Oct. 4, 2025

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - In my house, two legacies face each other.

On one wall hangs a reproduction of The Spirit of ’76, painted by my cousin Archibald M. Willard for the nation’s hundredth birthday. The central drummer in that painting — the older man leading the trio — was modeled after Archibald’s father, my cousin too.

The Spirit of ’76 is America’s most famous Revolutionary painting — the definitive image of independence, instantly recognizable wherever it appears. First displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, it captured the mood of a nation celebrating its hundredth year and looking back on its birth in revolution.

For my family, it is not just symbolic. My father descends from six officers in the Massachusetts Line of the Continental Army — and from a seventh, a 13-year-old fifer who fought at Lexington and Concord. He was the youngest combatant on that battlefield, carrying both a fife and a musket into the first fight of the Revolution. He lived into his 90s, long enough to be photographed — the only person from that battlefield whose face we can still see.

That painting is the definitive picture of 1776: a battered but unbroken march for freedom and equality. My family is literally in the frame — and in the fight.

Across the room sits another inheritance: the desk of my mother’s great-great-grandfather, Peter G. Morgan, born enslaved in Nottoway County, Virginia, in 1817.

Beside it rests the courting set he bought so his three daughters, once freed, could welcome suitors in dignity.

My family isn’t just in the picture of 1776. We live the unfinished fight of 1876.

A wager for freedom and equality

In 1864, while Petersburg was under Confederate siege, Morgan walked into a Confederate court and freed his wife and daughters.

Virginia law was brutal: any Black person gaining freedom — and their family — had 12 months to leave the state. Fail to leave, and you could be seized and enslaved again.

So Morgan wagered exile — or even re-enslavement — if Confederate authorities got to them before the Union did. Still, he took the risk. He bet everything on freedom and equality.

He was right on the first count. And for a time, right on the second.

Reconstruction’s promise

After the war, Morgan served in Virginia’s House of Delegates from 1869 to 1871. He sat on Petersburg’s city council and school board.

He helped build schools, relief associations, and even a bank. He believed that Reconstruction — America’s “second founding” — could finally make freedom and equality real.

But he also lived to see those hopes collapse.

The collapse came just after the hopeful celebration of 1876, with the Compromise of 1877 — a backroom deal to resolve the contested race between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford Hayes. Republicans kept the White House by giving in to Democratic demands to pull federal troops from the South.

With the old Union soldiers gone, white supremacists unleashed murderous violence to retake power. Reconstruction ended not with a bang but a betrayal — and lynch mobs burning human flesh.

Twin revolutions, both unfinished

That is America in a nutshell: twin spirits, twin moments, both unfinished.

1776 was for freedom.

1876 was for equality.

Yet neither dream dies.

The fire passes from Harriet Tubman to Ella Baker. From Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. From Chicago’s Jacqueline Jackson to Chicago’s Michelle Obama. And it burns on in young organizers today.

The warning is clear: freedom and equality are fragile, and gains can be rolled back. Today, both are under attack again — with democracy itself on the line, racial equality undermined, and immigrants targeted with open hostility.

The charge is clearer still: if my great-great-great-grandfather could bet on freedom and equality in 1864 while Petersburg burned — and my father’s young ancestor could join his father and brothers in arms at Lexington — surely we can fight for freedom and equality in our own time.

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

Sept. 29, 2025

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - For 200 years – the 17th and 18th centuries – Africans came to America involuntarily and enslaved. Then fast forward to the 21st century. The news is Sub Saharan Africans are coming to America willingly, in search of opportunity and freedom.

The trend was driven by the 1965 Hart-Celler immigration law that ended 40 years of racially discriminatory U.S. policy that preferred Northern European immigrants but rejected Southern and Eastern Europeans, plus other peoples from Asia and Africa.

By 1980, 15 years after Hart-Celler, reported the Migration Policy Institute, 130,000 African immigrants had arrived in the United States. In subsequent decades the numbers climbed to:

* 265,000 in 1990,

* 691,000 in 2000,

* 1,327,000 in 2010, and

* 2,094,000 in 2019.

