The lectures in this section focused on American social movements. In 2012 and 2013, I addressed movements for women’s rights, voting rights, racial equity, and LGBTQ2S+ liberation. Each lecture, either implicitly or explicitly, addressed issues of law: organized efforts to secure rights through legislation or through the enforcement of existing laws, challenges to laws that limited rights or liberties, and the power and limits of the law to achieve change or retard it.
I had explored the historical roots of contemporary social issues in previous lectures, trying to be transparent about the concerns that fueled my historical questions. My process shifted subtly in these lectures. I had previously begun by thinking about the anniversaries of historic events, like the publication of the Kerner Commission Report or the centennial of the Colorado Labor Wars, and had reflected on the contemporary relevance of their histories. Beginning in 2012, my talks responded to immediate events that pushed me to return to precedents and historical roots. I had become more comfortable addressing U.S. issues with Canadian audiences and had become secure enough to tackle Canadian issues as well.
In 2012, I addressed gender bias in Canadian and U.S. higher education as I explored the progress toward gender equity in higher education following the passage of Title IX of the U.S. Educational Amendments of 1972 and the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. Both legal documents forbade discrimination based on sex. Both had supported positive change. But achieving equity required more than the law, and remained then, as now, an unfinished project.
Inspired by one line in President Barack Obama’s Second Inaugural Address, in 2013, I compared the histories of Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall, three pivotal events in the struggles for women’s, African American, and LGBTQ2S+ rights. By the time President Obama spoke, Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall had become mythic symbols of the three liberation movements in the United States.1
The long struggle for woman suffrage in the United States is usually dated from the first U.S. Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. U.S. women won the vote in some states and territories beginning with Wyoming Territory in 1869, but did not win the vote nationally until the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.2 African American men were theoretically enfranchised in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteed the rights of citizenship to former slaves and the right to vote to all male citizens. In 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” That promise remained unfulfilled for many African Americans, and the U.S. Congress had still not passed legislation to enforce voting rights for African Americans by March 9, 1965, when non-violent voting rights activists in Selma, Alabama, tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge and march to the state capital in Montgomery. They marched to protest the murder of voting rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama State trooper. But Dallas County sheriff’s deputies and those same State troopers blocked them, and the nation witnessed that “Bloody Sunday” as the law officers beat, clubbed, and tear gassed non-violent demonstrators. More than fifty were hospitalized, among them John Lewis, then the Chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and from 1987 until his death in 2020 U.S. Representative from Georgia’s Fifth District. That brutal spectacle prompted President Lyndon Johnson to introduce the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Congress passed, and the President signed into law on August 6, 1965.
The Fourteenth Amendment, one of the most litigated portions of the U.S. Constitution, also provided the basis for Supreme Court decisions guaranteeing women’s reproductive rights in Roe v. Wade (1972) and the rights of same-sex couples to marry in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). The modern movement for LGBTQ2S+ rights is often dated from a 1969 event known as Stonewall, when gays, lesbians, and transgender people rioted against police who raided the Stonewall Inn in New York City and threatened its gay and transgender patrons. The Stonewall protesters did not immediately demand legal change, but the movement they energized went on to demand full citizenship rights regardless of sexuality or gender, including the rights to non-discrimination in employment, housing, military service, and marriage.
My 2014 lecture focused on children murdered because of their race, ethnicity, and class, and on responses to those tragic losses. Although most of my work and many of my lectures addressed the history of social inequality, my 2014 lecture, more than any other, responded to contemporary events: the murders of two African American youths, Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin, by armed individuals claiming the right to self-defence against unarmed teenagers because they “felt threatened,” and therefore justified under the Florida “stand your ground” law. I examined the youths’ deaths, and their parents’ anguished responses. When the boys were murdered, I had been thinking about the centennials of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre (which I addressed in my 2009 lecture), and the 1913 Calumet, Michigan, copper miners’ strike, two labor conflicts in which children died. My lecture explored these unconnected tragedies, and the historical constructions of race that linked and separated the murders of African American youths and those of miners’ children a century earlier.
One of the minor editorial changes I made to these lectures was to substitute the past tense for the present tense when I had referred to then-current events. And yet, for each of the issues raised in these lectures, the present tense remains in some sense accurate. The stubborn persistence of prejudice and discrimination after legal change had been achieved recurred disturbingly throughout these lectures. I was troubled by parallels between the successful efforts to undermine African American rights theoretically guaranteed in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution following the Civil War, and the efforts to undercut the hard-won legislative achievements of the Civil Rights Movement.
