Mark Small

In grade school we were taught America is great because of our founding principles of liberty, justice, and equality. After all, if we use size of our military to measure greatness, there are dictatorships that could be called “great.” 4/17

3 time lines, of equal importance, in our history must be included when we discuss “greatness.” From 1789 to 1865 chattel slavery not only was legal but protected by the Constitution. Other “advanced” countries abandoned slavery long before 1865. 5/17

After 1865, former slaves & their descendants fared hardly better. Poverty, lynching, denial of voting rights & use of the 14th Amendment to protect corporations instead of ppl meant life was brutal and separately, and unequally, “protected” by our laws. 6/17

In WW II tens of millions of people died. On a brighter note, large corporations & the U.S. military saw racism was bad for business. Mass prosperity meant America could afford to let ppl be free. In 1954 Brown I was handed down by a unanimous SCOTUS. 7/17

Another time line tracks the rights of women. Until Amendment XIX was ratified in 1920 & women could vote, they had few rights. Though they are over half of America’s population, the rights of women were at best an afterthought, at worst a joke. 8/17

3rd time line: rights of people who lived on this continent before Europeans - who mistakenly called them “Indians” - arrived. Indigenous peoples were victims of genocide as America pursued its “manifest destiny.” 9/17

Progress to secure rts of black people, women & our indigenous peoples was slow, but movement always was forward. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were critical. Insistence on equal pay for equal work was increasingly accepted as a truism. 10/17

Ppl began to understand that our indigenous peoples were varied and different - and that we owe them a lot of back interest on a lot of broken treaties. 11/17