, Historians, and Social and Cultural Critics In the United States in the 21st Century On the Flailing American Empire And the Tragic Ongoing Cost Of Its Fatally Corrupt And Oppressive Hegemony in the World and Its Direct and Disturbing Political, Moral, and Ethical Impact On Kamala Harris And Her Allegiance To the National Democratic Party Policy Platform Via Her Governmental Mentor and Chief Ideological Sponsor Joe Biden and the Ruling Hierarchy of the Democratic Party's Apparatus and Leadership And Their Elitist Donor Class During the 2024 Presidential Election Especially with Respect to the Massive Genocide in Gaza aa well as their Ruthless and Horrendous Plunder and Exploitation Of Land, Labor, and Resources by the Heinous and Deadly Apartheid System both in Gaza And in The Palestinian West Bank. Among Many Other Crucial Areas Of Investigation Coates Raises the Foundational Question of the Value of the Legacy Of the Imperatives Of Justice, Freedom, Equality and Self Determination As Led And Voiced by Such Extraordinary and Essential Leadership as Important Black Female Leaders and Activists in the Movements of the 1960s and '70s As Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Coretta Scott King, And so Many Others in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements Of the Past Century. Coates Further Details What is Its True and Still Powerful Legacy For Our Present Epoch Despite Harris' Political Limitations and Over Dependence on the Democratic Party Hierarchy

https://www.vanityfair.com/story/the-next-black-president

COMMENTARY

 
Did Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Cost Her the White House?

Ta-Nehisi Coates reckons with that question, and what it means for the 2028 election.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates
June 15, 2026

Vanity Fair

Kamala Harris at a campaign rally on November 4, 2024 in Allentown, PennsylvaniaMichael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Listen • 41 minutes

The patron saint of the 2024 Democratic National Convention was Fannie Lou Hamer—recalcitrant sharecropper turned agitator and, like the Democratic presidential nominee, a black woman. Hamer worked on the plantation of W.D. Marlow near Ruleville, Mississippi—laboring in the fields, cleaning the Marlow manse, and keeping the family’s records. All this, estimates Hamer biographer Kate Clifford Larson, earned her “between $600 and $800 a year, less than half of what white farm families earned in 1948.”

This was by design—the mandate of Mississippi’s ruling class was assured through the reduction of the state’s black residents to near slavery. Hamer took her revenge: She wore the Marlows’ fine clothes while they were away. She stole their perfume. She bathed in their tub. She used the family’s spoons and then watched them eat behind her. It was said that Hamer “didn’t have real good sense,” that she was “uppity,” and filled with “gripes.” But, as Larson recounts, Hamer’s own analysis hinted at something deeper—“I was rebelling in the only way that I could rebel.”

IN THE TRADITION. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers at the funeral of four girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963: Emma Bell, Dorie Ladner, Dona Richards, Sam Shirah, and Doris Derby. Photo by Danny Lyon/Magnum

In 1962, the rebellion was joined. That was the summer that a bevy of civil rights workers descended on Hamer’s Sunflower County seeking volunteers to help register blacks to vote. Hamer signed up and, through her courage, charisma, and oratory, quickly drew ardent disciples and ruthless adversaries. In 1963, Hamer was arrested, jailed, and at the behest of her white captors, beaten with a blackjack by two African American inmates. She emerged from captivity grievously injured but recalcitrant as ever.

A year later Hamer cofounded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, aiming to displace the segregated delegation to that year’s Democratic convention. This was a problem. Lyndon B. Johnson feared that Hamer’s protest would cost him Mississippi, or perhaps the entire Deep South. When Hamer testified at the convention, it was televised nationally. A flustered Johnson quickly called an impromptu press conference to knock “that illiterate woman,” as he would reportedly call Hamer, off the air. The evening news broadcast Hamer’s testimony anyway.

“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” Hamer told the convention. “Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily.” Hamer died in 1977. But she has become a hero, particularly to black women, who see in her an ancient tradition of politics that extends back to their arrival on these shores. That same political tradition, 60 years later, delivered Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket.

