Adam Harris

@adamhsays.com

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writer, southern. Co-host, Radio Atlantic. Author of The State Must Provide. Writing Is This America? More: www.harrisadam.com

One of America's oldest magazines is investing in video after seeing notable growth in its audience in recent months. On Monday, The Atlantic's flagship podcast, Radio Atlantic, will expand to produce twice- weekly episodes. Adam Harris will host a new video episode on Mondays that promises to focus on "the stories that set the agenda for the week," complementing the current Thursday show, hosted by Hanna Rosin.
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Writers write from compulsion, from necessity. That’s why prose can feel hot on the page. I think of these two perfect sentences from Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses: “No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.” Those sentences were created by a mind that blisters from its contact with reality. AI-written stories may produce prose that wins contests, but the urgency of the desire to get the words down is never going to be there. Even if it goes forever undetected, the absence of that urgency should matter to us, just as all fakery should matter to us: a fictionalized autobiography, the imitation of a Monet. In the absence of the occasion that startles the writer into action, the ersatz artifact is meaningless, no matter how closely it mimics the real thing.
For several months, the bill was held up by a white state senator, Earl Goodwin—who’d represented Eutaw until a state-wide reapportionment in 1983. On May 9, 1984, more than 200 Black Eutawans marched to city hall to protest the delay. Eutaw’s all-white city council was a “segregated island in an integrated sea,” the Reverend Joseph Lowery, Abernathy’s successor at the SCLC, said during the protest. After an extended filibuster, Goodwin relented. A county-wide referendum was required to annex the predominantly Black areas. It passed. Black representatives made quick work of the next election, winning seats on the Eutaw city council.
A photo of the OP’s granddad in his garden in Montgomery, AL.
A day later, Jesse Jackson died at the age of 84. The civil-rights leader’s two upstart presidential campaigns revealed how limited America’s political imagination was at the time; his platform would become the foundation of the progressive movement for the next three decades. Sometimes I look at black-and-white photos of Jackson—playing basketball with Marvin Gaye, standing next to King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis before he was murdered, or preparing to deliver the first joint address by a Black man to the Alabama legislature since Reconstruction. It’s easy to think of Jackson in the past. But he was also human, and lived until it was no longer this world but his friend John Lewis that he would see in the morning. In 2019, members of Congress were preparing to discuss H.R. 40, a bill that would study reparations for slavery—a bill to atone for history. I spoke with Jackson ahead of the hearing. We talked about racism, reparations, and ultimately about hope. It felt natural to wonder where someone who had seen so much bad in U.S. history continued to draw his resolve from. Jackson told me that his own hope stemmed from the fact that the truth cannot be erased. “The truth of slavery—that Africans subsidized America’s wealth—that truth will not go away,” he said. History must be remembered. His death is a reminder that the duty to contend with that history falls to those who are still on this Earth.
America loves its heroes. The nation has made lions of the men who signed a document 250 years ago to declare independence from the English crown; it's made saints of the 55 men who gathered in a sweaty room in Philadelphia to draft its Constitution. Time elevates those people and their deeds to the heights of deities, and American gods must be faultless. But those heroes are not gods; they were, indeed, men—fallible as all others.
