US Politics

Chad L Williams has written a brilliant biography of WEB Du Bois, a civil rights powerhouse widely regarded as America’s most important Black intellectual. Williams speaks and writes with a warmth and authority which have made him a star at Brandeis University, where he is the Samuel J and Augusta Spector professor of history and African and African American studies.The Guardian caught up with him just after he arrived in his hometown, San Francisco, where he was combining promotion for The Wounded World with a reunion with his sister and his parents, both retired attorneys.Williams lives in Needham, Massachusetts, with his wife, Madeleine Lopez, who directs the Center for Inclusive Excellence at Regis College, and their three children.“I thought I was going to go to law school but then I realized I didn’t want to be like my parents,” Williams said. “My first encounter with Du Bois was during my freshman year at UCLA, in a course on African American nationalism when I read [Du Bois’s 1903 classic] The Souls of Black Folks.“I was blown away. I remember not knowing what to make of this very strange book that had all of these powerful metaphors in it. It was really undefinable as far as discipline. It had history, sociology, philosophy, music. It is truly one of those timeless, classic books.“I started reading his other books like Black Reconstruction in America and really came to appreciate him as the most significant Black intellectual and scholar activist in American history.”To Williams, Du Bois was “singular” because of the sheer span of his life: “Ninety-five years; born in 1868 during the presidency of [Andrew] Johnson, during Reconstruction, he dies the day before the March on Washington, in Ghana in 1963. He really encapsulated the struggle for Black freedom and equality throughout the 20th century in the United States and throughout the broader African diaspora. I never thought I’d write a whole book about Du Bois. But yeah, it did happen.”Williams was a graduate student at Princeton when he first went to Amherst College, where most of Du Bois’s papers are in a library named in his honor. He saw a reference to “Du Bois world war I materials” and asked to see them.“I figured maybe I’ll get a couple of folders and [the librarian] returned with six microfilm reels. And I think, ‘What could this possibly be?’ I load this first reel and I see this manuscript which I knew nothing about. It was over 800 pages long. In addition to the manuscript, all of his research materials and all of his correspondence related to this book entitled The Black Man and the Wounded World.“He worked on it for two decades and no scholar had ever talked about it. I was stunned. This was this huge aspect of his life and career and scholarship which had been overlooked. From that moment I was hooked on understanding it. It would have been the definitive history of [Black soldiers] in world war I and one of Du Bois’s most significant works of scholarship – but he never completed it.”I asked if Williams identified with Du Bois’s seminal idea of double consciousness in every Black American, and how it related to the unfinished work on the war: “Did it mean anything to you as a Black man?”“I think not. Not initially. When I first read The Souls of Black Folk I was really just trying to understand who Du Bois was and what this book was about.”But soon, Williams began to reread the book every year. As he learned more about African American history, he “came to appreciate the significance of Du Bois’s formulation of double consciousness. And subsequently began to think about it just in terms of my own racial identity.“But it’s such a powerful metaphor and I really think it sits at the heart of my book, in terms of why Du Bois supported world war I, and how he felt that the war was an opportunity to reconcile that double consciousness that Black people faced. This tension that he described, of being Black on the one hand and being American on the other, this was the opportunity to put that theory into practice and to test it.“He genuinely thought those warring ideals he talked about could be reconciled … and he genuinely believed the war could serve as that opportunity. And ultimately he was wrong.”Du Bois fought for the creation of a Black officer corps, even though he had to accept segregated training. When he got to France, to interview Black soldiers, he was appalled by what he learned.“This is the beginning of him working on his book conducting research and also reckoning with the failed expectations of the war. He was genuinely taken aback by the racism that he was exposed to and Black soldiers told him about.”White officers spread the libel Black soldiers were raping French women. French mayors told Du Bois Black soldiers were much better behaved than white.“Getting the first-hand accounts from all these mayors was really important. And when he publishes them in [the NAACP magazine] the Crisis it’s an incredibly bold act, going directly against the narrative the government and the army are putting out about Black troops” being well treated.Like most great books, The Wounded World is a tribute to persistence. Williams worked on it for 12 years but he started thinking about it when he discovered Du Bois’s unpublished manuscript, 23 years ago.“One of the things that I think us writers can appreciate … is howdifficult it is to write a book,” Williams said. “I wish Du Bois had finished his book. But I can empathize with him. It’s not easy, even when it’s the great Du Bois, who wrote 22 other books.”