In 2020, when many saw in Joe Biden a floundering candidate, a loose coalition of black women activists saw an opportunity. The coalition included, among others, voting rights activist Melanie Campbell, 2024 Democratic National Convention committee chair Minyon Moore, and investor and strategist Jotaka Eaddy. They organized and applied pressure. They demanded a black woman on the ticket. They got it. They demanded a black woman on the Supreme Court. They got it. They demanded a black woman at the Federal Reserve. They got that too. And they got even more. By the end of 2024, Biden had appointed a record number of black women to the federal bench and cut black unemployment and black poverty levels to record lows. He’d passed a temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit, which in its single year of operation reduced black child poverty rates by half. This was an enviable string of political victories. And when Biden withdrew from the campaign and endorsed Harris, the most tantalizing victory of all was at hand. Now the same coalition of black women who could credibly claim the first fulfillment of a black agenda in recent memory pressed their advantage.

During the pandemic, Eaddy created the Google group Win With Black Women, which began convening Sundays via Zoom.

It became a central organizing node, and the night Harris received Biden’s endorsement, Win With Black Women drew some 44,000 attendees. “We didn’t hang up until 1 a.m.,” recalls Eaddy. “It was a reminder of what was possible, it was a reminder of our power, and it was a reminder of the connection to a struggle, a fight, and quite frankly, that baton that our ancestors had handed to us that we were collectively holding.”

No ancestor loomed larger over the convention’s proceedings in Chicago than Hamer. Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison invoked her familiar phrase, “We are sick and tired of being sick and tired.” The 2024 Mississippi Democratic delegation expressed their pride in representing “heroes such as Fannie Lou Hamer.” Maxine Waters praised Hamer and noted she was one of Harris’s “heroes.” In this, fatefully, Harris and the black women who propelled her to the top of the ticket were not alone.

Ten months earlier, on October 7, Hamas and other allied forces crossed out of Gaza and killed approximately 1,200 people, 800 of whom were civilians. In response, Israel launched a total war against the people of Gaza. In the first 30 days of this assault, Israel killed at least 4,100 children—roughly eight times as many children as Russia killed in 21 months during its war of conquest in Ukraine. It was as if each morning the IDF gathered up five classrooms of students and then erased them. “We are fighting human animals,” Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant asserted, “and are acting accordingly.”

The Blood-and-Soil Nationalism That Killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good

The arsenal for this war against children, against “human animals,” was the United States of America. According to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, America supplied 69 percent of Israel’s major conventional arms imports between 2019 and 2023 and approved some $20 billion in arms sales to Israel in the weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention. And the man who held the keys to that arsenal just happened to be one of the most progressive presidents black America has ever known.

Now another coalition—a group of young Democrats at the fringes of the party—looked for a way to bring Gaza to the center of the convention. They organized the Uncommitted National Movement—urging voters to check or write in “uncommitted” on the primary ballot and thus earn delegates of this selfsame line who would then have a presence at the DNC. “We tried our best to replicate Fannie Lou Hamer and the Bus Freedom movement when they went to the DNC,” says Uncommitted cochair Layla Elabed. “We literally looked at them and said, ‘Okay, how do we apply those lessons and practices to Uncommitted?’ ”

A black presidency is a contradiction—it owes its power to a movement against racist state violence at home but seeks an office which has always practiced racist state violence abroad.

The Uncommitted campaign settled on a single demand: a Palestinian American speaker to endorse the nominee at the convention. A symbolic re-embrace of Arab Americans would help Uncommitted delegates assure their community members that Harris was indeed taking their complaints seriously. According to Elabed, the organizers spent that week batting potential names back and forth with the Harris campaign for vetting. The exchange seemed promising. But as name after name was refused—Harris fundraiser Hala Hijazi, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, Georgia representative Ruwa Romman—Elabed’s optimism began to fade. And then on that Wednesday Uncommitted got a call: The call for a Palestinian American speaker was rejected.

It’s tough to identify a singular flaw that cost Harris the election. She ultimately won the Arab American vote, but there was a 12 percent swing away from her candidacy compared to Biden in 2020. Of those Democratic voters who broke away from Harris, nearly as many went to a third party as went to Trump. The effect of Gaza on these particular swing voters lingers painfully in the thoughts of Harris’s most ardent supporters. “I do believe that there were progressive critiques [to be made] of Harris,” says Eaddy. But the sheer fervor of protest from putative allies stunned Eaddy. “I believe that had dire consequences on the result of the election and ultimately where we are as a country right now.”

