By Will Crossley
As our country celebrates its 250th year, we face a question larger than commemoration: What story about our nation will we hand to the next generation?
Too often, we push Americans to choose between two incomplete narratives: One denies the reality of past injustices, and the other denies the possibility of triumph.
Both misunderstand the nation’s history.
Look, for instance, at the life of Biddy Mason. When she died in 1891, Mason was one of the richest women in Los Angeles, having built a fortune in real estate as the frontier outpost swelled into a city. But this matriarch of California’s wealthiest black families came from the humblest origins, deprived of freedom, family, and even a name.
The woman residents of early LA would come to revere as “Grandma Mason” was born into slavery in the Deep South in 1818. “Biddy” was simply a job description, a word meaning she cleaned house, cared for children, and helped heal sick people. Around age 30, with three young daughters, Mason walked from Mississippi to California behind her enslavers’ wagons. In 1856, she challenged the man who claimed ownership of her in court and won freedom for herself and her children. She became a nurse, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and one of the builders of Los Angeles.
Her life demonstrates that, even in the harshest circumstances, injustice was never the whole story.
Today, some prominent voices argue that America has not merely fallen short of its ideals but was irredeemably fraudulent from the start. That view is dangerously influential, especially among young people. Yet it cannot adequately explain the lives of the men and women who overcame some of the greatest injustices in our history.
“I do not love America, and never have,” public intellectual and my fellow Mississippian Eddie Glaude writes in his latest book. I find this posture bizarre, even self-destructive, not because America is beyond criticism, but because any effort to improve it requires investment, responsibility, and a belief that our national experiment is noble at its core. It must, in other words, be an act of love. By contrast, attorney Bryan Stevenson recently spoke of his desire to be “a great American, like my enslaved foreparents.” That aspiration strikes me as deeply consistent with the tradition of Mason and countless others who directly confronted America’s failures while refusing to surrender belief in its possibilities. It is impossible to be great at something you hate.