Furthermore, the new Americans were distinct in where they choose to live. In 1993, when the NBC “Today” morning show spent a week telling stories on the African continent, the National Association of Black Journalists held its annual convention in Houston. A local journalist announced with pride that greater Houston housed the third-largest Nigerian community outside of that originating nation (London UK was No. 2.)

Why those people came to Texas? Because of Houston’s oil industry that related to Nigeria’s and because the hot, humid climate was familiar. NBA and collegiate champion Akeem Olajuwon came to Houston for school and athletic glory (and years later, another 7-footer Dikembe Mutombo of the Congo was a student-athlete at Georgetown who blossomed as probably the NBA’s most feared shot blocker.)

Another geographical USA hotspot was the state of Maryland, especially affluent Prince George’s and Harford counties in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. megalopolis.

During my seven-year span as a professor at Morgan State University-Baltimore I relished teaching the grandchildren of African exchange students who had been coming to the USA since the 1950s The grandkids enriched my African Diaspora and Communication class as we collaborated on four cultural mileposts: fashion, food, music, and religion/spirituality.

For example, enslaved Africans brought rice to the New World and mass produced it in the Carolinas. A student informed me that African women sewed rice grains into their braided hair to smuggle and then plant something familiar in the New World.

The kalimba, a thumb piano had a distinct sound in the hands of Maurice White of Kennedy Center-honored, multi-Grammy winning band Earth, Wind and Fire.

The banjo too is a distinctively African instrument, memorialized in late 19^th century painter Henry Ossawa Tanner’s “The Banjo Lesson.”

As for religion and spirituality, Africans in America include Christians, Muslims, and Hebrews. Egyptians and East Africans people who were Christians before many Europeans.

A third regional concentration of 21st century Africans is in Twin Cities Minneapolis-St. Paul. Many were former refugees who escaped drought, famine, and regional wars and were hosted by humanitarian organizations.

U.S. Representative IIhan Omar was one of them. She now navigates the halls of Congress, distinct in her head wraps. Famously feisty, Omar was in the news this month because U.S. Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina tried to smear Omar and possibly have her stripped of key committee assignments. Mace’s stunt failed because Omar’s Democratic caucus plus some Republicans by a one-vote margin spared Omar from sanctions.

There are martyred African immigrants. In the 1999, Amadou Diallo, 23, of Guinea was a New York merchant who police mistakenly thought had brandished a handgun. The object was the wallet he pulled from his pocket. Multiple cops fired their guns, and their ricocheting bullets made may have made some of them believe Diallo was shooting at them.

He wasn’t, but 41 shots hit him 19 times, the name of a Bruce Springsteen song that angered many cops, but memorialized a tragedy.

Diallo was a victim, but Dr. Bennet Omalu was a sports hero. Based in NFL-loving Pittsburgh Steeler country, Omalu researched the connection between helmet-to-helmet collisions and traumatic brain injuries that shortened player’s lives and made some suicidal.

Initially, Omalu was ridiculed and dismissed by the NFL establishment but in time the science compelled the leaders of America’s most popular sport to embrace a concussion protocol to protect player’s health. Omalu may have saved NFL, collegiate, and high school football before enough parents reconsidered having their sons play the game.

The 21st century African immigrants in America experience have enriched this nation just as immigrants from every continent improved America, whether it is savory jollof rice, or Afro Beat music (recently made a Grammy Award category), or NFL and power five college stars with distinctive African surnames on the back of their jerseys.

(Never mind Donald J. Trump’s vulgar tirade about “shithole” African countries, nor his recent executive order to ban immigrants from a dozen Sub Saharan and Western Hemisphere nations.)

On TV, consider “Bob Loves Abisola,” the CBS romantic sitcom (2019-2024) where Bob, a white sock salesman from Detroit falls in love with Abisola, a nurse from Nigeria, who also works in the Motor City.

