The Last Moments of Henry Williams, a Black G.I., and the State of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, as explained by Burnham and Jackson

During her confirmation hearings in March, Jackson declared that she would interpret the Constitution according to how it was understood at the time it was adopted.

She spoke during an argument over the meaning of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a civil rights landmark. The immediate question in the case was whether a congressional map drawn by Alabama lawmakers had violated the act by diminishing Black voters’ power.

But a larger question loomed in the background: Was the act itself in tension with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which was adopted after the Civil War?

The federal Constitution proclaims republican liberty at the same time as it allows the sub-jugation of entire peoples within the United States. The Constitutionbackstopped the antebellum dream of a transcontinental slave empire and was the catalyst for radical antislavery politicians.

If we do see even more democratic backsliding than we are already seeing, then there’s no reason to think that most elites will follow suit. After a time, that absence of democracy may just become the regular order of things — a regrettable custom that nonetheless should more or less be left alone because of “federalism” or “limited government.” That, in fact, is how many politicians, journalists and intellectuals rationalized autocracy in the South and reconciled it with their belief that the United States was a free country.

It was a system that, as the legal scholar and former judge Margaret A. Burnham writes in “By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners,” rested on “the chronic, unpredictable violence that loomed over everyday Black life.” In one of many such episodes detailed in the book, Burnham recounts the last moments of Henry Williams, a Black G.I. killed in 1942 by an Alabama bus driver named Grover Chandler for what Chandler perceived as “impudence on the part of the young soldier.” Williams spilled his laundry on the floor when he rushed to escape the bus. “As he turned to pick it up, Chandler fired three shots, one hitting Williams in the back of the head. He died instantly right there on Chandler’s bus.”

The evolution of American democracy is impossible to explore, let alone comprehend, without analyzing how Blackness marked the boundaries of citizenship, dignity, wealth, poverty and punishment. In this way, the first two episodes form a couplet that work more powerfully in tandem.

The first two episodes of the new documentary series, “The 1619 Project,” which will premiere on Thursday, brings to life the New York Times multimedia project created by Nikole Hannah-Jones.

As the first two episodes of “The 1619 Project” make dramatically clear, “the relentless buying, selling, insuring, and financing” of Black people “would help make Wall Street and New York City the financial capital of the world.”

“It is Black people who have been the perfectors of our democracy,” argues Hannah-Jones in the series’ first installment, aptly titled “Democracy.” The story that follows in this episode centers Black people – usually relegated to the margins as slaves or peaceful demonstrators during the civil rights movement’s heroic period – in the larger narrative of American history.

The New York Times Sunday Magazine special issue, multimedia educational social media supporting materials and bestselling anthology were provided by the documentary series.

A Conversation with Hannah Jones about the 1619 Project for Black Women and Black History: How Black Women Served in the U.S. Armed Forces and the Challenges of Black Lives

Speaking autobiographically, Hannah-Jones argues, “no people had a greater claim to the American flag” which her military veteran father proudly hung outside her childhood home in Waterloo, Iowa, than Black people. She recounts how her childhood alienation from American history was interrupted by a Black high school history teacher who explained the meaning of 1619 for Black American and American history –the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to the shores of Virginia aboard the English White Lion ship.

Focusing on democracy here is pivotal. The relation between race and democracy is one of the most important revelations from the 1619 Project.

This violence paralleled Reconstruction’s bright spots for decades, reaching a fever pitch in 1898 the Wilmington Massacre, the first successful political coup in American history – organized by vengeful White racists against Black political leaders who were slaughtered, humiliated and forced to flee the city.

The episode’s focus on both enslaved Black women and their modern contemporaries allows us an intimate glimpse into the racial and sexual reproductive realities Black women have confronted throughout American history. During racial slavery, Black women were raped by White owners who then enslaved their own children, adding more economic values to their fortunes.

Our racial identities being listed on certificates of birth and death are more than bureaucratic signposts. They serve as indicators of future prosperity and punishment for some and premature death for others.

We eavesdrop on recordings from when the Works Progress Administration was in charge. Laura Smalley, a formerly enslaved black woman, says that plantation owners breed their slaves like hogs or horses.