The Wounded World: WEB Du Bois and the First World War is published in the US by Macmillan More

Frank Forrester Church sat in the US Senate for 24 years. His tenure was consequential. A Democrat, he battled for civil rights and came to oppose the Vietnam war. He believed Americans were citizens, not subjects. Chairing the intelligence select committee was his most enduring accomplishment. James Risen, a Pulitzer-winning reporter now with the Intercept, sees him as a hero. The Last Honest Man is both paean and lament.“For decades … the CIA’s operations faced only glancing scrutiny from the White House, and virtually none from Congress,” Risen writes. “True oversight would have to wait until 1975, and the arrival on the national stage of a senator from Idaho, Frank Church.”For 16 months, Church and his committee scrutinized the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency and their many abuses. Amid the cold war, in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, Congress grappled with the balance between civil liberties and national security, executive prerogative and congressional authority.Political assassinations, covert operations and domestic surveillance finally received scrutiny and oversight. A plot to kill Fidel Castro, with an assist from organized crime, made headlines. So did the personal ties that bound John F Kennedy, mob boss Sam Giancana and their shared mistress, Judith Campbell Exner.Giancana was murdered before he testified. Before John Rosselli, another mobster, could make a third appearance, his decomposed body turned up in a steel fuel drum near Miami.One subheading in the Church committee’s interim report bears the title: “The Question of Whether the Assassination Operation Involving Underworld Figures Was Known About by Attorney General Kennedy or President Kennedy as Revealed by Investigations of Giancana and Rosselli”.Against this grizzly but intriguing backdrop, Risen’s book is aptly subtitled: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys – And One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy. The Last Honest Man is a gem, marbled with scoop, laden with interviews.In 2006, Risen won the Pulitzer prize for his coverage of George W Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. Risen was also part of the New York Times team that snagged a Pulitzer in the aftermath of September 11. He endured a seven-year legal battle with the Bush and Obama justice departments, for refusing to name a source. Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general, backed off. But he earned Risen’s lasting ire.In 2015, Risen called the Obama administration “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation”. Holder, he said, “has done the bidding of the intelligence community and the White House to damage press freedom in the United States”.And then came Donald Trump.Risen now describes Dick Cheney’s efforts to block Church’s committee, as chief of staff to Gerald Ford. To Cheney’s consternation, the president “refused to engage in an all-out war”. So Cheney nursed a grudge and bided his time.In 1987, Cheney and congressional Republicans issued a dissent on Iran-Contra, blaming the Church committee for the concept of “all but unlimited congressional power”. Later, as vice-president to George W Bush, Cheney zestily embraced the theory of the unitary executive, the global “war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq.The Last Honest Man also doubles as a guide to high-stakes politics. Risen captures Gary Hart and the late Walter Mondale on the record. Both Democratic presidential hopefuls – Mondale the candidate in 1984, Hart the frontrunner, briefly, in the 1988 race – after sitting on Church’s committee. The three senators were competitors and colleagues. Paths and ambitions intersected.Church entered the 1976 Democratic presidential primary late – and lost to Jimmy Carter. Carter weighed picking Church as his running mate but opted for Mondale instead.“I think he had seen me on a Sunday news talk show, talking about the Church committee, and he liked how I looked and sounded,” Mondale told Risen.It was for the best. Church never cottoned to Carter, failing hide his disdain. Carter and his aides returned the favor. They “hated Church right back”. David Aaron, a Church aide and later deputy to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, recalls: “I know that whenever Church’s name came up, Brzezinski would grimace.”In 1980, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush beat Carter and Mondale in a landslide. The election also cost Church his seat and the Democrats control of the Senate. Four years later, Mondale bested Hart for the Democratic nomination, only to be shellacked by Reagan-Bush again.Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, leaves his mark on Risen’s pages too. He played a “previously undisclosed role in the Church committee’s investigation of the assassinations of foreign leaders”, Risen reports in a lengthy footnote.In an interview, Ellsberg says he “met privately” with Church in 1975, as the committee investigated assassination plots. In Risen’s telling, Ellsberg cops to handing Church “a manilla envelope containing copies of a series of top-secret cables” between the US embassy in South Vietnam and “the Kennedy White House”.The messages purportedly pertained to the “US role in the planning of the 1963 coup against South Vietnamese president [Ngô Đình] Diệm that resulted in his assassination”. The Church committee interim report referred to cable traffic between the embassy in Saigon and the White House but contained no mention of Ellsberg.In other words, assassinations and coups carry a bipartisan legacy. It wasn’t just Eisenhower and Nixon, Iran and Chile.Risen hails Church as “an American Cicero” who “offered the United States a brief glimpse of what it would be like to turn away from its imperialistic ambitions … and return to its roots as a republic”.He overstates, but not by much. Iraq and its aftermath still reverberate. But for that debacle, it is unlikely Trumpism would have attained the purchase it still possesses. Our national divide would not be as deep – or intractable. Church died in April 1984, aged just 59.
