To Be Equal 
July 11, 2026

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “The 1976 celebration was a more vital and happy one because of a broad belief that two years earlier the system had worked, and we were celebrating a system that had cleansed itself. We were in a period of renewal and relief, and today we’re in a period of fear and loathing. We don’t have any reason to celebrate our founding documents, because we’re living in an authoritarian state that is quite different from the one that the founders created.” -- Jonathan Alter

In a proclamation declaring 1976 The Bicentennial Year, President Ford called upon “every man, woman, and child to celebrate the diversity of tradition, culture and heritage that reflects our people and our patrimony.”

A half century later, President Trump used the occasion of the nation’s 250th anniversary to celebrate Trump.

In 2016, a bipartisan act of Congress created the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, branded America250, to “foster shared experiences that spark imagination, showcase the rich tapestry of our American stories, inspire service in our communities, honor the enduring strength, and celebrate the resilience of the United States of America”.

In 2025, the Trump administration began diverting funds intended for the nonpartisan commission to “Freedom 250,” a public–private partnership through which donors purchase access to Trump and millions of dollars could be funneled to Trump allies.  Among the events it produced were an IndyCar street race around the National Mall and a mixed martial arts combat event on the White House lawn.

On July 5, 1976, President Ford addressed newly naturalized Americans in Virginia: “‘Black is beautiful’ was a motto of genius which uplifted us far above its intention. Once Americans had thought about it and perceived its truth, we began to realize that so are brown, white, red, and yellow beautiful ... You came as strangers among us and you leave here as citizens, equal in fundamental rights, equal before the law, with an equal share in the promise of the future.”

In a speech to open the sparsely-attended Great American State Fair, Trump denigrated immigrants as “murderers, gang members, drug dealers, and dangerous criminals” and bragged about eliminating racial justice initiatives.

In 1976, the nation was struggling to recover from one of the most notorious episodes of presidential corruption in our history up to that point: a political espionage program, illegally funded by donor contributions, which the Nixon administration tried to cover up by destroying evidence, obstructing investigators, and bribing burglars.

The bipartisan resolve with which Congress confronted the Watergate scandal seems unthinkable today. Not only did a congressional committee vote unanimously to subpoena audiotapes that exposed the President’s guilt, members of the President’s own party stood ready to vote not only for his impeachment, but for his conviction, and urged him to resign.

But the reforms passed in the wake of the scandal did not anticipate a future president willing to flout institutional norms and test the limits of every available safeguard.

In his Bicentennial speech, Ford asked, “Are the institutions under which we live working the way they should? Are the foundations laid in 1776 and 1789 still strong enough and sound enough to resist the tremors of our times? Are our God-given rights secure, our hard-won liberties protected?”

Fifty years later, these questions no longer sound like a celebration of American resilience—they stand as an urgent test of whether our democracy can still summon the courage, accountability, and civic faith that once enabled it to correct its own course.

July 7, 2026

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - This week I am thinking about what it means to go back to school in a country that still rations opportunity. The stores are selling backpacks and dorm décor, but the deeper question is who gets access to education, who must borrow for it, and which institutions continue to carry the burden of Black possibility.

The fireworks have dimmed, and the Fourth-of-You-Lie sales are waning. In this country, we commemorate through commerce and celebrate through retail activity, so even though we are just a few days into July, back-to-school signs are already shouting from store windows and websites.

As with every milestone in this country, inequality roars. Some students will return to school with new laptops, quiet rooms, family-paid tuition, and networks that cushion every stumble. Others will return carrying debt, doubt, family obligations, food insecurity, transportation challenges, and the accumulated disadvantages of underfunded schools and under-resourced communities.

The back-to-school season is marketed as a fresh start. For too many students, it is also a reminder that opportunity in America has always been rationed.

The vanguard is not always the largest part of the army. It is the front edge. It moves first. It absorbs blows. It clears the path. By that definition, HBCUs have always been the vanguard. They were built because this country’s higher education system excluded Black people by law, custom, violence, and contempt. Their founding question was not, “How do we reproduce privilege?” Their founding question was, “How do we cultivate genius where America has refused to see it?”

That question remains urgent.

HBCUs enroll only a fraction of Black college students, but their impact is outsized. In 2022, HBCUs enrolled about 9 percent of Black college students, yet they produced 16 percent of the bachelor’s degrees earned by Black students in 2021–22. UNCF reports that HBCUs generate $16.5 billion in annual economic impact, support more than 136,000 jobs, and that the 2021 HBCU graduating class is projected to earn $146 billion over their lifetimes.

