Fine Print

What did you do when Jim Crow came knocking? That’s the question we’re going to have to answer for our children and grandchildren. Not just one day in the far future. Right now.

As Frederick Hom Dow bends down to brush off the flower residue and dust from the 1965 Freedom Plaza plaque that bears his father’s name, he points to the first of three Chinese characters, 譚金源, that sit next to the English words, “Harry Hom Dow.”

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Maya Angelou’s words have never been truer as we consider the motivation behind the Department of Justice’s attack on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

It matters more than ever at a time when nightclubs, lounges, and music venues—the gathering spaces that have long served as the connective tissue of Black social and civic life—are disappearing at an alarming rate. And it might not be a coincidence that democracy is dying along with the spaces where we learned to practice it.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but buying the Evil Empire album by Rage Against The Machine when I was a junior in high school fundamentally altered my brain chemistry.

Coretta Scott King, who would’ve turned 99 years old this month, devoted her life to anti-war and anti-capitalist ideals. Those philosophies would make her an enemy of this current regime. And yet, we remember her as a hero who, along with her husband and countless others, brought this country closer to its truest ideals.