On Congressman John Lewis... We met as fellow protestors in 1960. Two weeks ago, John agreed to co-chair this year's voter registration drive. He was the gift that kept on giving. This has been a difficult season. First, Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery, Dr. King's Chairman of SCLC's Board for 27 years, and now we have lost Rev. C.T. Vivian and John Lewis, on the same day. In the 1960's, we broke out of the bubble of segregation. John became the valedictorian of our class. John Lewis is what patriotism and courage look like. He sacrificed and personifies a New Testament prophet. Andrew Young and I prayed for John Lewis and C.T. Vivian on Thursday as we convened those who I went to jail with in 1960. Good Night, I will see you in the morning. #GoodTrouble
Jesse Jackson: Well, first of all, we had been freed without being made equal. There’s historical continuity between blacks being amassed in prison after 246 years of legal slavery. When there was a contest about it [in Dred Scott v. Sandford], the Supreme Court ruled that blacks had no rights. [After emancipation and the Civil War] those who had been slave masters became segregation masters. They took our freedom away from us; they began to lock up blacks by the thousands to do prison labor, farm labor—the whole range. They just put us back in slavery. We finally, in 1954, broke the backbone—legally—of that system [with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision], but we were never—there was never repair for damage done. Two hundred and forty-six years of slavery, then legal Jim Crow and [nearly] 5,000 lynchings without a conviction. And even today, discrimination by extension of that system has not completely ended. So we had been fighting for repair. We fought against the barbarism for our freedom; now we’re fighting for our equality. We are the foundation of American society—not the bottom, the foundation. When the Declaration of Independence came, we had been enslaved for 157 years. We made cotton king. We are due a different kind of recognition.
ON THE TIES THẠT BỊND us Life itself is nothing until it is lived, it is we who give it meaning, and value is nothing more than the meaning we give it. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialism is a humanism: P.51 How did one talk of the guilt that came from not dong the things that one wanted so much to do? Richard wright, A FATHERS LAW P. 35 Men do not like to feel themselves in dangers. Yet it is because there are real dangers, real failures, and real earthly damnation that words like victory, wisdom, or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win. Simone de Beauvoir THE Ethics OF AMBIGUITY p. 34
As the great believer cautioned, treachery says up when down; it" 'scatters whole families" without second thought or sound. "New occasions teach new duties"; again we've found this to be true, and the only question lingering is what are we to do.
"What were saying simply is that different sides of issues, like the Holocaust-denier thing that I mentioned earlier, should be given open discussion," he told me in July. He was referring to a question that he's gotten several times since his bill first came out: What should professors do if a student continues to present dissenting views about the Holocaust? Earlier this year, Cirino was admonished by a colleague, State Representative Casey Weinstein, after he refused to unequivocally say that Holocaust denialism is outside the realm of legitimate classroom debate. "There's no question that it happened, but if I were teaching a class, and somebody came up and said they doubted whether it really happened the way everybody had reported it, the choice for the professor is that you can throw that student out of class, you can fail them, you can tell the other students to harass them, or you can persuade the student with the preponderance of evidence that the Holocaust happened," he told me. "You may or may not convince the student, but that's the kind of dialogue that should be happening."
Miracle Children author talk with Erica Green and Katie Benner
“If we suddenly received more dollars,” he told me, “we’d have to ask some pretty hard questions about where we’d want to invest those dollars—and again, I’d point to enrollment figures.” If the demand is for the fields with clearly prescribed career pathways, that’s where the resources should flow, he said. “We are obligated to make sure that we’re serving those students in the best way possible, and for that money, we need to focus on the liberal-arts core curriculum of the university,” he told me.
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The late Eugene Talmadge, in my opinion, possessed one of the better minds of Georgia, or even America. Moreover, he wore the Phi Beta Kappa key. By all measuring rods, Mr. Talmadge could think critically and intensively; yet he contends that I am an inferior being. Are those the types of men we call educated? We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living. If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, "brethren!" Be careful, teachers!
In the months that have followed, Republican state legislatures and governors have made other efforts to overhaul higher education. Texas lawmakers, for example, passed bills that banned DEI initiatives at the state’s public colleges and redefined tenure—lawmakers had considered banning tenure altogether but ultimately reached a compromise—and listed vague reasons a university can fire a tenured faculty member, including “conduct involving moral turpitude” and “unprofessional conduct that adversely affects the institution.” Free-speech advocates fear what that could mean in practice. Texas A&M University suspended and censured a professor after she allegedly made a “disparaging remark” about the state’s lieutenant governor. (She was reinstated after an investigation found no clear evidence of wrongdoing, and the institution’s president resigned.) And in June, the Supreme Court upended more than four decades of precedent when it ruled the race-conscious admissions systems at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to be unconstitutional. Adam Harris: The government finally puts a number on the discrimination against Black colleges This year is a defining moment for American higher education, one that will decide whom institutions admit, who will teach those students, and what those professors can teach. For those on the right, it’s a reclamation, clawing back a set of American institutions that they believe have veered too far to the left. But for many administrators, professors, and historians, these changes risk destroying the pillars—shared governance, academic freedom, free inquiry—that have held up the world’s greatest system of higher education for more than a century.