The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys – And One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy is published in the US by Hachette More

When state senator Machaela Cavanaugh set out to block every bill brought by the Nebraskan legislature this session, it was kind of an accident.She was so incensed by the advancement of LB 547, a bill looking to block gender-affirming healthcare for young people in Nebraska, she promised to hold up every single bill the legislature brought – including those she agreed with – unless her colleagues agreed to drop it.If the bill continued to progress, she told her colleagues, she would “burn the legislative session to the ground”.That was 23 February. Ten weeks later, Cavanaugh has spent some several hundred hours speaking on the house floor at length, delaying every single bill the senate tries to pass.Sometimes she has filibustered bills that she would really rather be passing, like one agreeing on state senator salaries – a mere $12,000 a year – which, if she agreed to it, would mean she could get paid. She has filibustered till her lungs became sore; taken naps on her office floor between filibustering; she’s filibustered so much she’s barely seen her family.“I imagine when session is over I will sleep a lot for several days. I’m so exhausted,” Cavanaugh told the Guardian in a phone interview, her voice hoarse.She added: “It wasn’t a deeply thought out plan, it was just the tool I have available to me.” Nebraska’s legislature is technically non-partisan, though each lawmaker identifies either as Republican or Democrat, and that swing is currently in favor of the Republicans, 32-17.“I’m in the minority party here – the only thing I have is time,” she explained. “We have a 90-day session and a limited amount of hours in which we can accomplish whatever we want to accomplish. And so I decided I was going to take control of that commodity. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since,” explains Cavanaugh.Originally, Cavanaugh wanted to force her colleagues’ hands. Would they rather get on with their jobs, passing the huge number of bills – usually more than 200 in one session – required to keep a healthy state moving forward? Or were her colleagues so dead set on passing LB 574 that they would fight over every other bill rather than drop it? So far, they have chosen the latter. But Cavanaugh has stuck to her crusade because she feels she has no other choice.“It targets a vulnerable minority population in such a vicious manner as to deny them access to lifesaving healthcare,” said Cavanaugh. “They are targeting children. I don’t view it as an option to do anything other than fight against it. That’s my job as an elected official,” she says.“I just wish my colleagues would come together and acknowledge this is bad for the state. But they’ve chosen legislating a hateful bill,” said Cavanaugh.One of the bills Cavanaugh has contributed to blocking in recent weeks was a six-week abortion ban in Nebraska.“I’m grateful it failed to move forward. It is a total ban, essentially,” she said, in reference to the fact that many people don’t realize they are pregnant at six weeks, just two weeks after their first missed period. Realizing this, the Republican co-sponsor of the six-week ban also withdrew support from his own bill last week, effectively tanking it – the bill ultimately failed to pass by one vote.Cavanaugh believes there is a marked similarity in the way that Republicans – who have brought 533 anti-trans bills since the 2023 legislative session started – target abortion and trans healthcare.“They talk about the actual healthcare and how horrible it is. They really villainize it. And right before they block access to lifesaving care to people, they say: ‘because children need to be protected’,” she said.“And just like that, you’ve eliminated health care for trans people in Nebraska, and you’ve essentially eliminated trans people’s ability to exist in Nebraska. It’s not about protecting anybody at all.”These arguments certainly sound reminiscent of those used in a huge, ongoing national case, that will decide the fate of a crucial drug used in more than half of abortions in the US.Plaintiffs bringing that case argue mifepristone – which is used in roughly 53% of US abortions – is hurting women and girls. As well as being the preferred method of US abortions, that drug is used in miscarriage care, and for lifesaving abortions. But an argument based on the vulnerability of women could be just the thing that drastically curtails access to the drug.What happens on LB 574 next is unknown. In April, Republicans in Omaha agreed to compromise on the bill, but since then, conversations seem to have broken down. No compromise amendment has been submitted; but Cavanaugh’s colleagues still have 17 days left to try to pass LB 574 if they choose to. It’s unclear if Republicans will have the votes to pass the bill if it is advanced.Cavanaugh and two of her closest allies in the battle against LB 574 – senators John Fredrickson and Megan Hunt – will continue to fight it, regardless.