First We Take Mississippi

Paint It Black

October 30, 2026

This is not an ask. As a white guy, it is not my place to request anything of the African American community. I think I can beg, but it’s not an ask, it’s a hope.

Thanks Obama.

Keep Hope Alive

Perhaps more than anything, the path to ending Trump and actual justice and democracy goes through Black America, in particular Black women. They have been instrumental in keeping this country – the country that saw them as 3/5 of a person at its founding, and continued to allow and protect their enslavement for nearly another century – from its worst inclinations. Over and over and over.

Gary Clark, Jr. – This Land

In 1770, the first person to die for American independence was Crispus Attucks, of African American and Native American descent, shot during the Boston Massacre.

In the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis and countless others in the Civil Rights Movement were instrumental in dragging this country kicking, lynching and screaming into becoming an actual liberal democracy.

On June 17, 1972 a Black man, Frank Wills, security guard at the Watergate complex, caught Richard Nixon’s “plumbers” in the act of sabotaging democracy.

May 25, 2020, a 17-year-old Black girl, Darnella Frazier saw a Black man being pinned to the ground by several police officers, one with his knee on the man’s neck. She held her phone in camera mode for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, as onlookers begged to officers to stop, as George Floyd begged for breath and finally for his mother before his brutal, wholly unnecessary murder was complete.

On January 6, 2021 Donald Trump’s mob attacked the Capitol, with murder in their hearts and a coup d’etat on their minds. Black Capitol officer Eugene Goodman acted as a decoy and singlehandedly redirected the mob, saving the lives of members of Congress towards whom the mob had been headed until Goodman distracted them, presumably with a bright, shiny object.

Yes, the Democrats have been much more talk than action when it comes to enhancing the lives of Black Americans, but there can be no doubt that their not-so-loyal opposition – now the Fascist/Trump/Epstein/Sedition Party – will never be the ones to promote equality, which they have literally made all but illegal, for anyone but wealthy, white males. As flawed as it may be, the choice is clear. And the choice is now. Or possibly never.

If our Black brothers and sisters and others can find it in their hearts to try once more to wield their electoral power – like no one has ever seen before, to coin a phrase – this nation might avail itself of the equal-and-opposite reaction to the criminal, fascist, racist movement whose face is Donald Jeffrey Epstein Trump, and take one more step toward becoming a more perfect union.

“What we are seeing, with leadership from African American communities in particular, is that morally legible, non-violent, principled protest, works. Yes, now, even in 2026.”

Perhaps it falls to the descendants of those who literally built this country for much less than no pay to help all of us to rebuild this shattered republic, hopefully better and stronger and more of, for and by the people than it has ever been. Nothing less can be acceptable.

It would be unfair not to mention that the Fascist/Trump/Epstein Party started a redistricting war last year aimed at eliminating majority-Black voting districts across Red America (or as Robert Smigel christened it during the Bush II years – Dumbfuckistan). Racist much? And where’s the Supreme Court? Just kidding, we know exactly where they are – up Trump’s racist ass.

And maybe this time, if African Americans save democracy again, we will all repay those who have given so much and gotten so little in return properly, once and for all.

Leonard Cohen – First We Take Manhattan

I. Mangrey reporting.