It is our sincere hope that we move toward programming that is not confined to a single event or moment but instead supports ongoing learning and deeper understanding. This work is about helping us live our lives with purpose where service to all becomes a lived experience. In short, the MLK Dinner is not going away - rather we are in a moment of transition and the work of this task force will help us create its next iteration.
Supreme Court of the United States Washington, 2. q. 20542 CHAMBERS OF JUSTICE THURGOOD MARSHALL April 13, 1978 Re: No. 76-811, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke MEMORANDUM TO THE CONFERENCE I repeat, for next to the last time: the decision in this case depends on whether you consider the action of the Regents as admitting certain students or as excluding certain other students. If you view the program as admitting qualified students who, because of this Nation's sorry history of racial discrimination, have academic records that prevent them from effectively competing for medical school, then this is affirmative action to remove the vestiges of slavery and state imposed segregation by "root and branch." If you view the program as excluding students, it is a program of "quotas" which violates the principle that the "Constitution is color-blind." If only the principle of color-blindness had been accepted by the majority in Plessy in 1896, we would not be faced with this problem in 1978. We must remember, however, that this principle appeared only in the dissent. In the 60 years from Plessy to Brown, ours was a Nation where, by law, individuals could be given "special"
“ The national reconsideration of how the American story was told in history and popular culture, whose achievements were included in that telling, and strategies to account for all of the years of inequality, were attacked immediately. Some white Americans viewed policies intended to help address a legacy of discrimination against others as a discrimination against themselves, which led to lawsuits. Cases like Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which fought the affirmative action strategy at the university's Davis School of Medicine, sought to dismantle the apparatus that would enforce the Civil Rights Act. As soon as rights were won, they were disputed. By the end of President Trump's first term in office, he assumed that fight - beginning an assault on a bastardized version of critical race theory not long after Mr. Rufo blasted it on Fox News - and sought to blunt the momentum around books, articles and reports that examined the full breadth of American history, such as the 1619 Project.”
members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cow- skin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for the purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of pu- rity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred infuence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole fami- lies,— sundering husbands and wives, parents and chil- dren, sisters and brothers, leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate. We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We
WASHINGTON, Monday, Dec. 31. The scene in the Senate to-day was the most intensely exciting that was ever witnessed in that chamber. Senator BENJAMIN, of Louisiana, who, it had been reported, would make a conciliatory speech, gave out that he would make a parting secession speech, -- an announcement which drew an immense audience. Every corner was crowded. The lobbies were full. Senator BENJAMIN spoke calmly throughout, but the character of his speech at the close opened up to everyone the new era in national affairs. His closing declaration, that the South could never be subjugated, was greeted by the galleries with disgraceful applause, screams and uproar. It was evidently the act of persons who had purposely packed the galleries. For this demonstration the galleries were promptly cleared, but as the people passed out, remarks were current among the mob such as "That's the talk " -- "Now we will have war" -- "BENJAMIN's a brick" -- "D -- n the Abolitionists" -- "ABE LINCOLN will never come here."