These are not sentimental institutions. They are economic engines, leadership factories, and community anchors.

Still, HBCUs are too often asked to do transformative work with transactional support.

That contradiction is especially sharp now, as federal student loan policy shifts under the feet of students and families. The Biden-era SAVE plan — Saving on a Valuable Education — was designed to make repayment less punishing by tying payments to income and family size, reducing monthly payments for many borrowers, limiting runaway interest, and creating a shorter forgiveness path for some small-balance borrowers. Now SAVE has ended, and millions of borrowers have been told to move into other repayment plans.

The change lands first on borrowers already in repayment, but current students are not untouched. Undergraduates will face a narrower repayment landscape when they leave school. Families will confront new Parent PLUS limits. Graduate and professional students will face new borrowing caps just as advanced credentials remain expensive and often necessary. Graduate PLUS loans, which previously allowed many graduate students to borrow up to the cost of attendance, are being phased out for new borrowers. Grad PLUS was the backstop many students used when tuition and living costs exceeded unsubsidized loan limits.

These numbers are not abstractions. They determine who can become a nurse practitioner, a physical therapist, a psychologist, a professor, a public health leader, a lawyer, a dentist, a physician, or a minister. They determine who can move from the first degree to the next rung. They determine whether talent is nurtured or stranded.

For Black students, the stakes are higher because the debt burden is heavier. Black students are more likely to borrow for college, more likely to borrow more, and more likely to struggle in repayment because the racial wealth gap follows them from home to campus and from campus to workplace. A loan policy that may look race-neutral on paper can still deepen racial inequality in practice.

That is the context in which HBCUs do their work. They educate students through inequality, against inequality, and beyond inequality. They do not merely polish privilege. They cultivate possibility. They take seriously the students America too often treats as afterthoughts, and they turn potential into leadership.

Having led an HBCU, I know both the miracle, the math, and the myth. At Bennett College, I saw daily what HBCUs do with too little: stretch dollars, nurture brilliance, hold students close, and insist that Black women’s futures were worth fighting for. I know the devotion of faculty, the exhaustion of administrators, the anxiety of families, and the constant scramble for resources. I also know this: HBCUs cannot be praised in February and underfunded in July. They cannot be applauded at commencements and ignored in appropriations. They cannot be celebrated as cultural treasures while their students are left to navigate a debt system that punishes aspiration.

The country loves the symbolism of back-to-school season. New backpacks. New notebooks. New slogans. But the real question is not what is on sale, it's what is at stake.

If HBCUs are the vanguard, then the question is not whether they have earned our admiration. They have. The question is whether they will receive the investment, protection, and respect that their record demands.

Back to school should not mean back to debt, back to rationed opportunity, or back to the same old inequalities dressed up in fresh retail packaging. It should mean back to possibility. Back to purpose. Back to institutions that have carried us when the broader society would not.

HBCUs are still carrying us. The question is whether public policy will finally carry its share.

May 11, 2026

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - What we are seeing in America today is something that Black people haven’t experienced in a very long time—citizenship with no workable Voting Rights Act in place. Immediately after the Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais ruling, five southern states wasted little time in redrawing new congressional voting maps that would eventually wipe out Black-majority districts in their states. We can’t place all of the blame for the dilution of Black and Latino voting power through election manipulation at the feet of this one Supreme Court decision. Last July, President Trump ordered Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to redistrict his state to create an additional five Republican-leaning congressional districts.

The president intends to maintain political power and control by circumventing the will of voters by eliminating fair congressional districting through partisan and racial gerrymandering. To have this type of president make this type of order and then have a state governor carry it out is disturbing. As a result, we have a “redistricting arms race.” This is what happens when America elects a robber baron as president. A robber baron is a term used to describe powerful 19th-century American industrialists and financiers who amassed enormous wealth through unethical and controlling practices. Their key tactics included (exploiting workers), maintaining wealth by paying extremely low wages and providing poor working conditions, (monopolies) formed “trusts” to control entire industries, allowing illegal or aggressive means to dictate prices and eliminate competitors, (political corruption) influencing government officials through lobbying or outright bribery to secure favorable land grants and subsidies. Critics often focused on their greed and the unethical methods by which they created human suffering and extreme economic disparity between the very wealthy and the poor. In the late 19th century, the top 1% owned roughly 51% of property while the bottom 44% owned only 1.1%.

