It was also against the law for a Black person to sit at a Woolworth's lunch counter

 

     In a time of madness, people lose sight of the basics. So it is worthwhile to review the facts.
     For instance.
     Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A day when our nation — well, some of us anyway — honors the slain leader. I will fly the flag, as befits a patriotic holiday. Put my hand over my heart, say the Pledge of Allegiance and feel good about our country.
     How can I? With so much bad going on?
     Let me explain, as simply as possible.
     Who was Dr. King? He was a civil rights leader. And what is civil rights? It was — is — the process where people who are excluded from guaranteed American rights struggle peacefully to gain access to those rights.
     People such as?
     Black people, for starters. For about 200 years, Blacks were kept as slaves. And what had Black people done to deserve slavery? The answer is hidden in the question. Their skin was darker than those who enslaved them. Lighter-skinned people somehow considered themselves better, based on nothing. Nobody says, "I have a great accountant; his skin is very light." Nevertheless, they'd hire the white applicant over the Black, for that very reason. It wasn't written down. You just did it.
     Though there were laws written down, designed to deny the humanity of Black people and so facilitate their oppression. When Black people, inspired by Dr. King, tried to rise up and enjoy the freedoms guaranteed as American citizens, they often broke the law.
     The year I was born, a University of Illinois student named Jesse Jackson couldn't find a book he needed in the shabby and inadequate one-room McBee Avenue Colored Branch of the Greenville Public Library in Greenville, South Carolina. So he went downtown to the main branch to look for the book — on patriotism, ironically — and was met by the police, and turned away. Instead of accepting this humiliation, he returned with friends and was arrested.
     "Groups of Negroes have invaded the quiet of the public library," the News and Courier reported.
     Tradition, backed by law, kept a Black teenager from checking out a book. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2026, we ought to remember how unjust laws, brutally enforced, facilitate oppression. The Holocaust was legal. The Nazis kept meticulous records, never imagining humanity would return. Slavery was legal. A Black person eating at a Woolworth's lunch counter in 1960 was not.
     Now our government is acting as if stories like that somehow hurt white people. Biographies of Black heroes are whitewashed from military websites. The idea that we should live in a country where Black people can go to college is being criminalized. Colleges are being shaken down for money by the government for the crime of trying to create diverse campuses.
     Anyone who ever took a college tour knows how admissions work. There are academic standards, sure. But universities also let in a football team of students based on athletic prowess. And if the school band needs a trombonist, then a few trombonists are admitted. Plus someone from Alaska, so they can brag about having students from all 50 states. To suggest that also wanting a diverse campus that reflects our nation is somehow out of bounds is absurd.
     Then again, this is an absurd time. The harassment of dark-skinned Americans on the streets of Democratic-run cities — Los Angeles and Chicago last year, now Minneapolis — is absurd. Again, laws are invoked. Immigration violations — misdemeanors, paperwork issues — become enormous crimes that justify widespread brutality, the way the crucifixion of Christ was used to rationalize a millennium of killing Jews. Renee Good was a woman whose crime was sitting in a car that began to roll. She was shot in the face and the government denounced her as a terrorist, then went after her widow. It's cruel.

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