Howard University, where Vice President Kamala Harris attended college and where she will be on election night, is named after a white evangelical Christian who lost his right arm fighting to save his country and end slavery.
This Civil War hero oversaw the creation of more than 1,000 Black schools during Reconstruction. Undoubtedly there will be those who try to paint Harris’ decision to spend election night at this iconic historically Black university as tribalism; however, the truth is Howard began with a coalition that transcended race, gender and caste, and that’s what it symbolizes to this day.
Given the backdrop of the 2024 election, Howard University is the perfect location to watch the results.
“This is an inflection moment, I believe, in the history of our country,” Harris recently said. “This is a moment where there are powerful voices trying to sow hate and division among us. And if we’re going to deal with where we are in this inflection moment, we must speak all these truths, and one of the most significant and important truths right now is that the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us.”
That sentiment is one reason I voted for Kamala Harris to be our next president as soon as I could.
I am so sick and tired of the division and hate. Not just during this election cycle but what we’ve allowed to persist in this nation for so long because of a lack of trust in one another.
After a primary debate in 2012, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman called the nation’s trust deficit “the most important issue of all.”
“Nobody trusts Congress anymore,” he said. “No one has trust anymore toward the executive branch No one trusts Wall Street with the banks that are too big to fail. So, I would argue that the issues that are most salient in our political dialogue today were not even touched upon last night.”
It’s hard to disagree with Huntsman’s observations about our trust deficit, although we never fully trusted one another to begin with.
The only reason the electoral college exists is because founders like James Madison — the “Father of the Constitution” — did not trust direct democracy and feared what would happen if the enslaved won the vote. After the Haitian revolution ended in 1804, enslavers in the United States became even more inhumane out of fear of a similar revolt happening here at home.
Then we didn’t trust the Irish immigrants.
Then the Italians. The Japanese. The gays. Muslims. Migrants.
There have been roughly 40 openly transgender athletes in the 118-year history of the NCAA, and less than 2% of all high school students identify as trans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Trump is talking about trans people because many Americans may not know a transgender person, and so this minority is an easy target to demonize.
Keeping people apart, segregation, has always been the oxygen that hate needs to survive.
After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment granted citizenship to the formerly enslaved in 1868, but in 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy vs. Ferguson that racial segregation was constitutional. We called the resulting regime “separate but equal,” but in a society based on white supremacy, that was never going to happen. As Isabel Wilkerson noted in her Pulitzer-winning book “Caste”: “from Reconstruction to the civil rights era, southern boards spent as little as one-tenth the money on black schools as for white schools.”
She also wrote: “In a caste system, there can be little allowance for the disfavored caste to appear equal, much less superior at some human endeavor. In the early years of the Third Reich, the Nazis made a point of excluding Jews from any position or circumstance in which they might outshine Aryans.”
Right about now, you may be tempted to dismiss all of this as ancient history. Here is where I tell you the last Confederate widow died less than four years ago. Here is where I tell you earlier this year the Louisiana Supreme Court allowed a wealthy group of white residents living in the mostly Black city of Baton Rouge to form their own town and schools.
That would be the same state in which the “separate but equal” case was born 125 years ago. The same state that elected a KKK grand wizard to its House of Representatives after pictures of him wearing a Nazi uniform circulated. The same state that sent now-Speaker Mike Johnson, a man who spent most of his professional life attacking gay rights, to Congress.
But what gives me hope — what sustains me — is knowing that Louisiana is also where Maze featuring Frankie Beverly would perform in New Orleans each year. It’s where Winn Parish voted against secession in 1861. It produced Bobby Jindal, the first Indian American to run for president. Hattie Caraway of Arkansas became the first woman elected to the Senate — a leap forward in 1932 that happened with help from Sen. Huey Long of Louisiana.
At a campaign stop, the charismatic Long said: “We’re here to pull a lot of pot-bellied politicians off a woman’s neck.”
There’s no need to review the misogyny Caraway faced while she was making history. We’ve all seen it firsthand with the rhetoric about Harris a century later. And as she said a week ago at the Ellipse — the same location where Trump incited a mob to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election — “it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Having lived in many parts of the country — from Utah to Georgia — I’ve seen just how beautiful the diversity of the American people can be when we’re not at each other’s throats. A Harris presidency won’t end the divisions, but they will no longer be the controlling force of policy discussions.
After Andrew Johnson became president following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, this Confederate sympathizer allowed enslavers to police the formerly enslaved and redirected the federal government’s resources away from America’s promising future and back toward our ugly, yet familiar, past.
A century and a half later, we’re still trying to right the ship.
That’s why the Harris campaign slogan “We are not going back” didn’t need to come from a campaign headquarters in Washington. It rose organically, in the streets, from a coalition of Americans who believe we are stronger together than apart. My hope is that most voters feel the same way.
@LZGranderson