“I think everyone I work with would say that I am a substantial roadblock. They all are as frustrated with me as I am frustrated with all of it … It still has one more round of debate, and it could fail or pass. If it fails, I will stop talking. And if it passes, I will continue talking,” said Cavanaugh.Even if it does pass, Cavanaugh believes the bill won’t make it past an appeals court if challenged – because late last year, the eighth circuit court of appeals blocked an almost identical bill brought in Arkansas.“If this bill passes, it will be tragic for the trans community in Nebraska. It will be tragic for Nebraska writ large … And then it’s likely to be overturned in the courts. And so we will have done all of this harm and it won’t even get the result that they wanted,” she said.But she is looking forward to the session being over, and finally seeing her children and her partner. “I just want to do normal things that normal people do. Over the last 10 weeks, I’ve missed a lot,” she said. More

The US homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, said on Friday that immigration authorities faced “extremely challenging” circumstances along the border with Mexico days before the end of asylum restrictions implemented during the Covid-19 pandemic.A surge of Venezuelan migrants through south Texas, particularly in and around the border community of Brownsville, has occurred over the last two weeks for reasons that Mayorkas said were unclear. On Thursday, 4,000 of about 6,000 migrants in border patrol custody in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley were Venezuelan.Mayorkas noted that Mexico agreed this week to continue taking back Venezuelans who enter the US illegally after asylum restrictions end on 11 May, along with Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans. Migrants have been expelled from the US more than 2.8m times since March 2020 under the authority of what is known as Title 42.The secretary reaffirmed plans to finalize a new policy by Thursday that will make it extremely difficult for migrants to seek asylum if they pass through another country, like Mexico, on their way to the US border.“The situation at the border is a very serious one, a very challenging one and a very difficult one,” Mayorkas said.Illegal crossings tumbled after the Joe Biden White House announced asylum restrictions in January, but they have risen since mid-April. The president of the National Border Patrol Council, Brandon Judd, said this week they have been hovering at about 7,200 daily, up from about 5,200 in March.Border patrol chief Raul Ortiz said 1,500 active-duty troops are planning to be dispatched to El Paso, Texas, adding to 2,500 national guard troops already positioned across the border. Ortiz said El Paso was chosen because it has been a busy corridor for illegal crossings over the last six months. The troop deployment was announced this week but not the location.Mayorkas, on his second day of a visit to the Rio Grande Valley, said smugglers were deceiving migrants and luring them on a dangerous journey. “The border is not open, it has not been open, and it will not be open” after 11 May, he said.The Mexican foreign affairs secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, echoed Mayorkas’s sentiment about smugglers spreading misinformation.“We’re seeing a very significant flow (of migrants) in recent days on the basis of a hoax,” Ebrard said at a news conference. He said smugglers are saying: “Hurry up to get to the United States by crossing Mexico because … they’re going to end Title 42” on 11 May.“It’s a trick and they’re at risk,” Ebrard said.The Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador urged those who want to migrate to follow legal pathways, such as applying in US processing centers scheduled to open in Guatemala and Colombia. He said Mexico was not making special preparations for the end of Title 42 because he did not expect a surge.“A lot of people won’t let themselves be tricked,” the president said.Mayorkas touted new legal pathways, which include parole for up to 30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans a month who apply online with a financial sponsor. But he said the Biden administration could only do so much without Congress.“We have a plan – we are executing on that plan,” Mayorkas said. “Fundamentally, however, we are working within a broken immigration system that for decades has been in dire need of reform.”US customs and border protection said on Friday that it is raising the number of people admitted to the country at land crossings with Mexico to 1,000 a day from 740 using a mobile app called CBP One that was extended in January to asylum-seekers. Demand has far outweighed available slots.The administration faced a setback, at least a temporary one, when Colombia said on Thursday it suspended deportation flights from the US due to “cruel and degrading” treatment of migrants. Colombia’s immigration agency said it canceled returns of 1,200 Colombians after complaints about conditions in US detention centers and on the flights. More