From this perspective, a sector of the Democratic electorate demanded moral perfection of Harris and in the process allowed a completely immoral Donald Trump to return to power. For African Americans, presidential elections have almost always been exercises in lesser evils and harm reduction. Looking at the damage done to America’s public health system, a secret police force unleashed on its cities, the indiscriminate bombing of an elementary school, the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and the lust for extrajudicial killing, the great disaster of a Trump presidency is all too clear.

But two weeks before Harris accepted the nomination, Israeli media aired footage of guards appearing to rape a Palestinian prisoner. By then, the Israeli government had wiped out roughly 2 percent of Gaza’s population—some 40,000 human beings. A letter published in The Lancet by three public health researchers estimated that 186,000 Gazan deaths could be attributed to the conflict, including indirect deaths—8 percent of the strip’s population. To preserve democracy, Palestinian Americans were being asked to support a member of the administration that repeatedly armed the agents of this carnage.

“I think for a lot of African Americans, we weren’t connecting with how visceral the anger was at Biden and [Harris] because of what they were allowing,” says journalist Joy Reid. “And because of her sort of political inability to speak directly to the genocide, which I still don’t understand, to be honest. I genuinely don’t, because I know she’s an empathetic person. I’ve covered this woman for a really long time.... But people just didn’t see it and she couldn’t voice it. I don’t understand it. To this day I cannot explain it.”

 

Perhaps the answer lay in what Harris did say. At the convention, the vice president pledged to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” This language is fairly boilerplate for most people seeking the presidency. But it is also at odds with the very tradition that brought Harris to the brink. Hamer was a student of nonviolence—and not just for protesters in Mississippi. As early as 1964 she opposed the Vietnam War, horrified at the prospect of American bombs being dropped on a much weaker people half a world away.“I am sick of the racist war in Vietnam,” Hamer said at an antiwar rally in the 1960s, “when we don’t have justice in the United States.”

Perhaps it is naive to expect Harris, a candidate for the American presidency, to speak in the same register as Hamer, who was its antagonist. But it was that very antagonist whom Harris and her party claimed as a champion. The dynamic is familiar—Barack Obama’s claim of Martin Luther King Jr. was similarly incongruent. That is because a black presidency is a contradiction—it owes its power to a movement against racist state violence at home but seeks an office which has always practiced racist state violence abroad.

But what was known in 1964 was largely abandoned in 2024, and what was offered instead was a questionable survivalist theory of democracy—one that proposed to erect a shield over one group while providing weaponry to destroy another. For reasons moral, pragmatic, and perhaps mostly ancestral, the next black presidency will have to think bigger. To its list of adversaries—which include a renewed white supremacy, a rapacious billionaire class, an energetic Christian nationalism—it must add another, perhaps more formidable than them all: empire.

The portrait of America as an imperial power cuts against its self-image as a righteous cradle of democracy. But from its inception, the country has been aggressive and expansionist, seizing land from its Indigenous population, paying off some European powers while menacing others.

“I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1809. Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty,” as he dubbed it, steadily expanded across the continent throughout the 19th century and early 20th century, then it turned to the oceans, annexing Hawaii, seizing the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, then drawing Cuba and the Dominican Republic into its sphere of influence.

Even as the United States expanded its rule, there always remained a dim sense that an Empire of Liberty was a contradiction. The inveterate white supremacist Woodrow Wilson mouthed anti-colonial rhetoric before reverting to form at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. “Wilson spoke eloquently on behalf of smaller nations and their right to self-determination,” writes Daniel Immerwahr in his book How to Hide an Empire. “Yet he had southeastern European nations in mind.”