These robber barons included John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil), Andrew Carnegie (Carnegie Steel), Cornelius Vanderbilt (Railroads and shipping), and J.P. Morgan (finance & banking). Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, when asked by a reporter how much money he needed to finally have enough, said, “Just a bit more.” Rockefeller was America’s first billionaire and was forced by the government to dissolve his monopoly. Cornelius Vanderbilt was known for ruthlessly eliminating competition in transportation. Jay Gould was one of the worst robber barons. He was an American railroad magnate who founded the Gould business dynasty. Historians single out Jay Gould not because of his wealth, but because he repeatedly used deception, manipulation, and political corruption to extract wealth from others rather than create it through integrity.

Gould’s pattern was to rig markets, water stock, bribe officials, and crush labor, leaving investors and workers ruined while he walked away richer. Many Gilded Age tycoons were ruthless, but also associated themselves with major productive achievements or philanthropy. Gould, on the other hand, was notorious for enriching himself through schemes that even contemporaries called socially destructive. He was infamous for how he treated workers, reinforcing his image as morally callous. During labor conflicts in the 1880s, Gould was quoted as saying he could “hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” a line that captured how many Americans saw his willingness to set groups of workers against each other. In the Gilded Age, many industrialists were harsh employers, but Gould’s open contempt for labor and use of violence and division made him stand out. Even during his life, Gould “considered himself to be the most hated man in late-19th-century America,” and contemporary press, clergy, and politicians depicted him as the very embodiment of greed. In short, Gould is cited as one of the most unscrupulous and worst robber barons because of his large-scale and corrupt political influence, his willingness to destabilize the national economy for profit, and his aggressive, often brutal opposition to labor.

What we have today in the White House is a modern-day Jay Gould in President Donald Trump, who entered his second term in office using robber baron tactics to govern. The way observers saw Jay Gould deliberately run companies into the ground and then rebuild them in ways that benefited him is the same tactic Trump is doing with the federal government. The unfair advantage of congressional representation gained through unethical racial and political gerrymandering parallels the monopoly tactics of the 19th-century robber barons.

Robber barons never totally went away. We have them in modern tech moguls such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. We simply never had one as president. Even King Charles III has noticed a different and alarming America under the current administration. Speaking before a rare joint meeting of Congress, he gave a subtle warning regarding the need to uphold democratic traditions, specifically highlighting the importance of checks and balances on executive power. It has been a while since Black America has experienced a Jay Gould-type robber baron as president, particularly one whose goal is to ruthlessly destroy Black political power and prosperity.

David W. Marshall is the founder of the faith-based organization TRB: The Reconciled Body, and the author of the book God Bless Our Divided America.

May 10, 2026

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - In politics, fear has a color.

For most of American history, that color has been Black.

No ad has taught that lesson more brutally than the Willie Horton ad of 1988. It showed the face of a Black man convicted of murder. It blamed Michael Dukakis for a furlough program. It told voters mercy was dangerous.

After that, clemency withered. Democrats especially learned to treat grace as a trap. To this day, too many Democratic politicians fear using their clemency powers. Even when their cowardice means people receive punishment they do not deserve.

Republican governors and presidents have often been more sweeping. Our nation’s current president has used the pardon power boldly and repeatedly. He has never seemed afraid of the power itself. Too many Democrats still are.

This spring marks 10 years since the Bernie Sanders campaign made a very different kind of ad. Nearly three decades after Willie Horton, I asked the campaign to do the opposite. Put a Black man convicted of murder in a presidential ad. Not to destroy the campaign. To strengthen it.

His name was Chris Wilson.

Chris grew up in Baltimore. He saw violence young. At 17, he took a man’s life. He went to prison.

There is no hiding from that truth. There should not be.

But Chris did what we say we want people to do. He took responsibility. He educated himself. He built a master plan for his life. He came home determined to work, mentor, and help others escape the traps that nearly swallowed him.

At the time, Chris was painting my house. When the campaign came to film the ad, Chris helped find the location.

To me, his story was not a liability. It was the point. Real public safety requires redemption. Prevention. Education. Jobs. Second chances.

The idea carried risk. Given the legacy of Willie Horton, some had concerns. That was understandable. This was not a safe testimonial. It was a direct challenge to a powerful racial taboo.

But in a nation with the highest incarceration rate on Earth, Willie Horton politics had trained campaigns to distrust voters. My experience told me voters were better than that.

Years earlier, I had been part of polling for a big-box retailer that wanted to know what would happen if customers learned it provided second-chance employment for formerly incarcerated people. Customers said they would be more likely to shop there. The company stood to gain market share, not lose it.

People were ready to believe in second chances. Politics just had to catch up.