Moms for Liberty is a Florida-based pressure group which campaigns for book bans in US public schools, an issue at the heart of the national debate as Republican-run states seek to control or eliminate teaching of sex education, LGBTQ+ rights and racism in American history.But rightwing calls for school book bans are by no means a new phenomenon – and a look at the Moms for Liberty website indicates why.Moms for Liberty seeks to organise “Madison Meetups”, events it describes as “like a book club for the constitution!”, featuring discussion of “liberty, freedom and the foundation of our government”. Under “resources that we have found helpful”, the only resource offered is The Making of America, a book by W Cleon Skousen.In the early 1960s, Skousen was a hero to and a defender of the John Birch Society, a far-right group that campaigned against what it claimed was the communist threat to America.Matthew Dallek, a professor of political management at George Washington University, is the author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. He points out that though the Birchers were not the only ones promoting book bans in the 60s, “they were likely the most visible group promoting book bans or promoting the policing of content in schools, libraries, movie theaters, even on newsstands”.The Birchers, Dallek adds, focused on “the so-called erosion of the moral fiber of the United States, but also the struggle to rid the country of what they regarded as really the socialist left wing”.The society still exists but its influence is greater than its presence, most obviously through a resurgence of Bircher-esque thought and action in the Republican party of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.In the society’s heyday, Dallek says, book bans and school board elections, another current battlefield, “gave Birchers a way to take action in their community.“They looked at where their kids went to school and their local library and the movie theater they would pass by. Part of their agenda was to insert what they considered Americanist publications, as opposed to communist propaganda.“What’s frightening now is that I don’t recall a time where those efforts were so often successful. Moms for Liberty and the other successors to the John Birch Society, they’re having a lot more success at actually implementing their vision.”Last month, the writers’ organisation Pen America reported a 28% rise in public school book bans in just six months. As the 2024 election approaches, attacks on the place of race in history classes and teaching on LGBTQ+ issues seem certain to feature in Republican debates and town halls.Dallek considers the Birchers’ influence on the Republican party over more than 60 years. But he can’t recall the society inspiring “any sweeping legislation like Florida has now passed, through three major bills. And one in particular, it’s very Orwellian. They have these education minders who have to approve all texts in school libraries. That was certainly a dream of the Birch Society.”Tactics are familiar too. Birchers often protested against what they called pornography in books and teaching, as a vehicle for communistic thought. Now, the hard right sees pornography in books on LGBTQ+ rights, in drag queen story hours, or in the casting of children’s plays.Dallek says: “Whatever the language is, whether it’s ‘woke’, or ‘progressive’, or ‘pornographic’, or ‘communistic’, in a way the brilliance of the Birchers and other groups is in the way they use language. They’re able to distill ideas and aspects of the culture they find offensive and brand them as something evil, something un-American, something that will twist and pollute the minds of kids.“I don’t know that they meant that it was literally communistic to teach sex ed in schools but it was a kind of brilliant shorthand, because they were able to mobilise a lot of supporters by saying this was a civilizational battle. A battle for whether your children will grow up being moral or not, whether they’ll have a decent life.“And if we want to bring it back to today, Ron DeSantis is out there claiming, ‘We’re only banning books that are pornographic or that kids should not be exposed to.’ But then when you’re talking about banning Toni Morrison? I mean, come on. It’s ridiculous.”But it’s real. The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel, and her masterpiece Beloved have been removed from some Florida libraries.Dallek notes other echoes. For instance, the role of rightwing women.“Historically, schools have been in terms of teaching jobs often reserved for women. And so, ironically, in the 1960s and 70s, as feminism becomes a major force in the culture and many women expect to work outside the home and be active politically, conservative, really far-right women take an element of that and get active in their communities.