In neither the United States nor Canada have we eradicated inequalities of race, class, gender, or sexuality. In the United States, the legal protections of Roe v. Wade that guaranteed the right to reproductive choice, including the right to abortions, were eroded in numerous states through legal restrictions on the clinics that provided reproductive health services. Then, on June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. A Court dominated by anti-choice jurists, three of whom had been nominated by President Donald Trump, voted 6–3 to overturn the 1972 Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion in the United States for half a century. At the same time, nativist tropes used a century ago to combat union labor were revived, as they have been periodically throughout American history, to resist racialized immigrants from Central America, Haiti, and the Middle East, represented dramatically in President Trump’s attempt to ban Muslim immigrants during his first days in office.3
Some of the great achievements of the African American Civil Rights Movement have been eroded and remain under threat. On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder overturned the key oversight provisions in the 1965 Voting Rights Act: Section 5, which required certain states and local governments to obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices; and subsection (b) of Section 4, which specified the formula that determined which jurisdictions were subject to preclearance based on their histories of racial discrimination in voting.4 Removing the oversight provisions rendered the Act largely unenforceable and opened the way to voter suppression. Writing for the majority in the narrow 5–4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts justified the move, asserting “that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions,” although, as Roberts admitted, “voting discrimination still exists; no one doubts that.” To which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the minority, responded, “But the Court today terminates the remedy that proved to be best suited to block that discrimination.” Citing numerous continuing cases of racial discrimination in access to voting, Ginsburg concluded: “The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective. The Court appears to believe that the VRA’s success in eliminating the specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclearance is no longer needed. … With that belief, and the argument derived from it, history repeats itself.” And indeed, it has, through restrictive identification requirements, limiting the numbers and locations of polling places, and restricting early voting options.5 In the eleven years since the Shelby decision, states have passed over a hundred laws restricting access to the vote, laws that have disproportionately affected people of color. Many of the new laws were enacted in states that had a history of racial discrimination in voting.
Racism and gun violence have not been eradicated. African American youths continue to die from the deadly combination of institutionalized racism, internalized racist assumptions, and easy access to guns. In 2018 the National Council on Family Relations published a report, “Gun Violence and the Minority Experience,” by Yolanda T. Mitchell and Tiffany L. Bromfield, who found that the frequent gun violence in poor racial ethnic urban communities received much less media attention than mass violence affecting White Americans. Mass shootings in largely White schools, like the tragic mass murders at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut on December 14, 2012; Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018; and Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 24, 2022, captured widespread media coverage and public sympathy. Nonetheless, students of color remained disproportionately the victims of gun violence on school grounds.6 In 2017, almost 3,000 children were shot and killed in the United States annually, claiming the lives of ten times more Black children than White children.7 Yet gun violence that killed Whites was viewed as a social problem, while gun violence that claimed Black lives was viewed as “a separate, individualized matter.” As Mitchell and Bromfield argued:
Movements born from gun violence help to expand the picture. Students from Parkland have organized rallies, and the news media covers the “march” and fortitude of the young survivors who have taken to the streets of our nation’s capital. When communities like Ferguson, Missouri, organize, though, they are labeled “protesters” and “rioters”; they are met with the National Guard, army tanks, and tear gas.8
The racially inflected responses to murdered children thus link the histories of urban riots, excessive police force, and the murders of Black youths by individual civilians that I discussed in 2008 and 2014.
These facts pain me personally and as a citizen. As an historian, I am pulled to examine them for historical patterns and examples of effective change. The importance of laws to guarantee rights or abrogate them seems both evident and inadequate. Laws must be enforced to make a difference, and they can be overturned. But the ongoing tolls of internalized racism, sexism, nativism, and homophobia, of religious and class prejudices, also caution that legal change alone is insufficient without the longer processes of attitudinal and cultural change. No meaningful change occurs without courageous change-makers, and without daily individual acts outside the public limelight that change attitudes, behaviors, and social practices.
I have studied social movements because I feel for the victims of discrimination and am drawn to the courageous activists who resist inequity and work for justice, whose resistance, individually and collectively, is as enduring as the inequities themselves. I remain drawn to the historic actors, well-known and celebrated, private and obscure, who have sought to stop human suffering, who have supported marginalized communities and fostered pride among subordinated people. Which brings me back to the unhappy histories of my 2014 lecture.
I was drawn to my topic in 2014 not only by the painful horror of young lives lost, but even more by the courage of parents determined to make change out of unimaginable personal tragedy. As I prepared this book, I have similarly grieved the lost Indigenous children buried in the unmarked graves historians have known must have existed somewhere, and the strength of Indigenous parents to endure unimaginable grief. These histories bridge time in the unhappy persistence of discrimination and suffering. They can also bridge the experiences of people who have been privileged or subordinated by virtue of race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, or gender, by making visible the lived experience of marginalized and subordinated people, their endurance and resistance.