A Year of Conflict in the Middle East, From a War Reporter’s Perspective

After World War II, with colonialism considered passé, President Dwight Eisenhower embraced more clandestine means to preserve the United States’ imperial reach. President Harry Truman “drew the line at plotting against foreign leaders,” writes Stephen Kinzer in his book The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War. “That line evaporated when he left office. Eisenhower wished to wage a new kind of war.” Eisenhower’s national security team subsequently plotted to overthrow no fewer than three different democracies on three different continents over the course of his eight years. For oil, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh was toppled in 1953. For fruit plantations, Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was deposed in 1954. And in 1960, fearing Congo and its vast resources moving out of the West’s sphere of influence, Eisenhower ordered Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba murdered. The Belgians beat him to it.

Touring the world, a young John F. Kennedy was disturbed to find that America “was definitely classed with the imperialist powers of Europe.” Like Wilson, he paid lip service to the anti-colonial spirit and, at his inauguration, pledged support for the Third World “not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.” The Bay of Pigs was three months later.

Kennedy agonized over the failed operation to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro, but he quickly made peace with cloak-and-dagger imperialism. His CIA engaged the Mafia to kill Castro (1960); urged a military coup in Brazil (1962), which would bear fruit two years later; helped apartheid-era South Africa locate and arrest Nelson Mandela (1962); and supported the Ba’ath Party in overthrowing the Iraqi government (1963) and crushing its communist opposition. In Vietnam the once anti-colonialist Kennedy first supported Eisenhower’s handpicked dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, then facilitated a coup against him in which he was subsequently killed. When Kennedy was himself killed, a few weeks after Diem, so profligate were his shadow wars that some close to him believed, as Malcolm X said, that the chickens had indeed come home to roost. “Bobby Kennedy himself suspected the killings might be the work of the CIA, the Mob or Castro,” writes journalist Vincent Bevins in his book The Jakarta Method. “Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s first suspicion was that it was retaliation for Diem’s murder.

 

Fears of imperial boomerang did little to restrain Johnson or any other American president. Indeed, what stands out about the horrifying death toll in Gaza is how easily it slots into a history of American global power. In the same year Johnson pushed through the Voting Rights Act, his CIA helped dispatch the Indonesian president, Sukarno. Up to a million Indonesians were subsequently killed by the military regime, which the United States favored. Four years later, in a bid to crush the Viet Cong, President Richard Nixon secretly carpet-bombed Cambodia, which in turn led to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge. Then in 1973, Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his secretary of state, plotted the overthrow of yet another democracy in Chile, propping up the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet. This history poses a discomfiting truth: Gaza is not a betrayal of American democratic tradition but an expression of an American imperial tradition.

Much as broadcast news in the ’60s made it hard for Southern white supremacists to hide their brutality, social media has made it impossible for Israel, and thus the American empire, to hide its ownThe tradition is literally generational. In 1893, John Watson Foster helped overthrow the queen of Hawaii. Sixty years later, Foster’s grandsons, Allen and John Dulles, took up the trade. As heads of the CIA and the State Department, respectively, they engaged Kermit Roosevelt Jr. to overthrow Mossadegh. Roosevelt was himself a scion of the imperial spirit—his grandfather was Theodore Roosevelt, who championed the annexation of the Philippines. The subsequent events are a dizzying whirlwind of horse trading and violence: In 1963 the CIA backs a coup d’etat by the Iraqi Ba’ath Party, which Saddam Hussein would eventually lead. In 1979 the American-allied shah of Iran is driven from power. In 1980 a frustrated United States backs Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War. In 2003 the United States topples Hussein and delivers him to his executioners. In 2026 the United States collaborates with Israel to kill Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei. The tally? Four different regimes, with four different ideologies, of two opposing countries dispatched at the behest of one imperial power.

 

The focus on the regime changes inflicted on the Arab world and the Middle East at large obscures the routine violence inflicted on its people. For Americans, the Iraq War is remembered as a case of bad intelligence, and George W. Bush’s image has largely been rehabilitated. The estimated 200,000 civilians directly killed on “bad intelligence” less so. In November 2008 an errant air strike, conducted under auspices of a lame-duck Bush administration, killed 37 civilians who were at a wedding party in Wech Baghtu, Afghanistan. “We cannot win the fight against terrorism with air strikes,” pleaded Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai. Five years later, under President Obama, another air strike hit another wedding party, this time in Yemen, killing 12 more people.

