When I asked an employee at a hotel in Richmond, Virginia for directions to the Museum of the Confederacy, he gave me a strange look. “Are you sure you want to go there?” I understood the skepticism of this African American man in his smart bellman’s uniform. Black folks generally tend to stay away from memorials to the “Lost Cause.” “Yes, I’m sure. Can you please tell me how to get there?” I said with…

Let's be frank: I'm not going to write anything better than this that merits your interest today. It would be a disservice to content and probably also reading were I to write anything in this particular time slot other than "Let's all read this together," unless you already read the print version last week. Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the…

Suffragette: Susan B. Anthony, 1820-1906 (Social reformer, member of the Anti-Slavery Society, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association) Hooray: "I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet." Wait, What: "Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the Negro; but with all the outrages that he to-day suffers, he…