For those of us privileged not to have experienced overt discrimination, to have been spared demeaning and dangerous attacks, these stories open windows on enormous suffering and awesome resilience, dignity, and courage. On International Women’s Day, March 8, 2021, I joined the audience as U.S. Representative Lucy McBath hosted an on-line gathering with Sybrina Fulton to reflect on their shared journeys as mothers of murdered children. Fulton, the mother of slain teen Trayvon Martin, joined her ex-husband Tracy Martin, to establish the Trayvon Martin Foundation to “provide both emotional and financial support to families who have lost a child to gun violence.” She went on to found the Circle of Mothers, who support mothers who have lost children to violence.9 McBath, the mother of murdered teen Jordan Davis, left a thirty-year career as a Delta Airlines flight attendant to run for Congress, winning election in 2018 and re-election in 2020 and 2024, from Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, the first Democrat since 1979 to win the seat formerly held by Republican Newt Gingrich.10 From 2023-2025 she represented the neighboring Seventh Congressional District. She had shepherded two pieces of gun control legislation through the House of Representatives and in 2021 was trying to win Republican Senators’ support for both bills “not as a Member of Congress, but as a mother, as Jordan’s mother.”
McBath decided to run for office after the Parkland tragedy, and after the federal government again did nothing to curb gun violence. She acted, as well, from a sense of history, both public and personal. She wrote during Black History Month, 2020:
I didn’t have to look much further than the dinner table for civil rights heroes growing up during the 1960’s.
When I was growing up, my father Lucien Holman was a dentist by trade, but he was also active in the civil rights movement.
His position as an NAACP chapter president in Illinois afforded me the opportunity at a very young age to attend marches, rallies, and protests alongside civil rights heroes like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. Holman was invited to the White House to witness President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Lucy McBath traced her own activist roots to her father and their family table:
All these years later, I never imagined I’d also become an advocate after Jordan’s death. But those moments watching my father and his friends organizing around the dinner table helped me form the foundational values and strategies I bring to our gun safety movement today.
So before Black History Month is over, I wanted to honor civil rights heroes like my father and the folks that gathered around our kitchen table, as well as my good friend and colleague Rep. John Lewis who just turned 80 years old.
I’m honored to follow in their footsteps and work beside so many of them who are still alive today in our continued fight for justice for all.11
Sybrina Fulton also turned to politics, losing her 2020 race for Miami-Dade County Commissioner by only 333 votes. McBath encouraged her to try again, calling Fulton “the mother of the movement for her generation.” In 2021 Sybrina Fulton said she took hope even in the context of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police May 5, 2020, in part because the image of George Floyd dying was undeniable because it was captured on a cell phone video and could not be erased from memories. Most people who protested her son’s murder in 2012 were Black, she said. More people became involved after Floyd was killed, both Black and White. She placed great faith “in the young people to make positive change.” 12
Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis guide their mothers’ activism. McBath has become a leading Congressional voice for gun control. Constituents and supporters receive her pained but determined email messages after each new mass shooting, on her son’s birthday, and as she introduces gun control legislation in the House of Representatives. She has shared the letters she writes to her son each year on his birthday and the anniversary of his murder, and her reflections on Mother’s Day, for her “one of the hardest days of the year.”13 McBath has insisted on wresting some meaning from her loss, writing to her dead son: “I know that change hasn’t happened as fast as we may have hoped, but there is a light in the future. I know that you were not taken from us in vain eight years ago today. It cannot be that way. … [M]y promise to you is that I will continue to fight for you and your legacy. To make this world a better place, a safer place for families like ours.”14
Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis remain present for their mothers, enduring losses and enduring sources of inspiration. Their sons’ photos were visible in the background of each woman during the on-line gathering; Sybrina Fulton brushed away tears throughout the 45–minute program. Both women have been painfully public about their losses and their activist responses. Lucy McBath is eloquently transparent about the tragedy that sent her to Congress, about the activist histories and personal ties that motivate her efforts for change. “I cried, I prayed, and I decided to fight for justice for my son. And to make sure that no other mother had to feel the pain I did,” she wrote. “Even though he’s gone, I’m still mothering Jordan through this work.”
The tragedies that impelled Sybrina Fulton and Lucy McBath on their paths of public activism made them the vocal representatives of many less-visible social change activists, who have committed long years of hard work to make a better world for other people, other families, other children. They make explicit what has linked the personal and the political in movements for historic change.
Notes
1 On the making of these myths see, for instance Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Susanna M. Crage, “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth,” American Sociological Review 71:5 (October 2006): 724–51; Joe Street and Henry Knight Lozano, eds., The Shadow of Selma (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018), esp. Aniko Bodroghkozy, “Mediating Selma,” 133–49; Mark Walmsley, “‘They Just Couldn’t Write It the Way it Wasn’t Anymore’: Mainstream Media Narratives and the 1965 Selma Campaign,” 150–70; George Lewis, “Sidelining Selma’s Segregationists: Memory, Strategy, Ideology and Agency,” 170–95; and Megan Hunt, “‘Men of God and Goodwill Everywhere’: Selma and the Role of Religion in Civil Rights Drama,” 196–214.