With a bipartisan acceptance of innocent death as the cost of doing business in the Muslim and Arab world, it is not a surprise that a kind of casual contempt for its leaders and peoples oozes from the orifices of both Republican and Democratic administrations. In his 2008 presidential campaign, conservatives pushed Obama to repeatedly deny he was a Muslim in roughly the same register as one would deny beating his wife. When the dictator Muammar Qaddafi was dragged out of a drainpipe, sodomized with a bayonet, and killed, Obama’s secretary of state Hillary Clinton shared a laugh with a CBS reporter: “We came. We saw. He died!” In 2023, as the casualty reports out of Gaza mounted, Biden’s response was, essentially, to call bullshit—“I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden said. Gaza’s health ministry responded by releasing the names of every single one of the identified dead.

When Biden dropped out and Harris became the nominee, there was reason for hope among the Uncommitted delegates. Off the record, Harris conveyed her deep despair at the scale of atrocity in Gaza. Less than a week into her campaign, she emerged from a meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledging “not to be silent.” Moreover, among the coalition of black women who’d backed Harris, there were many who took a dim view of the Israeli state project. Eaddy, whose Win With Black Women call inspired a series (Win With Black Men, White Dudes for Harris, Swifties 4 Kamala), had visited the region in 2014. “What I walked away with was a parallel to the struggle for black Americans,” says Eaddy. “I saw things that were very similar.”

 A call to vote uncommitted at the Michigan Democratic primary. Emily Elconin/The New York Times. 

During a visit to Bethlehem, LaTosha Brown, cofounder of Black Voters Matter, recalls watching as an Israeli soldier pretended to shoot at a bunch of kids who were playing nearby. “Like they were ducks,” she remembers. “Even to this day, I can’t take it.”

Journalist Tiffany Cross, author of Love, Me: A Letter to Black Women in a Toxic Country, Career, and Relationship, visited the region under the auspices of AIPAC. It did not go as her sponsor planned. “Oh, I know exactly what this is,” Cross recalls thinking. “The Palestinians here are treated like black people.”

There was a consensus among many of the black women supporting Harris that a Palestinian speaker should have been allowed at the convention. But there also was a deep sense that the 2024 election presented a binary—Trump or Harris—and many in the Arab American community had made the wrong choice. This perspective originates in the basic truth that black people are a minority in a country that, at best, tolerates their existence. 

And that vulnerability has landed with particular weight on black women.

The very American imperialism that so endangered Muslim life had its roots in genocide and enslavement, the latter of which always took particular interest in black women. At its root, it was a system of rape, industrial in both scale and effect. Enslavement or freedom was passed down to the child through the mother, meaning white men could augment a workforce trafficked from Africa by raping with impunity and enslaving their offspring. “She alone could give birth to a slave,” the historian Paula Giddings writes in her book When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. “Blacks constituted a permanent labor force and metaphor that were perpetuated through the Black woman’s womb.”

Typical of rape survivors, black women were freighted with a particular kind of animus. “Mistresses and masters (and overseers) described slave women as lazier, filthier; more shiftless, slatternly, ignorant and impudent than slave men,” writes Thavolia Glymph in her book Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. The stereotypes mirrored a real-world disregard for the suffering of black women. Antebellum physician J. Marion Sims is known as the father of modern gynecology. He did this “fathering” by operating on the unanesthetized bodies of enslaved black women and girls.

But if America made black women a uniquely acted-upon class, black women too made themselves a unique class of political actors. Their particular oppression became a particular bond, evidenced in the pressure they were able to bring upon the Biden presidency. And that particular oppression also made the promise of a black woman president something more than another item on a checklist of firsts or the humoring of a particular interest group. “We would bring others along, which has always been the case,” says Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. “Even when our full freedoms were not actualized, we made it possible for others’ freedoms to be realized.” 

“The average thought of my constituent is, Why the hell are we always bombing some other country?” says Pennsylvania congresswoman Summer Lee.

In 2020, Cross was part of that early coalition that demanded Biden name a black woman vice presidential nominee. In her mind, the demand was always about something larger. “I think I would hope anyway that this black woman is someone who is going to say the uncomfortable thing,” says Cross. “I have to trust that a black woman could not see tens of thousands of children being murdered and not be struck by that, not be moved by that. Whether you’re a mother or not, I trust because we experienced that. We saw firsthand the violence of America, and we’ve always had to tap into our humanity in a certain way, just for our own very survival.”