“Women have been on the frontlines of many of these fights to ban books, to police what kids are learning. Parental rights, the whole idea … is I think focused at the moms and … imposing their version of Christian morals on public education and many public spaces.“To go back to the W Cleon Skousen thing” on the Moms for Liberty website, “it does suggest a link to the past. Skousen continued to write in the 1980s and 90s. He was a defender of the John Birch Society and was held up as a hero.”Skousen died in 2006. Seventeen years later, to Dallek his recommendation from Moms for Liberty “suggests there really is a tradition in modern American politics, on the far right, that has become much more mainstream.“Groups like Moms for Liberty understand that. That there’s a set of ideas, and a literature, and a whole kind of subculture around this effort to police ideas and morality in schools. And they are tapping into that very effectively.”
Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right is published in the US by Hachette More

My favorite kind of history makes you feel you are living inside every moment the author creates. This can only happen when the fruits of rigorous research are assembled with the flair of a novelist. Chad L Williams, a Brandeis professor, does all that and more in his riveting new biography of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois.The first Black man to earn a Harvard PhD, Du Bois’s passion and thoughtfulness still make him America’s most important Black intellectual. Besides his brilliance, he never shied away from friction: another useful quality for any good biographer.Williams’s focus is Du Bois’s role in the first world war and the book about it which preoccupied him for many years, though he never managed to publish it. But Williams also includes the most important details of Du Bois’s life before and long after.One of the many pleasures of this volume is that author and subject are equally interesting writers.Du Bois established himself as a thoughtful radical and eager combatant with The Souls of Black Folk, an essay collection published in 1903, into which Williams says he poured “all his brilliance and anguish”. Combining “philosophical clairvoyance, historical audacity, literary imagination, sociological precision, autobiographical introspection, political urgency, musical lyricism, and poetic emotion”, it was “a text that defied classification”.It also made Du Bois a declared enemy of Booker T Washington, who founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington pleased white supremacists by declaring that “in all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers”. Williams writes that Du Bois portrayed his rival as anointed by white capitalists “North and South to legitimize the social, political and economic marginalization of the race”.It was here that Du Bois offered one of his first famous insights: the color line endowed Black Americans with the peculiar sensation of “double consciousness”. This was the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity … One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”Williams discovered Souls as an undergraduate. It has been a touchstone ever since. The “dogged strength” of African Americans forms the spine of this biography.Six years after publishing his foundational volume, Du Bois became a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he was director of research and, most importantly, editor of its monthly magazine, the Crisis. This gave him a direct line into the hearts and minds of tens of thousands of African Americans, for 24 years beginning in 1910.In 1915, Du Bois correctly identified the Great War as proof that “European civilization has failed”. But he also believed the loyalties of people of color had to lie with England, France and Belgium, despite their terrible colonial records, because a triumph by Germany would be the worst possible outcome.Du Bois used his pulpit at the Crisis to celebrate the role of Black Africans fighting for France, photos of the tirailleurs sénégalais carrying arresting captions like: “Black soldiers from Senegal fighting to protect the civilization of Europe from itself.”When Woodrow Wilson led America into battle in 1917, Du Bois was fiercely anti-war: “It is an awful thing! It is Hell. It is the end of civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism.” But with what Williams calls “a mix of resignation, pragmatism, patriotism, and hope”, Du Bois supported entry, because he saw it as “an opportunity for African Americans to claim their full civic rights”.Du Bois clashed frequently with the NAACP board but he had a crucial ally in Joel Spingarn, the chairman. This was an early example of the Black-Jewish alliance which would be an important feature of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. Spingarn enraged many Black newspapers when he advocated for a segregated training school for Black officers. But Du Bois