2 By 1919, women had gained the full franchise in fifteen states, starting with Wyoming Territory in 1869, but women in all states did not achieve full suffrage until 1920.
3 Seven days after taking office in his first term, President Trump signed Executive Order 13769, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” known popularly as the “Muslim ban” or the “Trump Muslim Travel Ban.” It was suspended by a number of courts until March 6, 2017, when it was superseded by Executive Order 13780, again titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” Executive Order 13769 cut to 50,000 the number of refugees who could enter the country in 2017, suspended the United States Refugee Admittance Program (USRAP) for 120 days, indefinitely suspended the entry of Syrian refugees, and suspended the entry of people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Iraq was also briefly included. More than 700 travelers were detained, and up to 60,000 visas were “provisionally revoked.” The order met immediate opposition because it equated all people from these predominantly Muslim countries with terrorists, and hurt many, like the Syrian refugees, who were fleeing violence in their countries. Enforcement of the order was suspended by a temporary restraining order issued February 3, 2017 in Washington v. Trump and was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals. Later, Trump signed Executive Order 13780 and Presidential Proclamation 9645, which superseded Executive Order 13769. On June 26, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5–4 decision, upheld the third Executive Order (Presidential Proclamation 9645) and its accompanying travel ban. The day he took office, on January 20, 2021, President Joe Biden revoked the Trump Muslim Travel Bans with Presidential Proclamation 10141.
4 The covered jurisdictions had been regularly updated based on the preclearance provisions. The Voting Rights Act thus allowed for changes in historic patterns of racial discrimination in voting.
5 Examples of these restrictions include requiring drivers’ licenses for identification, thus disadvantaging people who can’t afford cars, or, in Texas, not accepting student photo IDs but allowing gun registrations as identification, which do not have photographs. Other strategies have included placing polling places where they are not accessible by public transportation, eliminating Sunday voting, and limiting the numbers and locations of drop boxes to deposit advance ballots. As well, legislatures in some states have drawn the lines of districts for Congress and state legislatures to divide and dilute the votes of people of color or of opposition political parties.
6 Yolanda P. Mitchell, PhD and Tiffany L. Bromfield, MA, “Gun Violence and the Minority Experience,” National Council on Family Relations, https://www.ncfr.org/ncfr-report/winter-2018/gun-violence-and-minority-experience, accessed June 7, 2021.
7 Katherine A. Fowler, Linda L. Dahlberg, Tadesse Haileyesus, Carmen Gutierrez and Sarah Bacon, “Childhood Firearm Injuries in the United States,” Pediatrics 141:1 (July 2017): 1–11.
8 Mitchell and Bromfield, “Gun Violence and the Minority Experience.”
9 Online Gathering, hosted by Representative Lucy McBath with Sybrina Fulton, International Women’s Day, March 8, 2021.
10 The Republican Georgia state legislature has twice redrawn the lines of Rep. McBath’s congressional district, trying to include enough Republicans to defeat her at the polls. After the legislature redrew the boundaries of District 6 in 2022 to include significantly more Republicans, McBath won election in the newly redrawn 7th Congressional District. Again in 2024, Republican legislators redrew the lines of the 7th District to make it difficult for a Democrat to win, whereupon Ms. McBath announced she would run for election in 2024 in the again re-drawn 6th District and was re-elected to Congress from her original district. Both districts, in their various configurations, are in suburban Atlanta.
11 Representative Lucy McBath, “My Father,” email to supporters, February 22, 2020. Representative John Lewis died July 17, 2020, months after Rep. McBath penned this letter. He was a revered Civil Rights leader, who had participated in formative acts of civil disobedience in the 1960s, including the 1960 Nashville sit-ins and the Freedom Rides to integrate seating on interstate busses. He served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963 to 1966, and was part of the leadership in organizing the 1963 March on Washington. In 1965 Lewis led the first of three Selma to Montgomery marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and suffered a brutal attack on that Bloody Sunday that required hospitalization. The image of his being bludgeoned on the head was part of what moved President Johnson to introduce the Voting Rights Act. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1986 and represented the Atlanta, Georgia 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death.
12 Representative McBath’s Online Gathering.
13 For examples, Lucy McBath, emails to supporters: “Boulder,” March 22, 2021; “one of the hardest days of the year,” May 9, 2021; “My letter to Jordan on the eighth anniversary of his murder,” November 23, 2020; “Our movement prevailed,” November 4, 2020; “Today is Jordan’s 29th Birthday,” February 16, 2024; “A Letter to Jordan,” November 23, 2024.
14 McBath, “My letter to Jordan.”