In 2024 this broad ethic of democracy came into conflict with a more prosaic politic. Harris and her party settled into a somewhat conservative pitch as the party of America before Trump. Perhaps the radical thought of a black woman as president made this approach seem prudent. But for many Arab and Muslim Americans, “America before Trump” meant returning to a time when FBI informants sought to entrap them, when police agencies spied on their mosques, and calling a presidential candidate a Muslim was a slur. Seemingly blind to this trauma, the Harris campaign followed up the Democratic National Convention snub by deploying Bill Clinton to Michigan. There, in the state with the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, Clinton told an audience that Israel had been forced “to kill civilians” by Hamas, and that the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea belonged to the Jewish people because “they were there first.” Meanwhile, Harris welcomed her endorsement by Dick Cheney, who was not a very popular vice president but was a zealous defender of torturing Muslims. The cumulative message was not “We don’t need your vote.” It was 

“We don’t value your life.”Elabed recalls a Harris supporter pleading for Elabed to help protect Harris now, on the implicit promise that Harris would protect Palestinian life later. This was not an abstract request—for the Palestinian American Elabed, it meant telling other Palestinian Americans that they must support a politician who’d pledged to continue to arm the state that was presently annihilating their families. 

“Who’s protecting them?” Elabed recalls wondering. “Who’s protecting their families?” When I was 23 years old, Clinton bombed the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. American intelligence indicated that Al-Shifa was controlled by Sudan’s fundamentalist government and was providing al-Qaida with chemical weapons. The claim quickly collapsed. Like how the 2003 claims of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs collapsed. Like how the 1964 claims of a North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin collapsed. I hadn’t been a fan of Clinton. Still, given a choice between the party of Jesse Helms and the presidency of Bill Clinton, calculating the “lesser evil” seemed easy. It was a calculation made through the exclusion of the Sudanese people.

In March, I flew to Dublin with my wife, intent on seeing the math with clearer, if older, eyes. I had coffee with 20-year-old Dima Shamaly, an electrical engineering student at University College Dublin. Shamaly is among a cohort of young Gazans admitted to universities in Ireland and granted visas. There is no guarantee that they will ever return to Gaza or anywhere in Palestine. They have no idea when, or whether, they will see their families again.

Shamaly has light brown skin, an irreverent sense of humor, and a loner’s mien. Her mother was a social worker. Before he died from wounds sustained in an Israeli air strike, her father worked as an emergency doctor for UNICEF. Shamaly herself had survived such a bombing.

In Dublin, she walked into the small café where we’d arranged to meet, hugged my wife, hugged me, and then she told me, over the course of a conversation:

I was born in Gaza City. I have two older brothers and a younger sister and a younger brother as well. One is 25. One is 23. I’m 20. My sister is 15 and my younger brother is 11. The best memory I have is going to the sea to talk to all the sailors by the beach. Everyone there knew me. So we would eat some bread, have some tea, and talk. Sometimes they would take me on the boat and go around. But you can’t go far, because the Israelis will shoot you.

There was like a gifted school in Gaza. It’s called Arafat for Gifted Students School in Gaza. It’s a mixed school with girls and boys. Before you get in, you have to pass an exam which covers chemistry, biology, math, Arabic, and English. If you pass this exam, you’ll go to the interview. Then after the interview, you’ll be able to be in the school. So, yeah, that was my school. I finished at the top of my class. I applied to some schools in the US before the war. I got full admission to Vassar College. So I picked Vassar, and I was going to go there. But then the war came and then I wasn’t able to get a visa or anything. Then Trump banned Palestinians from going to the US.

HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER Dima Shamaly, shown here in 2024, is a 20-year-old electrical engineering student at University College Dublin, one of a number of young Gazans studying in Ireland. They have no idea whether or when they will see their families again. Courtesy Dima Shamaly


Dima Shamaly with her father in 2014.Courtesy 
Dima Shamaly.

