Legacies Links for January 13, 2025: Not Even Past

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Screen shot of Jimmy Carter addressing a large crowd from a podium.
In his 1971 inaugural address as governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter (1924–2024) declared that “This is a time for truth and frankness. … I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over. Our people have already made this major and difficult decision, but we cannot underestimate the challenge of hundreds of minor decisions yet to be made. Our inherent human charity and our religious beliefs will be taxed to the limit. No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice.” Image source: Carter Center
  • “Jimmy Carter’s life intersected with slavery’s legacy. His record on Civil Rights is complicated,” WABE (January 8, 2025): LINK. “[Jimmy] Carter, who died Dec. 29 at the age of 100, spent his life intertwined with America’s and the world’s enduring legacy of slavery.”
  • Allen C. Guelzo, “In Sherman’s Wake,” Washington Monthly (January 5, 2025): LINK. A new book by Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation (Simon & Schuster, 2025), explores the hidden story of enslaved Georgians who briefly seized freedom during Gen. William T. Sherman’s famous March to the Sea.
  • Jeffrey Collins, “South Carolina statue honoring Black hero Robert Smalls will stare down a segregationist,” AP News (January 9, 2025): LINK. “A group studying where to put South Carolina’s first Statehouse monument to an individual African American has decided Robert Smalls’ statue should be staring down a notorious white supremacist [Ben Tillman] who dismantled most of the former slave’s work after the Civil War.”
  • Adrian Carrasquillo and Halimah Abdullah, “The all-American violence of the Jan. 6 insurrection,” The Emancipator (January 6, 2025): LINK. Linking the history of white supremacist insurrections to the violence and political uprisings today, the authors summarize that future transformative social change must be as peaceful as possible amidst so much violence.
  • Allison Wiltz, “Why Black Infants Face Added Danger in American Hospitals,” Medium (January 7, 2024): LINK (may need a free account to access). Research supports that the race of medical practitioners may impact mortality rates and that Black infants fare much better under the care of Black doctors.