Jon Meacham Quotes
As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.
Meacham, Jon. Time, Time Inc., 2012.
Blacks were fighting and dying in WWII. They were equal when they were under fire, but otherwise not. The war was against fascist protagonists whose creed was inequality while the allies were upholding freedom and equality. But making that aspiration a reality was difficult.
Vladimir Lenin. In their quest for world revolution, the Russian Communists had more problems with arguments in the United States whose reforms and economy had produced a very high standard of living. They knew that to effect a revolution, they had to reach the middle class and the intellectuals. They had little economically to attack America with but they were able to attack the United States morally. Even though segregation was legal in America at that time, many Americans thought it immoral. Most of the rest of the world did also. So that was one of the attack points. Since the communists opposed U. S. racial segregation, many Southern segregationists used a perverted logic and accused everyone who opposed segregation of being a communist. In addition to racial segregation, the Communists attacked other forms of discrimination such as anti-Catholic, anti-Asian, and anti-Semitic (See {638737} ) behavior.
The president was commenting on a Donald Trump campaign statement that African American were in the worst shape in history when the reality was just the opposite
Jon Ellis Meacham is an American writer, reviewer, historian and presidential biographer. A former Executive Editor and Executive Vice President at Random House, he is a contributing writer to The New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor to Time magazine, and a former Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek. He is the author of several books. He won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. He holds the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Endowed Chair in American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.