To be honest, we all thought that it’s just going to be like any other war. It’s not going to last that long or it’s not going to do anything. But we got displaced like 10 times or something. We were displaced in a house in Nuseirat. We were on the second floor, me and the woman, her name’s Kifaya, and her baby. There was no warning and no nothing. They just bombed the house. The last thing I remember is just that everything was red. The sky, the window, all that was red. There was no voice, no sound. I remember when I was under the rubble, I thought I’m actually okay. I thought nothing was wrong. But the moment they got me out, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
When I was in the hospital, they told me, “Thank God you’re alive” and all that. Then I said, “Okay. What happened?” They said, “Farah is alive,” like the baby. Her name is Farah. “And Kifaya is dead.” I was just...I don’t know. I don’t know.... There’s guilt. I know it’s just not good to feel this way, but it’s just the survivor’s guilt, this kind of thing. It’s like, “Okay, why specifically her? Why did she die and I live? Maybe she’s better than me. Well, she’s definitely better than me because she’s a mother. She has kids and she has a lot of responsibility.” These kinds of thoughts. And not just me. I think everyone who experienced this also has these kinds of thoughts.

I didn’t start school in September, because I was here to do a foundation year, but then I went to the engineering office and I was like, “I don’t need a foundation year.” I know math and I know English. A foundation year is basically for international students who don’t speak the language or who will find it hard to study in a different language. So they give them a year where they have to study basic things. So if you’re doing engineering, you’ll have basic maths or precalculus and English. So I went to the engineering office and I was like, “You can do whatever. You can test me or interview me.” And so I made an interview with them and they asked me a lot of scientific questions, and I passed it. Then they said, “Okay, but you have to wait a month until we approve your application to go straight into engineering.”

I found out that my father was killed on Facebook. Some of his friends posted that he was a great doctor and all that. He always said, “I’m here for a mission. I’m in this life for a mission. If my mission is over, then my life is not worth anything.” I never really understood what he meant, then he was killed and I understood. It’s just crazy because he had the chance to leave. When the war started he had offers from the Hungarian government and other places to go out of Gaza and he was like, “No.” He even wrote articles about doctors leaving Gaza and how shameful it is. As a daughter, of course I wish we’d left. But as a Palestinian, no.

When you live as black Americans do, in a constant state of emergency, it can be hard to look across an ocean and see what the long arm of your country is doing to people like Dima. What is already blurry is rendered almost imperceptible by the spectacles of American racism. Because when those whom America kills come to this country, the one sure way for them to advance is to become white, and the one sure way to become white is to put as much distance between oneself and black people as possible. Knowing this, the temptation to adopt a more siloed strategy, one that eschews coalitions with allies who have disappointed us, is strong. This is a very bad idea.

For Elabed, a Palestinian American, backing Harris meant telling others that they must support a politician who’d pledged to continue to arm the state that was annihilating their families.

If only because we are a minority, we need the numbers that come from alliances. And then there are certain moments, when a particular issue multiplies the power of certain allies. The Arab American vote is relatively tiny and constrained to a few states. But much as the advance of broadcast news made it hard for 

Southern white supremacists to hide their brutality, the sweep of social media has made it impossible for Israel, and thus the American empire, to hide its own. And just as the image of black people beaten for trying to cross a bridge resonated beyond our community, the image of a Palestinian hooked up to an IV, writhing in agony and burning alive, resonates far beyond theirs.

This resonance was not appreciated in 2024. A party that was deeply identified with destroying apartheid within its borders attempted to win by ignoring apartheid abroad. It did not work. “There was an underestimation of what was really afoot and how much it meant to so many people from many different walks of life,” says Pressley. “And I would say especially the younger generation. And I do believe it is why so many young people just did not participate and stayed home.”

There is another way.

In late 2023, as Shamaly and her family fled Gaza City, opinion polls showed African Americans, relative to the rest of the country, believed Israel should stop its military assault on Gaza. The earliest congressional call for a ceasefire, on October 16, was cosponsored by a black woman—then Missouri congresswoman Cori Bush. Half of her cosigners were black and none were white. In January 2024, a coalition of more than a thousand black pastors called for Biden to press for a ceasefire. The next month, the African Methodist Episcopal Church called for an end to aid to Israel, claiming the United States was supporting “mass genocide.”

