On June 19, 1968, less than three months after the assassination of her husband, Coretta Scott King issued a challenge from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She asked that the nation take Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights vision in a bold new direction. Before his death, Dr. King had set in motion the Poor People’s Campaign, an unprecedented crusade for economic justice. Speaking to a multi-racial crowd of 50,000, the grieving widow posed a simple question: “What good is the legal right to sit in a restaurant if one cannot afford the price of food?” Still reeling from her husband’s violent murder, she added, “…starving a child is violence…contempt for poverty is violence.”

The 1954 Montgomery bus boycott led by Rosa Parks and Dr. King helped secure African Americans the right to sit at the front of any bus, eat at any restaurant, and, finally, the right to vote. “Whites Only” was becoming a thing of the past. Yet, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History, in 1968, 35 million Americans were still living below the poverty line in the richest nation on earth. From the coal hollers of Appalachia to the blighted blocks in the nation’s many “hoods,” growing inequality was literally choking the life out of millions of families and communities—of every color. The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign had only modest success and eventually faded away.

Fifty-six years later, the voices of the poor are still largely ignored even as their numbers increase. In 2022, the poverty rate was 11.5 percent, with 37.9 million people in poverty. That figure and a slew of other “myths” about race and class are exploded in Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II’s new book, White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy.

The central argument of White Poverty (written with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove) is that systemic racism, discrimination, and the ever-expanding battlefield of culture wars are largely manufactured wedge issues promoted by big-money interests to keep poor people divided and powerless. He writes,

The fundamental structure of inequality in America is shrouded in the myths that plantation owners told poor European immigrants to make them believe that laws which allowed planters to own human beings would ultimately serve the interests of those poor white immigrants…white poverty remains the troubling fact that exposes the lie.

In the tradition of Black preachers who are social justice leaders like Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy, and Andy Young, Barber speaks prophetically, scholarly, and plainly about growing economic inequality, not just for Black Americans but also for their white brothers and sisters. The North Carolina minister cites a recent study by Dr. David Brady of the University of California Riverside that finds poverty to be the fourth leading cause of death in America—“more deadly than obesity and diabetes, both of which are exacerbated by poverty, and more deadly than firearms.” Like many before him, Barber calls for a “moral revival” in America. But his is a call with a plan.

His plan, rooted in past successes, is modeled after the multi-racial forces that made possible America’s progressive, if brief, post-Civil War Reconstruction era. He also draws inspiration from a Second Reconstruction, which flourished during the 1960s when people of all faiths and races fought for and won landmark civil rights legislation.

White Poverty is a clarion call for Americans of every race and background to unite for a Third Reconstruction focused on tackling the interlocking problems that have denied us an economy that works for all. Reverend Barber says,

If people fighting for a living wage could link up with people fighting for voting rights; if young folks fighting for climate action could link up with folks trying to pass commonsense gun control; if immigrants struggling to keep their families together could connect with unhoused people fighting for a place to be…if people who don’t think of themselves as political but are fed up with the way things are could link up with the movements that have been pushing for policies that could change the daily reality for most of us—if all of us could get together, that would be a mighty force for change.

He redefines what it means to be poor in America. He notes,

According to the government’s official poverty measure (OPM), an individual who earns $14,000 a year—or a family of four that gets by on $28,000—is not poor. But try existing for a month in America today on $1,167…I’ve met people in America’s cities who earn twice the OPM —sometimes working swing shifts at multiple jobs—and still sleep in their car at night because they can’t afford to pay rent on top of their other monthly living expenses.

He argues that “63 percent of U.S. workers today live paycheck to paycheck,” and “When we look at poverty through this lens of practical necessity, 140 million Americans are poor or low income—a full 43 percent of the country.”

The majority of poor people in this country are white. Reverend Barber explains, “I sound the alarm about white poverty because I am convinced that we can’t expose the peculiar exceptionalism of America’s poverty without seeing how it impacts the very people that our myths try to privilege.” In part two of White Poverty, he challenges myths:

• Pale skin is a shared interest.
• Only Black folks want change in America.
• Poverty is only a Black issue.
• We can’t overcome division.

Barber has been at this work for a long time. After serving as pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, for 30 years, in 2023, he became the founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. He developed his Moral Fusion philosophy in 2013 when he first led weekly “Moral Monday” rallies throughout North Carolina—while building a multi-racial, multi-cultural coalition focused on lifting poor and low-income people. In 2015, he established “Repairers of the Breach” to train communities in moral movement building. Moral Mondays has expanded into a national movement mobilizing diverse communities “from the hood to the holler” to challenge the status quo and get more poor people to exercise their right to vote.  

As I write this, we are only days away from a planned dramatic rebirth of the Poor People’s Campaign. On June 29, Barber and Dr. Liz Theoharis, national co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign, are planning a Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. As the reverend puts it, “It’s time for a resurrection, not an insurrection.”

White Poverty is equal parts biblical inspiration, commonsense wisdom, scholarly insight, history lessons, and grassroots strategy. Through religious metaphor, poetic asides, and real-life anecdotes, Reverend Barber captures what ails America and what is needed to lift more people out of poverty and nourish our “impoverished democracy.”

His Moral Fusion movement is firmly rooted in the call of Christianity—and all religions—to care for the sick, the forsaken, and the poor. Paraphrasing Isaiah, he says, “If you loose the bands of wickedness…if you pay people a living wage, if you care for the poor…if you even invite them into your home and treat them like family, then your light will break forth like dawn and your healing will be complete…then you will be called a repairer of the breach.”

