I went to Arlington National Cemetery last week for research on a novel I’m writing. There are a lot of dead people there, mostly victims of U. S. Imperialism. I suppose excepting WWII where maybe we wore the white hat. I learned the cemetery used to be a plantation owned by the wife of Robert E. Lee. Confiscated during the Civil War. Mid-war, it became a refugee camp for enslaved peoples freed by Sherman and other Union offenses. It became a thriving community of 1500 people. Of course, after Reconstruction, there were relentless efforts to retain the land for white […]

I just finished Richard Rothstein’s new book, The Color of Law, A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America. Please read this important book. Since the rise of Malcolm and the black power movement, I’ve considered the demand for integration as not addressing the real needs of the Black community. But Rothstein makes clear that the end of segregation, in housing in particular, is not about Black and white kumbaya. Rothstein argues that the segregation in housing that persists throughout the North as well as the South was not de facto segregation, enforced by local prejudices of banks and realtors. […]