“The average thought of my constituent is, Why the hell are we always bombing some other country?” says Pennsylvania congresswoman Summer Lee. And there is wisdom in this instinct. “We can’t afford health care, we can’t afford housing, we can’t afford grocery bills, right? All of those things, we’re told, are luxuries that if you work hard enough or if you’re special enough, you’ll get. Well, we spend a billion dollars a day dropping bombs in Iran. So those things are not disconnected.”

Lee is pointing to a different tradition of activism, one that does not accept a survivalist democracy in which the lives of one suffering people are balanced against another. We intimately know the perils of this balancing. Indeed, the history of American politics is littered with ostensible golden ages—the Era of Good Feelings, the Roaring Twenties, the postwar ’50s—that can only be deemed such by our total exclusion. Out of that knowledge comes a tradition of broader democracy extolled by some of black America’s most celebrated heroes.In 1965, the year of the Voting Rights Act’s passage, Coretta Scott King stood before an anti-war rally in Madison Square Garden and rejected survivalist democracy:

"Have you often wondered as I have, why it is that the same president Johnson who speaks so eloquently for civil rights, and who has been so moved by the struggle for the right to vote and the anguish of the poor, can be so callous about the Vietnamese and so apparently thoughtless on foreign policy. I think it is because we permit him to be."King’s criticism of the Vietnam War preceded her husband’s. It was neither popular with the FBI, which, as political scientist Jeanne Theoharis notes, subsequently labeled her a subversive, nor with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Johnson had already passed two civil rights bills and in 1968 passed another. He was the best president black America had seen in nearly a century. And here was King attacking that very president in the name of a people half a world away. But King’s mandate came out of the empathy of having seen her people, and herself, excluded from democracy.

“I have to trust that a black woman could not see tens of thousands of children being murdered and not be struck by that, not be moved by that,” says journalist Tiffany Cross.

It is broadly assumed that Harris is planning to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. There are those who would write her off, and perhaps her timidity before America’s facilitation of Gaza’s destruction has earned that dismissal. But if Harris were interested in a second act, one rooted not in a failed pragmatism but the courage of the heroes she claims, Fannie Lou Hamer and Coretta Scott King, she would not have to look far for inspiration. Harris’s maternal grandmother was an activist in India, sheltering women from abuse and leading education initiatives for them about contraceptives. Her maternal grandfather was active in the fight for Indian independence. Harris herself was born in Oakland in 1964—the same year Hamer made her stand. The Harrises were intellectual activists, with a keen interest in black struggle and its broader implications. They organized study groups focused on black writers such as Ralph Ellison, Carter G. Woodson, and W.E.B. Du Bois. They debated apartheid and decolonization. They hosted black writers like Amiri Baraka and even Hamer herself. Harris’s parents saw Martin Luther King speak together, protested the Vietnam War, and marched for civil rights pushing their firstborn in a stroller.

“These were my mother’s people,” Harris writes in her memoir The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. “From almost the moment she arrived from India, she chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in the black community. It was the foundation of her new American life.”

Harris recalls the walls of her day care center as decorated with posters of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman. The nursery’s matriarch made pound cake and flaky biscuits, and played Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” She recalls being sent on Sundays to the 23rd Avenue Church of God, where Harris and her sister, Maya, sang in the children’s choir. They were reared in a social justice Christianity, which called upon them, according to Harris, to “defend the rights of the poor and needy.” This does not strike me as the biography of someone who needs lectures on the nexus between the black freedom struggle and its import to the broader world. To the contrary, it reads like the story of someone steeped in that knowledge.

And that story forces a very basic question: What was the point of all this? Why the invocations of Tubman, the readings of Du Bois, the visits from Hamer? And did the advocates of this collective pedagogy imagine their children rising to heights of power, only to view the darker nations of the world through the same violent lens as their oppressors? And if they did not, if they believed that the “poor and needy” meant those within the empire as well as those without, then what moral mandate does that place upon their children?

And if their children have come only to praise, not check, empire, then why have they come at all?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ta-Nehisi Coates

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer, The Message, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is currently the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department at Howard University. See more from V.F.’s THE GREAT FIRE project here, which Coates guest-edited for the September 2020 issue.