Reading this book, I recalled my own experiences of growing up in poverty in Baltimore. The stories that Barber tells about the people he has met living in their cars, pleading with the local church for help to pay an electric bill, or who have to live with an illness because they do not have health insurance sounded all too familiar. Living paycheck to…sometimes no check, I felt both the physical and emotional trauma of poverty. White Poverty reminded me that poverty is color-blind.

While much of America and the media seem fixated on political scandals, partisan bickering, and culture wars, 140 million Americans struggle against a rising tide of poverty and neglect. Reverend Barber intends to wake this sleeping giant through “a movement that won’t shut up until America faces our exceptional poverty and does right by the people who built this nation and keep it running every day.”

The post “It’s Time for a Resurrection, Not an Insurrection” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

I can still see the look of pride on my mother’s face when, in 1967, I told her I had been accepted at Morgan State University. Maybe you’ve never heard of the school, but where I grew up, in the projects of Baltimore, it was like getting into Harvard. The 156-year-old historically Black university—the largest HBCU in Maryland—boasts an impressive roster of alumni, from Black Enterprise magazine founder Earl Graves Sr. to the NASA data science pioneer Valerie M. Thomas. The Black professionals I knew as a kid were mainly Morgan grads, including our family physician and most of my public school teachers. 

My mother was a passionate believer in education. After moving to Baltimore from North Carolina as part of the “Great Migration” in the 1940s, she earned a typewriting certificate from the Cortez Peters Business School, founded in 1934 by Howard University–educated Cortez Peters as one of the first Black-owned vocational institutes to prepare African Americans for business and secretarial jobs. Unfortunately, the pressures of poverty and raising four kids prevented her from pursuing her dream of going to college. 

It would be different for me. Tuition at Morgan and other HBCUs at that time was well below the cost at predominantly white institutions, but it was still too high for a family dependent on public assistance and living paycheck to paycheck. I understood that I would have to work my way through Morgan, and I did.

It turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. At Morgan, I studied under distinguished professors who noticed my aptitude for language. Waters Turpin introduced me to the novels of Richard Wright and James Baldwin and encouraged me to submit my poems to the annual Morgan poetry anthology. Ruthe T. Sheffey took a special interest in me and somehow made Chaucer and Shakespeare interesting to a Black kid from the ghetto. I was also nurtured by the tough love of people like Morgan’s then president, Martin Jenkins, who told us at freshman convocation to look to our right and our left because one of us would not be there the following year. Then there was Helen “Mom” Roberts, who ran the student canteen. She cared enough for us to throw us out when we would have rather played cards than go to class. 

My life was also enriched by being at Morgan during the height of the civil rights movement. I remember campus visits from luminaries like Baldwin and Muhammad Ali. I attended campus civil rights rallies and marched with students at Baltimore’s Northwood Plaza Shopping Center to oppose segregation and at Annapolis to protest the state’s systemic underfunding of Morgan. These experiences formed the foundation of my lifelong commitment to social justice.

The lessons I learned, the people I met, and the values I absorbed at Morgan took me to places I had never imagined. After college and a series of public relations positions I was hired as press secretary for Maryland Representative Kweisi Mfume (also a Morgan grad), for whom I started writing speeches. That led to a job as speechwriter for Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. From there I moved to the Clinton White House, eventually becoming chief presidential speechwriter, the first African American in history to hold that position. Since then, I’ve written speeches for an array of leaders in government, business, and academia—including, fittingly, former Morgan State University president Earl S. Richardson. 

It’s hard to exaggerate the impact HBCUs have had on Black America. They have produced 40 percent of Black engineers and members of Congress, 50 percent of Black lawyers, 70 percent of Black doctors, and a staggering 80 percent of Black judges. They have achieved this extraordinary success in the face of years of scandalously inequitable funding. A recent federal government study found that between 1987 and 2020, states provided historically Black land grant colleges with roughly $12.6 billion less on a per student basis than their white land grant counterparts. “People don’t really understand what this number means or the magnitude of the loss caused by this gap,” notes Michael Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College, a Dallas HBCU, and a fellow member of the Washington Monthly Board of Directors. “There simply is no area of American life that would not have been significantly improved if HBCUs had been fairly funded.”

In spite of this abiding injustice, Black students continue to flock to HBCUs—especially since the murder in 2020 of George Floyd, which reinforced the widespread belief among African Americans that they were not safe in many mainstream environments, including on many predominantly white college campuses. Philanthropies have tried to fill some of the gap, MacKenzie Scott’s $560 million in gifts to 23 HBCUs being the greatest example. The bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which President Joe Biden signed in 2022, also opens up more research funding for HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions. 

Still, the nation’s 107 HBCUs remain underfunded, under-resourced, and academically underestimated. So argue two of America’s leading educational scholars, Marybeth Gasman of Rutgers University and Levon T. Esters of Pennsylvania State University, in their important new book, HBCU: The Power of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Since 1837, HBCUs have moved millions of African Americans from poverty to the middle class. And they have demonstrated, the authors rightly observe, the “power to transform local communities and improve the quality of life of a city, state and the nation.” 

The authors bring decades of research and real-world experience to this work. Gasman, the author and editor of 30 books, has served on the boards of three HBCUs. Esters, whose scholarship focuses on the career development of Black graduate students, is a proud alumnus of two HBCUs. Supported by extensive research, including nearly 60 interviews with HBCU presidents, alumni, and donors, as well as a recounting of their own firsthand experiences, Gasman and Esters provide a compelling, conversational, and comprehensive overview of the current HBCU landscape.