Thomas to his Mother, believing slavery would no longer be an issue to the north after secession
Text of Thomas Rowland letter to Aunt Emily, describing resigning from West Point
The psalm says joy comes in the morning, but it doesn't say it always lasts. Rarely a week goes by when I don't think about what Granddaddy saw-what he knew. The playwright Lorraine Hansberry once wrote, "The New South slams up against the Old." Even as Black folks have had their rights expanded, explicit voter-suppression efforts have sought to curb them. America has a tradition of mucking up its critical junctures. N OCTOBER 9, 2019, I could not muster more words than "Wow." Steven Reed had just been elected the first Black mayor of Montgomery in the city's 200-year history. I pulled out my phone to call my mom. It had been only 20 years since Emory Folmar was the mayor. We laughed thinking about what Granddaddy would have had to say about it. He might have worried, the same way Black folks his age worried when Barack Obama was elected president. White people have not historically taken this sort of Black advancement lying down. I'd begun digging into what happened at Eutaw by then. I knew more of the story—why things were the way they were and how significant that 1870 election was. More than a year later, Raphael Warnock became the first Black Democrat to represent a former Confederate state, and Georgia's first Black senator. The day after Georgians made history, insurrectionists rioted at the Capitol. I have to imagine Granddaddy would have seen that coming.
Granddaddy took me to church with him on Sundays in Montgomery, in a small brick chapel on Decatur Street. It’s where I learned my hymns and that too many perfumes combined can fill up your lungs like smog. The preacher would flip open his Bible. “Weeping may endure for a night,” he would say. I’d look at Granddaddy, who always knew the verses. He’d join the congregation: “But joy cometh in the morning.” August 11, 1969, must have felt like morning in Eutaw. Bodies packed into the courthouse. Sweat dripped from the folks braving the balmy Alabama heat. It was a day of celebration. They called it “Independence Day”—complete with a parade, speeches, and a ball. A century later, Greene remained roughly 80 percent Black, and after a special election, six of the seven seats on the county commission were held by Black farmers. For the first time, Black people controlled a county government in Alabama. “To me, the Greene County victory is more important than the mission of Apollo 11,” Ralph Abernathy, the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said during his speech that day. “The astronauts found only rocks covered with dust on the moon. In Greene County, we found human beings living a life of misery and poverty, exploited by the white power structure over which poor Black people had no control.”
Atlantic education summit 2019
There’s a lot of shorthand in baseball—the sort of jargon in every profession which becomes a barrier to entry. They’re often aphorisms. One that I’ve appreciated while watching the Guardians—particularly in the Terry Francona and, now, Stephen Vogt managerial eras—is: Play the game the right way. It’s easy to define, hard to do. Playing the game the right way means running hard to first every time a ball is hit into play. It means keeping your head up when you’re on the bases, and keeping the defense honest. Laying down a bunt or punching a ball as far as possible into the outfield grass when a man is at third and you have an out to give. It’s about getting someone on base, getting them over, and getting them home. Playing the game the right way is both a principle and a practice. Like anything we would hope to be good at—writing, parenting, friendship, democracy—the principle is easy to follow intellectually, but much more difficult to live out, especially when things get hard. The easy way out–glossing over fundamentals–would be, well, easier. But the right way is about discipline. Sure, it won’t always be perfect, but on the grand balance, there is always the chance of success if the process is right.
It’s Memorial Day, May 31, 1999, and the Spurs are in the Western Conference finals—one series away from the big dance. There are 12 seconds left in the fourth quarter. The Spurs, down 18 points in the third, have clawed their way back to within two. Sean Elliott, the Spurs forward, doesn’t so much as pirouette as look like someone just bumped into his shoulder on the street. His pinkie toe is practically hugging the sideline as he catches the ball. Somehow—divine intervention, maybe—Elliott composes himself with a hop and one dribble while orienting his body toward the hoop. His heels hang out-of-bounds, the balls of his feet planted firmly inside the line. Rasheed Wallace, the Portland Trail Blazers power forward, uses every bit of his 7-foot-4-inch wingspan to try to get a hand on the ball. It is no use. Elliott’s eyes lock on to what he can see of the rim as he rises with the picturesque form of basketball-shooting manuals. “He fires the three,” Bob Costas, the NBC announcer, says. “And he hits it!” The Alamodome erupts—logically, some Trail Blazers fans must be there, but it seems like all 35,000 people in the arena have joined in an ebullient chorus. About 20 miles away, at our home on Randolph Air Force Base, my living room erupts in screams as well.
