Freedom Demands Memory: How America Risks Losing Its Moral Compass

By Charles Young | The Phoenix Paradigm

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Those timeless words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. echo louder than ever in today’s climate. If we forget how far we have come—and how far we have yet to go—we risk erasing the very map of our moral progress.

While reflection shows signs of advancement, we are also witnessing a troubling regression: a growing movement to omit African American history from public education. This omission is not only a disservice to truth but a threat to the moral foundation of our nation. African American history is American history. Even when its truths are unappealing or difficult to bear, they remain inseparable from the story of this nation. The question then becomes—how can a nation that claims to champion freedom, justice, and equality do so honestly if it refuses to confront its own historical shortcomings?

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Racism persists as the unspeakable topic in America. An honest national conversation about the trauma and legacy of slavery, Jim Crow policies, and systemic inequity has yet to be fulfilled—and it is long overdue.

History shows that immediately following the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments

abolishing slavery (except in prisons) and granting citizenship and voting rights to African Americans—newly freed citizens were not merely passive participants in democracy. They were architects of progress, actively shaping governance in the South until the Compromise of 1877 reversed many of those gains. By 1890, African Americans had been almost completely disenfranchised. The narrative of progress had been rewritten, and the image of African Americans was twisted into one of inferiority—portrayed as “shiftless, ignorant, uncivilized,” and “subhuman.” These depictions, rooted in prejudice, informed public policy for decades to come.

‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’”

It is a cruel irony that those who fought hardest for justice—Black citizens and the white allies who supported them—were often branded “radicals,” persecuted, and even lynched for their advocacy. Yet, despite unrelenting opposition, African Americans endured and built institutions, communities, and culture in the face of systemic hostility.

How then can we denigrate the work ethic of African Americans—the same people who survived sharecropping and tenant farming, who fought in wars abroad while enduring segregation at home, and who kept the industrial heart of this nation beating during the world wars? When the factories emptied upon the soldiers’ return, it was African Americans who were the first to be pushed out, leaving thousands devastated by deunionization in Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland.

These are not the caricatures that history books too often portray. They are builders, innovators, defenders of democracy, and laborers in the engine of progress. To misrepresent or erase their story is one of the greatest hypocrisies of any society that claims to stand for liberty and justice for all.

The conversation surrounding African American history is not about nostalgia—it is about truth. To exclude it from public education is to deny the roots of our national identity and to perpetuate the cycle of ignorance that allows injustice to thrive.

Thank you.

• Harding, Vincent, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis. “We Changed the World, 1945–1970.” In To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans, Vol. II, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, 184–283. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Kelley, Robin D. G. “Into the Fire, 1970 to the Present.” In To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans, Vol. II, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, 294–379. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Marable, Manning. “The Future in the Present: Contemporary African-American Thought, 1975 to the Present.” In Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, edited by Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, 529–550. Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.
• Painter, Nell Irvin. “A Chance to Make Good, 1900–1929.” In To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans, Vol. I, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, 49–76. Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Sugrue, Thomas J. “From a Raw Deal to a New Deal, 1929–1945.” In To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans, Vol. I, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, 119–158. Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Radical Members of the First Legislature after the War, South Carolina. Photograph. 1878. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Reproduction Number: LC‑USZ62‑28044 (5–11).