The authors begin by noting that Cheyney University in Pennsylvania was founded in 1837 as the nation’s first Black college. But they go on to remind us that ever since their 1619 North American arrival on slave ships, “Black people quickly understood that education was the pathway to freedom in a new land … Although rarely acknowledged in textbooks, enslaved Africans pursued all forms of education despite laws in southern states forbidding them from reading or writing.” With emancipation in 1863, the nation faced the obligation to educate 4 million formerly enslaved people. Until then, Black colleges were typically founded and run by white and Black missionary organizations, including the AME and AME Zion Churches. 

“Rather than merely wanting to provide an education to African Americans,” Gasman and Esters recount, the white missionaries “were focused on spreading Christianity with the goal of ridding Black people of the ‘immoralities’ of slavery and sparing the nation from the ‘menace’ of uneducated African Americans.” They explain that white corporate philanthropists, including John D. Rockefeller, Julius Rosenwald and William Baldwin, and John Slater, expected these colleges to be schools of industrial education. They supported the colleges in order to keep them “under their watchful eye. To receive funds, the colleges had to be incredibly careful not to upset the segregationist power structure that prevailed in the South at the time.” This was also the focus of a major rift between two of the most influential Black educational leaders at that time—Booker T. Washington, who favored the industrial education approach, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who advocated for a focus on producing future leaders through an emphasis on a liberal arts curriculum.

The book tells us that although the passage of the 1890 Morrill Act “provided annual federal appropriations to each state to support land-grant colleges” and “banned racial discrimination in admissions for those institutions receiving federal funding,” it did not eliminate inequities in funding for HBCUs or address the impact of widespread Jim Crow laws on students and administrators or the desire for control by white donors. 

Largely through interviews with those most closely affiliated with HBCUs, including college presidents, current and former students, community members, and donors, the authors explore nearly every aspect of the HBCU experience. These include chapters on culture and the impact on Black identity; the remarkable strides in socioeconomic mobility made possible by HBCUs; the community-building prowess of many HBCUs; and the well-documented need for stronger, more stable institutional leadership and improved customer service at these institutions. 

Along the way, we learn about the astonishing roster of HBCU leaders and graduates who have made notable contributions to American society. Among them are the civil rights champions Martin Luther King Jr. (Morehouse College) and Jesse Jackson (North Carolina A&T University); the first Black, South Asian woman and HBCU graduate vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris (Howard University); the dynamic social activist and former Georgia state Representative Stacey Abrams (Spelman College); the theologian and activist William Barber II (North Carolina Central University); and outstanding HBCU leaders, including Ruth Simmons, president of Prairie View A&M University; Johnnetta Cole, the first female African American president of Spelman; and David Wilson, president of my alma mater, Morgan. Future leaders like these are currently in the HBCU pipeline.

In an interview with the authors, Cheyney University president Aaron Walton observes that if not for HBCUs, a great deal of Black talent would go undiscovered and untapped, and the nation would not benefit from their contributions. He adds, “HBCUs help create a pool of diverse candidates for occupations that have [been lacking] brown and Black people.” 

In addition to a rigorous academic experience, facilitated by excellent professors who take a personal interest in their students’ success, many of these schools and their students have been and continue to be in the forefront of our nation’s social and racial justice movements. The book recounts the seminal role that North Carolina A&T students played in the 1960s “sit-in” movement protesting segregation:

The most prominent example among these sit-ins—and noted by historians as the start of the movement—was the case of the four Black college men from North Carolina A&T State University who refused to leave a segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. Throughout their challenge, these young men were supported by the students at nearby Bennett College for Women [another HBCU].

Similar protests occurred at Fisk University and other HBCUs during the antiwar and racial justice movements of the 1960s. Tragically, on May 15, 1970, during a protest at Jackson State, Mississippi state police entered the campus and shot and killed four students. 

This book reminds us that although most HBCUs “maintain their historically Black traditions,” on average 13 percent of their students are white, 2 percent are Hispanic, and 2 percent are Asian American. “Some HBCUs today are models for LGBTQ inclusivity,” the authors note, “such as Spelman College with its Audre Lorde curriculum project and Bowie State University with its stand-alone LGBTQIA Resource Center.” 

In addition to their unique scholarship, community-building. and social impact prowess, these schools offer something you won’t find anywhere else. Whether describing the vibrant “step shows,” Greek life, the excitement of Black college football rivalries, or the national recognition gained by Black college marching bands and choirs, the authors give readers an inside look at the unique diversity and cultural vibrancy that are the hallmark of the HBCU campus.   

The affirmative action debate too often assumes that selective predominantly white institutions are the only avenue of success for young men and women of color. My own experience and this book explode that myth. While we must continue to demand equal access to college across the board, including at so-called elite predominantly white institutions, the authors confirm what many of us have long known: HBCUs are unique centers of excellence and indispensable contributors to the power of our nation.

Esters, a graduate of Florida A&M University (FAMU),echoes the sentiments of many of today’s HBCU students who enter college burdened with economic challenges and the daily reality of racial division and find a welcoming, racism-free comfort zone. 

One of the aspects that I enjoyed most about attending college, especially an HBCU, was the journey of personal growth and identity development … Walking the “yard” at FAMU and seeing nothing but a sea of Black students was powerful and instilled a sense of pride and a can-do attitude in me. Attending an HBCU meant you were part of a family.

