History repeats

During Ulysses S. Grant’s administration, though fraught with scandals, there was an ongoing continuation of the Civil War. Not so much a shooting war but a concerted war against the rights of a recently emancipated people.

President Grant and his Republican administration fought for justice and enforcement of constitutional rights. But Democrats in state after state passed Jim Crow legislation denying voting power to Black people.

Here we are, 150 years later, with a Republican Party objective to make voting difficult across the land. Real progress toward equal rights didn’t start until the 1960s, but now it seems to have stalled, and there exists a voting bloc intent on reversing that progress while waving the flag, denying science and supposedly embracing American values and the Christian faith.

History repeats. Violence and injustice live on as they did in the 1860s. The actors have changed. A minority of Americans started the Civil War, and today a minority of Americans seems to be chasing some of those same Confederate objectives.

— R. Quitter, Plainfield