Abisola’s African co-star is also a standup comic. Gina Yashere has a bit in which she says striving Nigerian families in America expect their children to become one of three things: “Doctor, lawyer, or embarrassment to the family.”

Editor's Note: This is an updated version of a column that appeared last week.

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - When millions rallied in defense of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel—giants of late-night television whose dismissal or censorship loomed—the outcry was swift and effective. Their platforms were preserved, at least for now. But for countless lesser-known writers, columnists, and community truth-tellers, censorship has long been the silent norm, and under the shadow of Trumpism, it threatens to grow more suffocating.

For decades, I worked inside major journalism institutions that proudly invoked the virtues of a free press, while quietly silencing those who dared live out those principles. I was one of the first Black women to sit on the editorial board of a major newspaper. My work was not dismissed because it lacked quality, but because my voice—rooted in experiences outside the white male corridors of power—refused to conform. I believed my perspective could enrich our coverage. Instead, it branded me an outsider.

This struggle is not new. It is the timeless clash between voices that testify from the margins and systems that demand loyalty to privilege. When I wrote about poverty, inequality, or the struggles of everyday people, I was not trying to be rebellious—I was bearing witness. But privilege prefers a flattering portrait over an honest mirror.

I recall one editorial meeting where a U.S. senator boasted about billions in “savings” from massive health-care cuts. When I asked how many children would be left malnourished or sick, the silence was chilling—as though two skunks had wandered into the boardroom.

Too often, stories vital to Black communities were dismissed as “not news” or were gutted in editing until their urgency evaporated. My investigation into Medicaid policies that destroyed African American doctors’ practices is one example. Patients went untreated, livelihoods were ruined—but because the devastation was concentrated in Black neighborhoods, the story never made the front page.

Meanwhile, my white colleagues’ opinions often sailed unchallenged to print while mine were interrogated, delayed, or dismissed. In the newsroom, as in the streets, the fight for equality was unrelenting. My refusal to “play along” ultimately cost me my position. My words were branded a “poison pen”—too inconvenient for the powerful, too committed to the voiceless.

What was brushed aside as “minor” in my case now plays out on a national scale. In-house censorship has metastasized, increasingly echoing the playbook of authoritarian regimes.

Former President Donald Trump has made his contempt for independent media explicit. He has pressured networks like ABC and CBS to soften critical coverage. He has filed lawsuits against The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. His allies in Congress stripped federal funding from NPR and PBS. Under his influence, the FCC has targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives while promising to root out so-called “liberal bias.”

He recently stated outright that networks, newspapers, and talk show hosts who portray him unfavorably will be punished. That threat is already reshaping once-trusted newsrooms.

Distinguished Black journalists have been disproportionately targeted. At The Washington Post, columnist Karen Attiah was dismissed after she challenged right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk’s vile claim that Black women—including Michelle Obama and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—“lack brain processing power.” Such voices are not just silenced—they are erased.

The danger goes further. The administration has imposed rules on Pentagon reporters requiring them to pledge not to publish information without official authorization. If such restrictions hold, they will not stop at the Pentagon. They will creep across agencies, shackling journalists and crippling democracy itself.

Silencing voices—whether late-night comedians or unknown columnists—does not erase the truths they speak. It widens the gulf between those in power and those who endure its consequences.

History shows us what happens when censorship becomes law: democracy collapses, and tyranny fills the void. My warning is simple: what happens to the “minor” voices today will happen to the major ones tomorrow.

• Among bachelor’s degree holders, 82.9 percent of Black students are the most likely to borrow federal loans.
• Four years after graduation with a bachelor’s degree, Black student borrowers owe $25,000 more than white borrowers.
• Four years after graduation, Black borrowers owe an average of 188% more than whites.
• Black borrowers are most likely to struggle financially due to student loan debt, with average monthly payments of $258 for undergraduate studies.