But this book is not only for those of us who can point to lifelong benefits from having attended an HBCU. It is an invitation to prospective students, their parents, high school college counselors, teachers, professors, scholars, potential donors, policymakers, and anyone interested in learning more about HBCUs—an unsung hero of American higher education.

The post Confessions of an HBCU Grad appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In 1848, at a time when Black families were routinely ripped apart and Black bodies were bought and sold in public squares as chattel, a Black man and his mixed-race wife pulled off one of the most daring and ingenious feats of self-emancipation imaginable. Defying conventions of race, class, and gender, William and Ellen Craft of Macon, Georgia, transformed their appearances and engineered an extraordinary flight to freedom. Their daring escape energized the abolitionist movement and helped change the course of history.

Ilyon Woo’s new book, Master Slave Husband Wife, lifts the curtain on a largely unknown chapter in America’s complicated racial history. In her first book, The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times, Woo wove history and narrative together in a compelling look at 19th-century women’s rights. In this book, she tells the true story of a courageous married couple who challenged slavery, America’s original sin. She also sheds light on America’s original blessing—the efforts of free Blacks and people of all races to answer the clarion call of the Declaration of Independence by risking their own “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” in the fight to end slavery and racial discrimination. 

William Craft, a skilled cabinetmaker, was the property of Ira Hamilton Taylor, a banker who rented him out to a local shop owner. Ellen Craft was the daughter and property of James Smith, who had enslaved and impregnated her mother. When James’s wife could no longer tolerate Ellen’s presence in the house, Ellen was given to her white half sister, Eliza, as a wedding present. She then became the legal property of Eliza’s new husband, Dr. Robert Collins. 

Both Ellen and William were trusted “favorites” of their owners. But favored slave status was no match for their dream of a free life together. William and Ellen first met in 1841, when he was 18 and she was 15. As their relationship deepened, Woo writes, Ellen made clear that she would not marry or bear children until they escaped bondage, “not until her own body—and therefore her children—belonged to her.” Ultimately, however, Ellen relented. Though they were denied a sanctified Christian wedding, with the permission of their owners they “jumped the broomstick”—a tradition among enslaved people, who were denied legal weddings—in 1846. 

Two years later, with Ellen disguised as a wealthy, white, disabled slave-owning man, and William playing the role of her attentive slave, they began a harrowing flight from bondage that took them from Macon through Philadelphia and Boston, on their way to Canada. Traveling by train, boat, steamship, and the Underground Railroad—and relying on Ellen’s ability to pass for white, on her seamstress skills, and on William’s abundant creative instincts—they escaped in plain sight, always one step ahead of capture. After sneaking through the streets of Macon as master and slave, they arrived at the train station. There, they were able to elude their first pursuer, the cabinetmaker from the shop where William worked. The man had tracked them to the station and was looking into train windows for the fugitives when the train pulled out. Ellen also hoodwinked a station porter who had previously known and been interested in her. “This man now called her ‘Young Master’ and thanked her for the tip she gave him,” Woo recounts. From there, it was a four-day race to the Mason-Dixon Line and free soil. But four days was hardly the end of it. In fact, the chase had just begun.

Woo reminds us that the Fugitive Slave Act—first signed into law by President George Washington in 1793, and later toughened in 1850 by President Millard Fillmore—authorized local and federal government officials to hunt down, capture, and return escaped slaves to their owners and imposed penalties on anyone who aided their flight. This meant that no matter how far north William and Ellen ran, as long as they were on American soil they were in constant jeopardy of being kidnapped and returned to bondage in Georgia. 

Following the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, private citizens in northern states formed so-called Vigilance Committees to protect escaped slaves and thwart the efforts of professional bounty hunters. When Robert Collins sent two men, Willis Hughes and John Knight, to Boston to bring back the Crafts, the Boston Vigilance Committee came to the rescue. With the help of sympathetic local attorneys, commissioners, and judges, the committee orchestrated a series of judicial delays. Hughes and Knight were arrested for conspiring to kidnap the Crafts. Upper-class Bostonians mocked the uneducated slave catchers, and street boys threw spoiled eggs and garbage at them. As Woo writes, “It was too much for the Georgians to bear. They had left Macon as heroes and expected to return triumphant, captives in hand. Instead, they had been the ones chased, ridiculed, spat upon, hunted down by law, man, woman, and child.”

After that incident, the Crafts were advised to keep running to Canada. But they were tired of running. At the urging of the charismatic ex-slave William Wells Brown, they took a detour to join him as powerful speakers on the antislavery lecture circuit. They toured Europe, and then settled in England. This was another pivotal act of courage that elevated them on the international stage. As William regaled audiences with the dramatic retelling of their bondage and escape and Ellen appearing as “the white slave,” their lectures raised much-needed money and support for the abolitionist movement.

In chronicling this expansive saga, Woo does not shy away from recounting some of the most heinous horrors of slavery. But she simultaneously introduces us to the compassion and commitment of a number of white abolitionists, including Quaker families and people like William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone, Robert Purvis, and the Reverend Theodore Parker. These and other men and women like them formed allegiances with Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and other free Blacks on the frontlines of the 19th-century antislavery movement. A number of these activists played key roles in the remarkable self-
emancipation journey of William and Ellen Craft. In fact, it was Parker, a Unitarian minister and avid abolitionist, who ultimately persuaded the bounty hunters Hughes and Knight to abandon their mission.