agreed that, given the depths of prejudice, this was a necessary evil. He called the segregated facility “a temporary measure” designed to “FIGHT, not encourage discrimination in the army”.The secretary of war accepted the NAACP request. More than 1,000 Black officers were trained. But when Du Bois got himself a passport and passage to France, he discovered bigoted white officers making Black lives hell. They spread the libel that Black soldiers were raping vast numbers of French women. One colonel requested the removal of Black officers from his regiment, because they supposedly prevented the development of “mutual confidence and esprit de corps”. Black officers, Du Bois wrote, were disgusted by the “seemingly bottomless depths of American color hatred”.He surveyed French mayors, all over the country. Reports came back: Black Americans were treating French women with much greater respect than white American troops did. The entire 369th Infantry Regiment, the Black Rattlers from Harlem, embedded with the French army, received the Croix de Guerre.When the war was over, Du Bois and 5,000 others watched in awe as the French honored its troops of color with a gala celebration at the Palais du Trocadéro. The Théâtre-Français acted out “battlefield exploits of the colonial troops … and singers from the opera gave a rousing rendition” of the Marseillaise. The spectacle “surpassed any tribute to Black men” Du Bois “had ever seen”.I can only hint at the number of beguiling moments that fill the pages of this great book. The best part of this job is an occasional chance to celebrate great work. This gripping history is a cause for celebration.
The Wounded World: WEB Du Bois and the First World War is published in the US by Macmillan More

Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, signed a bill on Friday that makes it possible to oust elected district attorneys from office if they are believed to not be adequately enforcing the law. It’s a move that is seen a thinly veiled power grab to push out Democratic prosecutors, include some who said they would not prosecute abortion-related crimes.The new law sets up a statewide Prosecuting Attorneys Statewide Qualifications Commission with the power to investigate complaints against district attorneys and remove them if they have sufficient cause. The law outlines a series of offenses for which a prosecutor can be removed, including “willful and persistent failure” to carry out their duties and categorically refusing to prosecute crimes they are required by law to pursue.“I am not gonna stand idly by as rogue or incompetent prosecutors refuse to uphold the law,” Kemp said at an event before he signed the bill on Friday in Savannah. “Today we are sending a message that we will not forfeit public safety for prosecutors who let criminals off the hook.”The measure comes as Fani Willis, a Democrat serving as the Fulton county district attorney, investigates Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. A special purpose grand jury has already recommended indictments in the matter and Willis has said if there are charges, they would be announced this summer.Willis has criticized the measure as “racist”, noting earlier this year that Republicans were pushing the measure after the number of minority district attorneys increased from five to 14 in 2020. ““I’m tired and I’m just going to call it how I see it,” she said. “I, quite frankly, think the legislation is racist. I don’t know what other thing to call it,” she told a senate panel earlier this year, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The eight-person commission will consist of a five-member committee that can investigate district attorneys and a three-member hearing panel. The commissioners’ terms will formally begin in July 2024, the same month complaints can start to be filed. The commission’s members would be appointed by the governor, lieutenant governor and legislature in Georgia, which are all Republican-led.The new law is widely believed to target Deborah Gonzalez, a Democrat who was elected the prosecutor in Athens-Clarke and Oconee counties in 2020. Gonzalez has adopted a number of criminal justice reforms, including not charging for simple possession of marijuana. She was also one of several district attorneys in Georgia who announced last year that she would not prosecute abortion-related crimes.“This is not an oversight bill. It’s an overstep on the part of the legislature to undermine the voice and vote of the people who elected us as DAs based on our approach and what they felt they wanted, in terms of the way that justice should be done in their community. This just takes all of that away,” Gonzalez told Bolts, an online newsmagazine.Houston Gaines, a state lawmaker from Athens who supports the bill, said the point of it “is to restore public safety in places where you have rogue district attorneys who simply are not doing their job”, according to the Associated Press.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe bill comes as Republicans elsewhere have moved to remove elected progressive prosecutors from office. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis suspended Andrew Warren, a Democrat, after Warren said he would not enforce crimes around abortion and gender therapy. In St. Louis, Republicans were moving to oust Kim Gardner, the circuit attorney for St Louis county, before she announced she was resigning on Thursday.Georgia lawmakers also previously passed a measure that allowed for a takeover of local election boards for poor performance. A panel reviewing the elections operations in Fulton county, the most populous in the state, recommended not taking over the board earlier this year. More