Heritage, an entreaty to repose I saw what my ancestors saw last night, just after we laid the kids down to sleep. A cloudless sky - so clear; the pale moon - light casts shadows of crepes right upon my feet. I once said a prayer on a night Like this: That the Lord of my granddaddy keep us! Staring up at the black, speckled abyss
(Browning did not respond to a request for comment from The Atlantic on LinkedIn. When I called his office, I was put on hold for 30 minutes before the line went dead. Each subsequent call was sent directly to voicemail.) "What I do is I let my actions speak, and how I conduct myself and how I treat people speak."
"The waitress brought our food out, and we thought (Tuberville) went to the bathroom, but he never came back to dinner," Danzey said. "Then next thing I know, the next day, he made an announcement that he's going to Cincinnati." The next morning, when Danzey and other recruits were set to take a tour of the campus, Texas Tech offensive line coach Chris Thomsen (also the team's interim coach) told the group Tuberville was gone.
Creighton, justifying Tech’s policy.
Steven Hood, vice president of student life, told the staff of each magazine on Monday night that because the magazines target primarily specific groups, they are "unlawful proxies." Neither magazine barred participation based on personal characteristics like race or gender identity, and both had hired staff who were not part of their target audiences.
“The president’s vision to take a sledgehammer to the Department of Education’s ability to function will cause student suffering. The founders believed that education was critical to the full experience of citizenship; it was where students learned arts, sciences, humanities and how to engage with one another. But putting that vision into place left the nation with a system where inequities — in content and classroom composition — were left in place. America began to undo those inequities, and the department protected that progress. Now, less than three months into Mr. Trump’s second presidency, the administration has done everything in its power, and some things beyond its authority, to ensure we are equal no more.“
The victories followed Tuesday’s special legislative elections. Six Senate seats were up for a special election on Tuesday, along with one House seat, because a federal court ordered the State to create more Black-majority legislative districts earlier this year. Two other Senate districts were up for special elections to fill vacated seats, along with a House seat. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits racial discrimination in voting and mandates that racial minorities must have an equal opportunity to participate in the election process. That could soon change, however, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority appeared inclined to strike down Section 2 during oral arguments in a case last month.
a text thread of expletives and astonishment
But as much as this is a tale of a resource-strapped institution, it’s also a tale of something else—something that has nothing to do with the school’s budget and everything to do with the state of higher education in the 21st century. And that’s because even if the state were to miraculously open the coffers for state institutions, Summers said he would likely still eliminate the history major and others in favor of more focus on STEM fields bolstered by a broader general-education curriculum.