This is an incredibly painful history to confront – and one that is more necessary in our own time than ever. Serena Williams, a black woman as rich and famous as her, almost died from a heart problem after giving birth to her daughter.

Our only way forward is by looking back at not so much what we sometimes refer to as “legacies” but through confronting a history that actively marginalizes Black life and in so doing represents an existential threat to America’s democratic future.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday will release his book, “The Courage to be Free,” to much anticipation ahead of his expected plunge into the 2024 presidential race. For the first time, DeSantis has used authorship to boost his political ambitions.

In the fall of 2011, as a Navy prosecutor about to go for a congressional seat in Jacksonville, he released “Dreams from our Founding Fathers.” The book from the obscure publisher, which deals in children’s titles and a thriller series produced by a middle school principal, received little praise but was read by a few people.

This orthodoxy is built upon the idea that the federal government has a limited power over the states. Does this mean that he would take on a new challenge as president? Does he think that the transformational presidency has changed his office in ways that he wants to follow? Maybe his next book will hold some of these answers.

In his book, DeSantis argued that the Constitution’s creators expected representatives to be responsive – though not beholden – to public opinion, especially when pursuing far-reaching pieces of legislation. As a result, Obama and his allies should have looked at the decades of opposition to health care reform instead of messing with it.

DeSantis as a Republican primary candidate for governor in 2018 campaigned almost exclusively on his endorsement from then-President Donald Trump, who often peddled false claims and once claimed, “I alone can fix it.”

Obama’s candidacy was described as one of singular historical significance and himself as a messianic figure. In his closing message to Florida voters, he said he was made by God on the eighth day to be a fighter.

He compared Obama to George Washington, who he said had a deepsense of humility and an ethos of republican government. He noted that the founding fathers warned of demagogues who used questionable rhetorical techniques, or were intent on sowing divisions within the body politic.

“Slavery had been a fact of life throughout human history, and had existed in Britain’s American colonies for 150 years before the Convention at Philadelphia in 1787. The abolition of slavery would have represented an enlightened, socially, politically and economically momentous change in certain southern states, where slave labor was the key to the entire economy. This is why there was no real chance that the Convention would abolish slavery.

DeSantis went on to argue in his book that Obama’s views were more closely aligned with the slavery defender Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, who lost the 1860 presidential election to Abraham Lincoln, than the great emancipator.

The Supreme Court case that found blacks couldn’t claim citizenship and wasn’t permitted to enjoy rights like voting was used by the author to accuse Obama of plagiarizing it.

The passage of the affordable healthcare act by obama was one of the most talked about topics in the time when DeSantis published his book.

The opposition to “ObamaCare” is not surprising. He helped create the federal government shutdown by founding the Freedom Caucus, which voted to repeal the health care law. But unlike some Republicans, who at times voiced support for the law’s more popular provisions (like the requirement for insurance to cover children until age 26), DeSantis’ opposition appeared wholesale.

The redistribution of wealth was a more controversial justification for a federal restructuring of the health care system, that was originally justified by President Obama, as a necessary remedy for rising health care costs that hurt members of the middle class.

The requirement for insurance companies to cover children and adults with pre-existing conditions appeared to be problematic to DeSantis because it could lead to higher insurance costs.

“Though this sounded noble, the law had the effect of undermining insurance coverage for children,” DeSantis contended. Insurers have been forced to either take financial losses or increase premiums by being mandated to take more risk than is economically justified.

In his book, DeSantis charged Obama with crossing the line on executive power, yet at times he did not follow the same rules as the governor. He said that Kathleen Sebelius used her power to intimidate businesses for engaging in speech that she did not like. This illustrates the progressive impulse to centralize authority in bureaucratic arrangements at its apogee.” The governor issued a similar warning to businesses not to get in his way.

If you are the CEO of a company, you want to get involved in our legislative business because it is a free country. I’m fighting back against you if you do that. I will try to make sure people understand what you do and what you aren’t doing.

Disney learned a lesson from it. Disney fought against a state measure that limited classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity. Earlier this month, state lawmakers voted to give DeSantis new powers over the government that controls the land around Disney’s Orlando-area theme parks.