From their new home in England, the Crafts continued their activism; wrote a book, Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom; founded a school in Africa, and another in Georgia; and mobilized support for the Union side during the American Civil War. They also fulfilled their dream and raised six freeborn children. 

Parts of Woo’s story unfurl with dramatic cinematic sweep, but ultimately this is a meticulously researched work of narrative nonfiction, documented with a bibliography and extensive notes. Woo writes in the opening overture, “Though propelled by narrative, this work is not fictionalized. Every description and line of dialogue originates in historic sources.” 

Woo’s account provides the backdrop for the larger story of the roots of America’s continuing racial divide and the sacrifices many have made to create a more perfect union. We have made great strides since the fight over slavery led to a bloody civil war, but fissures remain, and lingering vestiges of the past still afflict many communities. These include the post–Civil War “Black Codes,” which sanctioned racial discrimination; Jim Crow; redlining; and mass incarceration. 

Is it coincidence that the current voting rights debate is center stage in Georgia, the state that denied dignity and voting rights to William and Ellen Craft? Can we deny that there is a link between the reality that as an enslaved couple, the Crafts were forbidden to learn to read or write, and the separate and unequal education that continues across the United States today? Clearly, the journey to freedom isn’t over. Master Slave Husband Wife is a welcome addition to a growing effort to fill historical gaps and tell the unvarnished truth about the past so we can build a better future. It is a riveting American saga and a teachable moment for these times.

The post Emancipation Relocation appeared first on Washington Monthly.

President John F. Kennedy once remarked at a White House dinner for Nobel Prize winners, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” It took a lot of chutzpah to pull off that joke. Five decades later, another supremely confident politician, Barack Obama, quipped, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters.” While not disputing his boss, in his new memoir, former Obama chief speechwriter Cody Keenan describes the daunting task of putting words in the mouth of the man some called “the smartest person in the room”: America’s first Black president. 

With an equal measure of wit, humility, and heart, Keenan takes us on a private tour of presidential speechmaking during 10 legacy-defining days of the Obama administration—from the successful fight to save Obamacare to the victory for marriage equality to a soul-stirring eulogy following the murder of nine Black parishioners at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Along the way, Keenan paints a picture of an exceptionally collegial, scandal-free, and committed White House staff stocked with people he would come to view as one of the most extraordinary collections of talent, human knowledge, and humanity ever assembled at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Though Keenan’s story is not solely about race, he is fully aware of the ironic challenge of capturing the voice of the first leader of the free world who dared to drop the mic and break the centuries-old Oval Office color barrier. How could a 35-year-old white kid from the North Side of Chicago possibly be equipped to write speeches for the first Black president—a man who spoke the language of both the South and North Sides of the Windy City and who found his muse in the music of Miles, Coltrane, and Ray Charles? 

Keenan tells us his parents met at a New York City advertising agency. His dad was “a surfer jock” from Southern California, his mom “a farm girl from central Indiana.” He describes them both as having “good Midwestern sensibilities.” Keenan candidly admits that, unlike Obama, “I did not inhabit two worlds; I inhabited one … Everything I knew of other people’s hardships came from books I checked out of the library.” This is not altogether true. For his first three years after college, as a staffer in the office of Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, Keenan, as he puts it, “got to bask in the inspiration of that very Kennedy-esque idea that America is not the project of any one person; that anybody can make a difference, and everybody should try to.” Keenan’s evolving social conscience was reenergized by the echo of the Kennedy vision, “updated … for a new time,” when he heard Obama’s call for a truly United States of America at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. 

In 2007, when Senator Obama announced his candidacy for president, Keenan joined the campaign speechwriting team, and when Obama defeated John McCain in 2008, Keenan became part of the White House speechwriting staff, headed by Jon Favreau. After proving himself as the “workhorse of the team” and earning high praise for his speechwriting skills, Keenan was promoted to chief speechwriter when Favs left in 2013.

Grace is framed around a thicket of pressing and competing speechwriting deadlines facing Keenan and his team during 10 hectic days in June 2015. It was referred to as “SCOTUS week”—the week the Supreme Court was expected to issue rulings on a slew of cases before its summer recess. The outcome of several of those cases would either codify or obliterate two of Obama’s top policy goals. King v. Burwell would determine if Obamacare, which had become a lifeline to health insurance coverage for millions of poor and middle-class Americans since its passage in 2010, would survive. Obergefell v. Hodgeswould decide if LGBTQ Americans had finally won their decades-long struggle for an equal right to marriage. 

Presidential draft statements in the event of both victories and defeats of those cases had to be prepared enough in advance to give Obama a chance to shape them to his liking. As if that weren’t enough pressure, on June 17, the Wednesday of SCOTUS week, the White House and the nation were stunned by the news of a mass shooting in a Black church in Charleston that took the lives of nine of its members, including its pastor, Clementa Pinckney. After much discussion, the president decided to deliver Pinckney’s eulogy, on Friday, June 26—one day after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Obamacare and the same day the Court issued its monumental decision in favor of same-sex marriage. 

At the start of that week, Keenan and his team were faced with a complicated maze of questions. Could the speechwriters meet these impossible, simultaneous deadlines? Would the Court rule in favor of the hopes of the president and millions of Americans? And would Obama follow through on his inclination to sing “Amazing Grace” during the eulogy for Pinckney? Keenan also wondered if he could meet the expectations of the Charleston eulogy, given his scant understanding of the Black church and the yawning gap between his and the president’s backgrounds. He recalled an earlier meeting with Obama in which the president asked him, “You know what they say about Miles Davis?” Keenan did not. Obama said,

It’s the notes you don’t play. It’s the silences. That’s what made him so good. I need a speech with some pauses, and some quiet moments … Because they say something too. I want you to go home, pour yourself a drink, and listen to some Miles Davis … and find me some silences. 

