My latest in PJ Media:
Today [June 10] is the renowned bluesman Howlin’ Wolf’s birthday, offering us a reminder that even through times of segregation and genuine “systemic racism,” race relations in America were not always as overheated and tense as they are today. When Wolf was born on this day in 1910, he was named Chester Arthur Burnett, after the twenty-first president of the United States, Chester Arthur. This was because Arthur, who was president from September 1881 to March 1885, was a champion of civil rights in an age when very few were. Although Arthur is forgotten today, a quarter-century after his death, Wolf’s parents demonstrated that they remembered his efforts for black Americans.
As explained in Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster, when Arthur was twenty-five in 1854, he joined the law firm of Erastus D. Culver, at which he formed part of a legal team that argued successfully for the freedom of any slaves that their owners brought to New York.
Arthur also led the defense team for a black woman, Elizabeth Jennings Graham, who was not allowed to ride a New York City streetcar. The future president won the case, and New York City streetcars were desegregated, one hundred years before Rosa Parks, courtesy of Chester Arthur.
When the Republican Arthur became president after the assassination of James A. Garfield, the Democratic Party was in firm control of the “solid South,” and systematically denied black Americans their rights. But Arthur continued to stand for the equality of rights of all people before the law. He deplored the Democratic takeover of the South and worked with third parties in the South to try to build a coalition that would dislodge the Democrats from power and end the denial of civil rights to black Americans.
There is much more. Read the rest here.