We are just back from what I am calling a civil rights tour of the South—Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma, Alabama and Memphis, Tennessee. We visited the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham where four little girls were blown up in 1963, the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery and the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, part of the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated.

We visited those places because they represent a distinct part of American history, just as Constitution Hall in Philadelphia does, or Pearl Harbor, or Wounded Knee, or the Alamo, or Manzanar, or Arlington Cemetery or the Vietnam Memorial do.

America has a rich and varied history, much of which we can remember with pride and quite a bit with shame. But it’s our history—all of it. We can’t write a history of baseball without mentioning Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb; but we also can’t ignore Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron.

In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, history was a patchwork of facts, fictions and omissions. Events and individuals were omitted in the official Soviet version. Americans got a kick out of the various inventions and accomplishments that the Soviets falsely claimed for themselves.

Now we’re witnessing an apparent attempt to replicate that effort here. The Naval Academy in Annapolis went about purging books from its library in advance of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first visit. The Nazis made a big show of burning books back in the 1930s. Since when are we afraid of ideas, including ideas we loathe? We’re witnessing a new example of the cancel culture so roundly condemned by critics on the right. The purging of the Naval Academy library, of course, isn’t an isolated example. It’s part of a concerted campaign supposedly to expunge any trace of DEI from the government. The effort, in fact, is a systematic attempt to rewrite our history to exclude the contribution of anyone except White males.

What should we do with the 180,000 African American soldiers who fought for the Union Army in the Civil War—16 winning the Medal of Honor—and arguably provided the winning margin? Or should we forget the contribution of the 442^nd Infantry Regiment in World War II, composed almost entirely of Japanese Americans, including 1,500 men who left internment camps to join the Army? The 442nd became the most decorated unit in American military history.

Can we write a history of the West without mentioning Indians; and if we mention Indians, can we not discuss the battles fought with them, the treaties signed and violated by the U.S. Government?

Is the history of the United States a series of proud accomplishments (by White men) without a single blemish? The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620—a notable event in American history. They came here, among other reasons, to practice their religion freely, as they desired. We celebrate the event every year at Thanksgiving.

A year before, in Jamestown, Virginia, the first documented African slaves arrived. They were followed by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans over almost two centuries. Eventually a war was fought over their enslavement. They had no rights. Families were routinely shattered. Children were separated from their parents, husbands from wives. Men and women were beaten, tortured and murdered. Obviously, we can’t be proud of that history, but can we honestly choose to ignore and suppress it?

What is the price we pay for censoring the uncomfortable parts of our past, for deluding ourselves that we are better than we are, for maintaining the illusion of our innocence and superiority? Are we stronger when we deny our reality; or when we acknowledge our history—all of it—and determine to be better?

The history of America is an intricate, multi-faceted weave of the experience and contributions of hundreds, maybe thousands, of different groups of men and women—immigrants from Ireland, Germany, England, Scotland, Russia, Ukraine, Taiwan, China, Japan, Africa, Scandinavia, India, Italy, Bolivia, Spain, Portugal, Cuba and many, many more—not simply the efforts and accomplishments of White men.

Viewed entirely differently, the history of America is a story of overcoming and of becoming, an effort as the Constitution says, “to form a more perfect Union”. As with so much else these days, we need to be careful not to entrust the custody of our history, our values, traditions and our liberty to those who are ignorant of and indifferent to them.