That was a great teaching moment that set the stage for a highly praised Charleston eulogy resulting from one of Keenan’s most intense collaborations with Obama. 

While Keenan’s memoir sheds voluminous light on the drama and tension surrounding those 10 tumultuous days in June 2015, it also reminds me of the principled leadership and close foxhole friendships forged during my time as Bill Clinton’s chief speechwriter. Every White House speechwriting team has a unique cadence and personality. But Keenan’s description of the early-morning senior staff meetings in the chief of staff’s office, late nights sequestered in the West Wing “Speechcave,” high-stakes Oval Office meetings with the president, and working trips aboard Air Force One all have the unmistakable ring of authenticity. 

Grace is a refreshing departure from the flood of scandalous “literary” flotsam that typically washes up in the wake of the transfer of power. This book might not make breaking-news headlines, but it just might restore a little faith in the presidency and the backstage men and women who work around the clock to fulfill the chief executive’s promises to the American people. Cody Keenan’s memoir is essentially a love story. The love of a president for his country, his family, and his staff through some of the toughest political and personal fights imaginable. The love Keenan and his White House compatriots had for serving in the Obama White House and playing a vital role in helping the president bend the arc of history a little farther toward justice. And, finally, Keenan’s love for a former White House researcher, now his wife, Kristen Bartoloni. Like the president he served, Keenan tells his story with conviction, compassion—and amazing grace.

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One of the great unheralded pleasures of being a former presidential speechwriter is being inducted into the Judson Welliver Society, named after the first presidential speechwriter—the man who wrote the immortal words of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Comprised of selected former White House speechwriters, the society includes scribes for every president since Harry Truman. 

I attended my first Judson Welliver Society dinner in December 2002, after my stint in the Clinton White House. It was held in the stately dining room of the Motion Picture Association’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., courtesy of the society member, Lyndon Johnson speechwriter, and MPAA president Jack Valenti. The evening was capped by an after-dinner round robin of White House memories from the men and women who had written some of the most memorable and forgettable words in presidential history. 

At that meeting, the society president, the late William Safire, a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and subsequently a New York Times columnist, called the roll, as was his custom, reading the names of speechwriters in attendance from their respective administrations, starting from the earliest, and asking them to stand. There was Ted Sorensen, famed speechwriter for John F. Kennedy; Richard Goodwin from the Johnson White House; Nixon’s acid penman Pat Buchanan; Jimmy Carter wordsmith James Fallows; and so on. 

Finally, Safire got to the Clinton writers. It was a long list, owing to Clinton being the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win reelection. It took a lot of writers to keep up with Clinton’s eight-year love affair with the podium. 

I waited expectantly while Safire called the Clinton roll: “Don Baer, Michael Waldman, David Kusnet, Bob Boorstin, Paul Glastris, Carolyn Curiel, Jeff Shesol, Jonathan Prince, Jordan Tamagni …” I was more than a little puzzled as I raised my hand to get Safire’s attention while slowly rising to my feet. “Excuse me, my name is Terry Edmonds. I was President Clinton’s chief speechwriter, and, I might add, the first African American presidential speechwriter in the history of this country.”

Perhaps there really was some innocent snafu that left my name off the list. After all, no one who looked like me had ever sat at this table. But as I took my seat, I wondered how many other times African Americans and other people of color have been written out of the pages of history. How many more generations of young African American boys and girls would be privy only to the dust and not the shine of their ancestors? 

Invisibility is the natural habitat of a ghostwriter, and even more so for a speechwriter, who is paid to be the faceless voice of a public figure. While I have held a succession of executive speechwriting roles since leaving the White House more than 20 years ago, I have often been the only person of color in the room. Workplace racial tensions are a persistent reality, and I have felt both the sharp and subtle pains of the color line. 

Beyond the workplace slights, there is a bigger reason why the relative dearth of speechwriters of color is a problem. To be effective, leaders need advisers who, through their life experiences, understand the world around them. And the world is changing. The 2020 census revealed that the non-Hispanic white population in the United States declined from 64 percent in 2010 to 58 percent in 2020. As demographics shift, we see a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, a polarized argument about global climate change, and a hardening of attitudes about race. Public figures are unlikely to speak effectively on these issues to a diversifying country without more speechwriters of color. But, according to recent data, 72.5 percent of speechwriters in America are white, with speechwriters of color—Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and African American—making up only 24.9 percent. 

Since retiring from my last job as speechwriter, for New York State Attorney General Letitia James, I have joined a burgeoning movement to ensure that more speechwriters of color are afforded the opportunities and professional recognition they deserve. Progress, once slow, is gathering steam. In April 2021, Shaan Heng-Devan, who describes himself as “a proud biracial first-generation immigrant,” was hired as speechwriter for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. In November, a young African American woman, Alexandra Robinson, became deputy speechwriter for Labor Secretary Marty Walsh. 

The hidden hand behind these and other breakthrough opportunities is a new organization called Speechwriters of Color. Celebrating its first year, SOC is committed to increasing the number of speechwriters of color who are developing messaging and serving as “ghostwriters” for leaders in business, politics, nonprofits, and government. Through mentoring, networking, and outreach to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and other minority-serving institutions, SOC hopes to inspire more young writers of color to pursue careers in speechwriting. It also wants to encourage more thought leaders from every sector to hire a diverse cadre of talented speechwriters. 