Here is the final proposal of IHL to the plaintiffs in Ayers. The board members will not move another inch, they say. They did include several of the comments yesterday by the plaintiffs counsel. This language is highlighted. The new language on "comprehensive" recognition is essentially ours, but is stated in a more positive way and is stated only once. Paul Stephenson, out of an abundant sense of protection of IHL, had reiterated the point that no further resources were to be implied by the recognition of JSU as "comprehensive," to the degree that it bordered on insult. Moore is in Memphis today, but is available to talk to you by phone. He and Anderson believe that the plaintiffs will take the deal, and we may be before the court next week. Peyton
memo Thurgood Marshall sent to his colleagues in 1978 as they were deliberating about the Bakke case which both upheld and limited AA:
“Values are only as good as their durability under pressure; and many of America’s largest companies proved an equitable, inclusive workplace was never one of their core values to begin with.“
Notice Due to the temporary shutdown of the federal government beginning October 1, 2025, all Library of Congress buildings are closed and all public events are canceled until further notice
“Many of these so-called advocates are actually engaging in violent and dangerous behavior,” Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, told me in a statement. She added, in reference to Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker: “From comparisons to the modern-day Nazi gestapo to glorifying rioters, the violent rhetoric of these sanctuary politicians is beyond the pale. This rhetoric is contributing to a more than 1000% surge in assaults of our ICE officers.” And yet this comes at a time when ICE itself has become more violent toward immigrants, protesters, and unlucky bystanders alike. In recent weeks, agents have shoved to the ground a journalist trying to document an arrest and a woman who was crying because her husband had just been taken into custody. Both were hospitalized. And in Chicago, they shot a woman who they say rammed an agency vehicle—a claim that the woman’s lawyer said body-camera footage disproves. Alongside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the FBI, ICE also stormed an apartment building in the dark of night, breaking down doors and detaining scores of people, including U.S. citizens. Bystanders reported seeing children zip-tied to one another.
Even in the worst times, people have had to rest. It may not mean stopping altogether, but acknowledging that a fight against time is futile. That does not mean we overindulge in leisure. Each of us has the ability to slow down, and to consider how we read or write, work or live. We can also decide what we can or cannot withstand. The input of time only records our moments of decision, until we have none left to make.
On time, a two poem collection on our capacity.
“The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal―and How to Set Them Right” by Adam Harris — Adeline Lee In “The State Must Provide,” Adam Harris traces the history of racial inequality in American higher education and the systemic exclusion of Black Americans from education. He explores the establishment and development of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which emerged from a post-Civil War push for agricultural education. Harris also examines the HBCUs’ struggles for survival as state legislatures withheld funding and as activists and plaintiffs fought legal battles for education equality. This book was eye-opening and humbling to read for me as a student pursuing higher education. Harris’ writing stood out for how powerfully it humanizes history; his portrayal of activists and plaintiffs not only through their work but also through their personal fears and struggles was devastating yet inspiring. It forced me to reflect on my own privileges and to reconsider the true purpose of my education — an opportunity that others fought so desperately for. I now feel a stronger obligation to use my access to education to advocate for greater equity and inclusion in academic spaces.
A screen capture of the HBCU braintrust conversation
Jo Ann Allen Boyce
On her first day, Boyce had worn her hair long, proud. But after that, white students would walk up behind her in the halls and yank it. “You would never know who it was,” she said. “They would make plenty of space by the time you had recovered and turned around.” On the third day of that first week, the ruckus outside the school grew. Inside, students would step on the back of the Black students’ heels. Gail remembers her heels being stepped on until they bled. John Kasper, a 26-year-old segregationist and Ku Klux Klan member, had also started organizing in town. The walk to school became treacherous for the Black students as the mob threw rocks, bottles, sticks, and rotten tomatoes and eggs at them. “It felt like you were being squeezed” walking into the building, Boyce said. “They weren’t that close, but it felt that way, like you were being smothered by these rows of people on the side of the road.”
The Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA stopped short of banning race altogether, leaving room for students to discuss how it shaped their lives in personal essays. But the administration has acted as if it barred any consideration at all. Institutions that sign this agreement would go even further, pledging not to weigh race, sex, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, religion—or even proxies like geography or wealth—in admissions or financial aid. It’s easy enough to nod along with the principle, if you ignore America’s history of higher education and assume the words were written in good faith. Maybe that was naive before this administration took office; seven months in, it’s willful ignorance. Remember, Jim Crow laws were “race-neutral” on their face, too. They didn’t say Black people couldn’t vote; they just required property ownership or a literacy test. Those hurdles could be waived, of course, if your grandfather fought for the Confederacy. The burden fell entirely on Black citizens, framed as their own failure rather than discrimination.
A screenshot of section six of the linked document from the Trump administration titled Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which uses a lot of words to say signatories of the document will be expected disregard the rights of transgender students.