Black History Month Part 10: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent Of Black America: The Celebration and the Reckoning
The Celebration and the Reckoning By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA Welcome to Part Ten — the final essay of a ten-part series. We begin with The Crossing. The laboratory of race science. The navigation strategies of Frederick Douglass. The theological weapon of the slaveholder’s Bible. The systematic destruction of Reconstruction. The federal architecture of the […]
Black History Month Part 8: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent Of Black America: Old America
The Racial Calculation Behind Every Policy This Nation Has Ever Called Something Else By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA The birth of America was not about freedom. Every school child is taught otherwise, and the teaching is not entirely wrong — the men who signed the Declaration of Independence genuinely believed in the Enlightenment philo-sophy they […]
Black History Month Part 7: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: We Thrived Anyway
Harriet. Frederick. Marcus. Malcolm. Martin Luther King. Are you there? Of course you are. You are still present. You are still witnesses. Unseen — but not unheard. You are here not as memory, because memory describes the past as gone, and you are not gone. You are here. You were here before us, and you […]
Black History Month Part 6: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: The Architecture of Exclusion
How the Federal Government Built the Racial Wealth Gap — and Why It Has Never Been Repaired By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA The Syndicate The United States of America is the original apartheid state. South Africa’s apartheid system began formally in 1948 and ended in 1994 — forty-six years of state-enforced racial separation that the […]
Black History Month Part 5: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: Reconstruction and the First Betrayal
How Every Promise Made to Black America Was Earned, Not Given — and Then Systematically Taken Back By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA The Pattern There is a pattern in American history that is so consistent, so documented, and so precisely repeated across 160 years that it can no longer be described as a series of […]
Black History Month Part 4: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: The Bible and the Whip
How Sacred Text Became a Weapon — and What the People It Was Used Against Did with the Same Book By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA The Two Weapons The apparatus of American racial slavery required two instruments of control. The first was physical. The whip, the chain, the brand, the auction block, the patrol, the […]
Black History Month Part 3: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: The Mirror America Still Cannot Look Into
Frederick Douglass, the Fourth of July, and the Contradiction That Has Never Been Resolved By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA The Man and the Moment On July 5, 1852, a man stood before an audience of approximately 600 people in Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, and delivered an address that remains, 174 years later, the […]
Black History Month Part 2: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: The Laboratory
How the Attempt to Define Us as Less Than Human Proved the Opposite By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA The Apparatus and Its Confession There is a principle in law that applies with particular force to the history we are about to examine. It holds that a witness who testifies against his own interest is among […]
Shared National Values
Non-White, Non-Heterosexual American History Under Erasure By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA On Sunday night, CBS News correspondent Norah O’Donnell sat down with Maryland Governor Wes Moore—the nation’s only Black governor—for a nationally televised town hall and asked him a question that, by now, most thinking Americans have already answered for themselves: Do you consider President […]
Black History Month Part 1: We Were Never Less
The Defiant Ascent of Black America By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA A Note Before We Begin There is a version of Black history that gets told every February. It arrives on schedule, curated and comfortable, moving enough to satisfy the moment without disturbing anyone who needs to remain undisturbed. It features the same names, the […]