SOC was founded by two young speechwriters whose career paths illustrate why the organization is needed. Growing up in Kansas City, Michael Franklin took buses to compete in high school speech and debate tournaments. When he arrived at Howard University in 2017, he joined that school’s speech and debate team. As a sophomore, Franklin was invited to a mentoring mixer at a conference of professional speechwriters at Georgetown University. It was a revelation to him. “I didn’t even know there was such a profession as speechwriting,” Franklin recalls. He was also struck that few of the speechwriters were Black like him. “I’ve been in the competitive speech and debate space since middle school and competed with tons of Black and brown folks who would write speeches for fun and compete on the weekend,” he says. “There’s no reason professional speechwriting should have been lacking so much diversity when competitive speech and debate had so many successful, diverse competitors.” The next year, he organized the first Black Speechwriters Symposium at Howard. He was also invited to a luncheon series with speechwriters on Capitol Hill. Not many people of color there, either.

One of the few was Mintaro Oba, who also noticed the lack of diversity at the Capitol Hill luncheons. The child of Japanese immigrant parents, Oba became fascinated by famous speeches as a child, breaking them down to see how their rhetoric worked. Like Franklin, he had no idea that there was such a thing as a career in speechwriting until he got to college, when his classmates at American University introduced him to The West Wing and the character Sam Seaborn, the presidential speechwriter played by Rob Lowe. The NBC drama inspired him to take a class in speechwriting, co-taught by Jeff Nussbaum, previously a speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore (and currently writing for Joe Biden). After graduating and working on Korea policy at the State Department, Oba joined a speechwriting firm where Nussbaum was a partner, West Wing Writers. He was working there when he and Franklin crossed paths at the Capitol Hill luncheons. 

The following summer, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, Oba send a note to a group of speechwriters suggesting that they create an organization to harness the country’s racial reckoning to bring long-term change to the speechwriting profession. Responding immediately, Franklin jumped at the chance to cofound the organization. Other writers of color agreed to sign the founding document. I am proud to be one of them. 

While other speechwriting organizations are beginning to highlight the need for greater diversity in the industry, SOC is the nation’s only group specifically building a pipeline of writers of color to join the speechwriting profession and rise in its ranks. Franklin (who now works as a communications associate at the nonprofit Black Futures Lab) and Oba (speechwriter to the managing director of the International Monetary Fund), along with others at SOC, have spent countless hours without compensation, organizing public events, reaching out to HBCUs, and combing through LinkedIn profiles to create a list of hundreds of job openings, interested applicants, and current or retired speechwriters willing to provide career advice and connections. 

The group’s theory of change is simple: If it can encourage more writers of color to pursue speechwriting and support them with mentoring, master class training, and job placement help, it can increase their opportunities while providing added value for their employers. 

This would be a real advance over the career system I experienced back in the day, which was really no system at all. Like most speechwriters my age, I stumbled into the profession. After college at Morgan State University and a series of PR jobs, I volunteered on Kweisi Mfume’s 1986 congressional campaign in my native Maryland. When Mfume won, he made me his press secretary. When someone was needed to write his floor speeches, the job fell to me. Though I had zero training in speechwriting, I turned out to be good at it. A few years later, I was hired to be a speechwriter for Bill Clinton’s health and human services secretary, Donna Shalala. From there I went to the White House and a series of rewarding speechwriting jobs for the next 30 years. 

These days, there is more of a career infrastructure for writers starting out, including speechwriting associations, firms, and even courses at a few colleges. Still, getting a job in the profession today—whether in government, nonprofits, or business—largely depends on going to the right schools and making the right connections. That puts many people of color at a disadvantage. 

SOC aims to narrow that disadvantage, and in its first 12 months it can point to several notable accomplishments. More than 300 speechwriters of color and over 100 allies have become members. To date, with help from SOC, nine of its members have been hired or offered jobs at cabinet-level departments and agencies in the Biden-Harris administration. Several are working in corporate and nonprofit jobs. 

It’s a start, and an important one. In the 21st century, success in business, politics, and other sectors depends on crafting messages and policies that speak to our increasingly diverse population, and that honor the dignity of everyone.

Speechwriters of Color is central to achieving that goal.

To find out more, visit https://twitter.com/SpeechwritersC.

The post Why We Need Speechwriters Who Look Like America appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The biggest surprise of all is that only 12 years after her 1761 arrival in Boston on a slave ship, speaking only Wolof, her native tongue, Phillis Wheatley was publishing the first book of poetry in the Western world by an African-American writer. Wheatley’s masters, John and Susanna Wheatley, and their daughter, Mary, first opened the door to this stunning achievement. For reasons not fully known, this trio took it upon themselves to tutor young Phillis in English, Latin, and the Bible. It was not long before the precocious black child was writing and publishing poetry clearly reflecting the influence of such literary giants as Alexander Pope and John Milton.

Phillis Wheatley’s reputation quickly grew in England, where her first and only volume, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in 1773. While she was not accorded as much acclaim in the United States, her literary talents did attract the attention of both Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, and she became a darling of American abolitionists, who pointed to her achievements “as proof positive of the equality of the African, and therefore as a reason to abolish slavery.”

