On April 14, 1865, celebrated stage actor and über-racist John Wilkes Booth slipped into President Abraham Lincoln’s booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.; pulled out his Derringer pistol … and you probably learned the rest in grade school.
America had technically ended the Civil War days earlier, but Booth wasn’t having it. He killed Lincoln for doing the unthinkable: defeating the South and the institution of slavery. In response, 12 days later, authorities traced him to a tobacco barn in Virginia and blew his ass away.
In reality, although he didn’t realize it, Booth had accomplished his mission. For him, white supremacy was not only an ideal; it was a way of life. It was what America should be: a nation where whites as a caste lived on a superior plane to all others. The notion that the nation would be one where nonwhites could pursue equality was unacceptable.
Because Lincoln was dead, his Vice President, southern sympathizer Andrew Johnson, took over.
Needless to say, the Confederates were not held accountable for staging a rebellion against the country. Instead, their defeated leadership became free to engineer a white supremacist empire in what was supposed to be a democracy.
The Civil War was fought to defeat the Confederacy, which was bent on upholding slavery as an institution (although enslaved Blacks had been fighting for and creating paths out of slavery themselves for years). After Emancipation, slavery was illegal, but still took years, some say decades, to be extinguished. However, taking its place in the American South was the institutionalization of racism. That meant creating laws to subjugate Black people, eliminating Black public officials, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as a political force, and ultimately Jim Crow as the standard legal thinking in half of the country.
If you lived in the South, the concept of living in a democratic society was as far away as the North Star which other Black folks had followed before to escape enslavement. Even if you lived in the North, it is likely you migrated from the South, and therefore were not shielded from racism. But since a vast majority of Black people lived below the Mason-Dixon line, that meant they were subject to oppression by conservative politicians and institutions, even if it meant generations of deadly violence and domestic terrorism to keep them in line.
America’s failure to eliminate sociopathic racism left her with unfinished business that prevents her from becoming the nation she professes to be: a nation in which “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is reality. We have spent 10 generations not succeeding at this.
A phalanx of people will say that Black people have every opportunity to advance and thrive in America. We say you could argue that is true, given the number of us who have been successful — but that’s in spite of the obstacles generally put in our way.
But let’s not beat around the bush here: The rise of a white supremacist narrative in the last 10 years, which derived from a century and a half of a political ideal to keep whites at the top of a hierarchy, no matter the cost, clearly means that the Civil War win did not end white supremacy, and now, with 250 years behind us, we are all under threat because of it.
There is no question in our minds that the MAGA movement is a white supremacist, Christian nationalist platform. Its intention is to permanently solidify whites, especially white men, at the top of the American social, political, and economic hierarchy. Some involved in the movement will openly admit this. Others will deny it, saying they are color-blind or have no problem with anyone of other backgrounds. Ask them if they’re okay with their color blindness with a nonwhite president, vice president, cabinet, Supreme Court, and speaker of the House all at the same time, though, and they would wince.
Just last week, Republican Sen. Thomas Massie said, “I think it’s ironic that we control the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House, and we’re yelling election fraud? … We won all the damn elections and we’re in charge. And what are we doing with it?”
He’s absolutely right. America’s leadership is all under President Trump’s thumb to do his bidding, kidnapping people and expelling them from the country without due process, killing healthcare for millions, upending the economy with a series of moronic tariffs, coupled with an ill-conceived war with Iran. The Supreme Court has been used as a tool to attack Americans’ rights as if by a greedy king seeking to lead by fear and intimidation. That birthright citizenship was upheld by the court was a beacon among other decisions like the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and removal of temporary protected status for Haitians and Syrians. That birthright citizenship was upheld by the court was a beacon among other decisions like the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and removal of temporary protected status for Haitians and Syrians.
If you’re running the show, as Massie described, why would you need to make things worse? Well, if you look at the racist preaching of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, the cruelty is the point. It’s not enough to win; it’s about punishing and subjugating everyone you dislike.
That’s what white supremacy is. The purpose of it was really never to benefit the republic; it was always about whites in power waging perpetual war against everyone else to maintain control. However, oppression is always a stupid business model. It is costly. It takes resources that could otherwise improve things. Ultimately, having the power to do good but choosing to do evil forces you to create a mythology about yourself as something beautiful, when everyone knows you are covering up how ugly you are with bad makeup.
This is why we put a burning Confederate battle flag on this week’s cover. We knew it would piss people off. In fact, we hoped it would. We have unfinished business and it starts with scraping that makeup off. America has to finally look itself in the mirror and see that allowing the white supremacist narrative to persist in this country for centuries has only put it on a path to destruction and it is time to pivot, once again, in a better direction.
In his famous oration in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King — before he spoke of his “dream” — said something far more radical: “America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”
It’s time for America to stop bouncing its checks, finally do what it set out to do during the Civil War, and end white supremacy to extinguish what Trump and his cronies are doing to the country.
If not, expect future historians to speak of the fall of America as we currently speak of the fall of Rome. The Romans, too, chose folly over fairness. They, too, decided an empire ruled by ridiculous men was better than a republic that pursued true democracy. They, too, were overrun by the avaricious and incompetent, clinging to the belief they were superior and godlike.
What, then, will America choose?