Everyone signed off on taking the risk. The campaign made the ad. The name said it all: “Be Bold, Change the System.”

There was Chris, looking into the camera, telling the truth. No hiding. No sugarcoating. No mug shot. No monster. Just a man. A Black man. A Baltimore man. A man who had caused harm, paid a terrible price, and fought to become a force for good.

It was the anti-Willie Horton ad.

The Willie Horton ad said Black men are the reason to fear mercy. The Chris Wilson ad said Black men are among the reasons to believe in redemption.

And it worked. The ad drew roughly a million clicks in the first 24 hours. It sent Bernie’s support up fast in Illinois. It was used powerfully in Michigan and Missouri. It moved people because it trusted them.

Chris later received a book contract. The Master Plan told how he refused to let prison be the end of his life. That work became the basis for an education program that has trained more than 100,000 incarcerated people.

Today, Chris is a celebrated artist whose paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

That is what Willie Horton politics never wants America to see. It wants to freeze a Black man forever at the worst moment of his life. Chris Wilson proves something else. Redemption does not erase accountability. It fulfills it.

Ten years later, the lesson is urgent. Willie Horton politics is still with us. It has changed targets. Today, the scary Black man in the old ad has too often become the scary brown immigrant in the new one. Campaigns still take one terrible crime, attach it to a whole people, and tell voters mercy, due process, and fairness will get them killed.

The faces change. The formula does not.

The Chris Wilson ad, and the life he has led since, prove the best way to combat racist, authoritarian propaganda is with the bold and transformative truth.

Bold enough to believe accountability and redemption can live in the same sentence. Bold enough to trust voters with the full humanity of a Black man who changed his life. Bold enough to bury the politics Willie Horton made famous — and build a politics worthy of the people of every color we too often leave behind.

In America, the color of trust is the color of the blood in all our hearts — red and blue, flowing together as one.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.

To Be Equal 
May 9, 2026

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - "The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave. Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the States where that law continues to matter—the States still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting—minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process."  Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan

Instead of taking an objective look at the state of voting rights in this country that is rooted in its history to exploit rather than provide equality, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board came together to draft a piece titled Democrats Have a Jim Crow Fantasy.”

The piece suggests that the Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais likely will have no meaningful impact on voting rights, basing its argument on the fact that Black voter turnout in midterms increased after Shelby v. Holder in 2013.

After cherry-picking statistics about midterm turnout in 2018 and 2022, the board had the audacity to state that “Many states in the South—including Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia—have no-excuse absentee voting” while completely ignoring the fact that the administration is aggressively trying to limit absentee voting ahead of this year’s midterms.

It also failed to mention that since 2020, an election with record voter turnout because of mail-in ballots, states responded by passing a record number of voter suppression laws with tactics that include: enforcing strict voter ID laws, shown to disproportionately impact lower income voters, purging voter rolls, and in many majority Black communities, literally removing ballot boxes.

Regarding Shelby v. Holder, the piece also ignored how the decision reduced Black political participation.

Using nearly one billion individual voter‑file records, researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the average county formerly subject to Section 5 preclearance, the relative participation of nonwhite voters worsened after federal oversight ended.

Critically, the study estimates that absent Shelby County, the white–Black turnout gap would have grown by only about 4–5 percentage points by 2022. Instead, it grew by roughly 9 points, nearly double what national trends alone would predict. That divergence reflects a causal effect of ending preclearance, not mere coincidence.

It doesn’t take a study to see how Louisiana v. Callais will impact Black voter representation in Congress; we can look at the arms race to redistrict the South that took place within days of the decision.

The editorial closed out by saying that “The Court’s Callais ruling may result in less racial polarization to the extent that both parties will have to compete more vigorously for minority voters rather than packing them into majority-minority districts for partisan gain.”

As we see with states immediately rushing to eliminate any competition in their newly drawn maps, its clear that the real fantasy is both parties competing for minority voters.

Louisiana went as far as to cancel its primary elections to redraw a map that could potentially eliminate all of its Black districts and Tennessee created a map that establishes a one-party system that eliminates the only sitting Black member of Congress the state has.

No one claims that today resembles 1965 Selma in form. But the data show that federal oversight mattered, and its removal disproportionately burdened minority voters.

Callais was yet another nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act. It co-signs the dilution of the votes of Black communities which may result in the reduction of Black congressional representation in numbers worse than after Reconstruction.

Calling this reality a “fantasy” is not analysis; it is evasion and only underscores the urgency of restoring the protections that once enforced them.