Video of Donald Trump’s deposition in his civil rape trial in New York City was released to the public on Friday.The footage, from last October, included a previously reported but never publicly seen exchange in which the former president mistook a picture of his accuser, the writer E Jean Carroll, for a picture of his second wife, Marla Maples.“That’s Marla, yeah,” Trump said. “That’s my wife.”His questioner said: “The person you’ve just pointed to is E Jean Carroll.”Carroll says Trump raped her in a department store in New York in the mid-1990s. She is suing for battery and for defamation, over comments he made while denying the claim, which she made in a book in 2019.In one such comment, repeated in his deposition, Trump said Carroll was not his “type”.On Friday, Renato Mariotti – a former federal prosecutor now a columnist for Politico – pointed to the impact the footage could have in deciding the case.“Trump claims E Jean Carroll isn’t his type,” Mariotti said, “but he mistook a picture of her for a picture of his ex-wife. You don’t need to be a lawyer to understand why his testimony could [affect] the jury’s verdict.”In the clip, Trump called Carroll’s claim “the most ridiculous, disgusting story” which he said was “just made up”. An exchange followed about when Trump became aware of a picture showing him with his first wife, Ivana Trump, Carroll and Carroll’s then husband, John Johnson, at a public event in New York.Shown the picture, Trump said: “I don’t even know who the woman – let’s see, I don’t know who, it’s Marla.”His questioner asked: “You say Marla’s in this photo?”Trump said: “That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife.”Asked “which woman are you pointing to”, Trump said: “Here.”His questioner said: “The person you’ve just pointed to is E Jean Carroll.”“Oh I see,” Trump said, adding: “Is that Carroll? Because it’s very blurry”.Trump’s affair with Maples was a tabloid staple in the 1980s, one indelible headline, engineered by Trump, seeing Maples proclaim him the provider of the “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had”.In his deposition, he was asked if he had seen other women while married to his first wife. He answered: “I don’t know.”Trump was also shown repeating, “with as much respect as I can”, his contention that Carroll “is not my type. Not my type in any way, shape or form.”In rally footage shown at his deposition, Trump described Jessica Leeds, who accuses him of sexual assault on a plane in the late 1970s, as “not my first choice, that I can tell you … that would not be my first choice”. This week, Leeds testified for Carroll.Trump told Carroll’s lawyer she “wouldn’t be a choice of mine either, to be honest with you, I hope you’re not insulted, I would not in any circumstances have any interest in you”. He also called the lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, a “political operative” and a “disgrace”.Other footage showed Trump discussing the Access Hollywood, hot-mic footage which surfaced in 2016, briefly threatening to derail Trump’s election campaign.In that tape, Trump said: “I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet, just kiss, I don’t even wait and when you’re a star they just let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”In his deposition, he said: “Well historically, that’s true with stars.”He was asked: “It’s true you can grab them by the pussy?”He said: “Well, if you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.”“You consider yourself a star?”“I think you can say that, yeah.”The jury saw the footage this week. Lawyers for Carroll rested on Thursday. For Trump, the lawyer Joe Tacopina said no witnesses would be called and Trump would not testify himself. Trump nonetheless has until 5pm on Sunday to change his mind.Trump faces other forms of legal jeopardy, including investigations of his election subversion, retention of classified records and business and tax affairs.In another New York case, he has pleaded not guilty to 34 criminal counts related to a hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims an affair Trump denies.Politically, Trump has capitalised on his predicament, alleging persecution by Democrats, enjoying a flood of donations and surging to commanding leads in Republican primary polling. More