But many white Americans impugned Phillis Wheatley’s authenticity by defining her as nothing more than a classical “imitator.” In fact, some, like Thomas Jefferson, insisted that it was virtually impossible for blacks, whom he considered mentally inferior to whites, to produce great art or poetry. To Jefferson, “The compositions composed under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”

But for me the greater tragedy of Phillis Wheatley’s life, as described by Gates, was not the doubt or scorn rained upon her by skeptical whites, who, against all evidence, could not bring themselves to believe that an African slave girl could write poetry that captured the attention of both King George and George Washington. After all, Wheatley’s achievements were validated in her day by other members of the white intelligentsia, a recognition that not only loosed the shackles of her own literary dreams, but proclaimed the humanity of all African people and paved the way for what has become a remarkable African American literary tradition. That alone should have secured for her a place of undisputed veneration, especially in black literary circles. But, unfortunately, that has not been the case, and that is the greater tragedy. Hard as she struggled during her lifetime to gain the recognition she deserved, the indignities heaped on Wheatley in the years after her death, at the hands of her own people nonetheless, have inflicted an even greater injustice to her legacy.

Gates describes how, what he calls “the politics of authenticity” infected criticism of Wheatley’s work by 19th- and 20th-century black intellectuals and writers, who denigrated her for not speaking out more forcefully against slavery. The genesis of this antipathy is traced to an eight-line poem Ms. Wheatley wrote when she was 14 entitled “On Being Brought from Africa to America.”

The first line reads: ” ‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land.” The poem is an indictment of her African roots and a paean to her captors and their religion. Encountered with 21st-century sensibilities, it is a poem devoid of any trace of black pride. Even though Ms. Wheatley later wrote and spoke out powerfully against the human costs of slavery, the damage was done. Looking back at Wheatley from the vast expanse of two centuries of civil rights protest and progress, these modern day African-American critics have declared that the 18th-century prodigy was not “black enough,” or worse, an Uncle Tom.

This double bind of denigration, from both the whites of her day and the blacks of ours, is the most fascinating aspect of Gates’s story. Many black writers and professionals live in a similar cultural purgatory today. Anyone who has worn the proud but heavy mantle of a black “first” knows that, for a while at least, white stares of skepticism and white arms of condescension come with the territory. It is also true that success in the white world can cause an estrangement of sorts from black roots and lead to a life lived in cultural limbo. Thankfully, for Phillis Wheatley the downside of her black success, though seeded during her lifetime, only fully sprouted after her death.

The post Captive Genius appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The fact is, most African Americans consider Bill Clinton to be a bona fide brother. I use that term in the broadest biblical sense. It does not mean that Clinton is an honorary black man or the first black president. And it doesn’t mean that his positions on issues affecting black Americans are universally accepted throughout the community. Welfare reform and school vouchers are two notable points of vigorous debate.

But, Bill Clinton has earned the respect and admiration of most African Americans, both for his words and his deeds. To most of us, his long-standing embrace of black people, black culture, and black concerns is, well, unimpeachable. Black people took note and did not forget that it was Bill Clinton who fought for the expansion of empowerment zones to places like Harlem. It was Bill Clinton who insisted that we “mend, not end” affirmative action. It was President Clinton’s voice of outrage that led the chorus against the outbreak of church burnings and hate crimes across America. And it was Bill Clinton who kept his promise to put together a Cabinet and White House staff that “looked like America.” The fact of the matter is, black people felt that for the first time in a long time there was someone in the White House who took our struggle for equal opportunity and justice seriously. And let’s not forget, Bill Clinton did all this while presiding over the longest and strongest economic expansion in history — a rising tide that lifted all boats from Wall Street to Main Street to 125th Street in Harlem. During his time in office, all the things that really mattered to most Americans improved — jobs and income — rose at all levels, crime reached record lows, homeownership reached record highs, teen pregnancy was down, educational achievement and college attendance were up. So, in black America the question is not why we love the man so much, but why you don’t.

I think there is another thing that many white pundits just don’t get when they attempt to assess black attitudes toward Bill Clinton. African Americans really relate to Clinton’s cool-under-fire tenacity. As Congressman Rangel said during his introductory remarks on that stage in Harlem, we saw it as no accident that the same people who were out to get Bill Clinton were out to get us first. That may be a tad hyperbolic, but there are many in the black community who believe that the only reason Bill Clinton was hounded so vociferously as President is that he was a friend of black America.

And then there is Monica. There is a palpable undercurrent of moral superiority in the voices of many conservatives who contrast their outrage at Clinton’s sexual dalliances with the nonchalance with which they are regarded in the black community. To many of us, Monica was a convenient smokescreen for unbridled attacks on a left-of-center Clinton by hyperventilated far-right conservatives. Our “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” attitude revealed that, in this instance, blacks were not less moral than whites, just less hypocritical. We applauded Clinton for standing tall in the face of that hypocrisy. Strength in the face of adversity. Joy in the midst of sorrow. Faith in the depths of despair. These have been the indispensable garments of black survival for as long as we can remember. In the darkest days of his Presidency, Bill Clinton wore them well. That alone makes him a brother in the struggle.

Yes, it is true that his choice of Harlem as his post-presidential home was not his first choice. But Bill Clinton cannot be accused of being a Johnny-come-lately to the African American community or to our issues. That is why I stood with pride alongside both black and white former Clinton officials in front of the Adam Clayton Powell Plaza to welcome the brother home.

Terry Edmonds, former Director of Speechwriting for President Bill Clinton, is currently assistant to the President for Government Relations at Morgan State University.

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