Adam Harris
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adamhsays.com
Adam Harris
@adamhsays.com
5.2K followers 640 following 610 posts
Writer exploring education, history, politics, and the South. Author of The State Must Provide. Writing Is This America? | Now: Senior fellow, New America; Soon: Host, The Atlantic. Occasionally sharing poems.

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www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/o...
“ 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.”
January 12, 2026 at 3:09 AM
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2) Frederick Douglass, on hypocrisy: “The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families,— sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers, leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate.”
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
January 9, 2026 at 4:11 AM
adamhsays.com
Two final things:

1) Tom, his family, and their ilk gushed about Judah Benjamin‘a New Year’s Eve 1860 speech favoring secession.

From the NYT the next day: “His closing declaration, that the South could never be subjugated, was greeted by the galleries with disgraceful applause.”
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."
January 9, 2026 at 4:05 AM
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I realize I haven't talked much about Is This America here! I've been working on it for the last several years. Excited for you all to read it. More soon, but for now:
January 9, 2026 at 3:37 AM
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No concern except to tell his mother that he was sorry Richard, who they held in bondage, had escaped. You’ll also note, here, a later attempt to edit the letter which is faded—an attempt to change “fellow did it” to “was taken away” and further strip Richard of any agency.
January 9, 2026 at 3:09 AM
adamhsays.com
But he wasn’t worried about Civil War actually happening. “I do not think it is the spirit of the 19th century to fight over an abstract principle and in event of a seperation, slavery must be but an abstract question to the people of the North,” he wrote to his mother in May.
Thomas to his Mother, believing slavery would no longer be an issue to the north after secession
January 9, 2026 at 3:07 AM
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“We must either make up our minds to fight under the stars and stripes, wherever our services may be called for, or we must resign at once and free ourselves from that solemn oath,” he wrote to his Aunt Emily in April 1861.
Text of Thomas Rowland letter to Aunt Emily, describing resigning from West Point
January 9, 2026 at 3:06 AM
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“the new south slams up against the old”
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.
January 6, 2026 at 7:05 PM
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2) The psalm says joy comes in the morning but it doesn’t say it always lasts.
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.”
January 6, 2026 at 6:40 PM
adamhsays.com
I’ve been trying to find video from the event, but I’ve been scrolling through some of the live tweets from it and this one from @lottiejoiner.bsky.social stuck out:
December 28, 2025 at 2:06 AM
adamhsays.com
grateful for every moment I got to spend with her. she truly believed in the importance of sharing her experience because America has a habit of forgetting. in may 2019, I interviewed her again on stage in DC:
Atlantic education summit 2019
December 27, 2025 at 1:50 PM
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I missed the AP story when it ran earlier this month. It included this photo of Jo Ann taken by Bethany Mollenkof on the day she and I sat at her table in her LA home in 2019.

I was working on a project interviewing those who desegregated America’s schools. Not the laws, the people.
December 27, 2025 at 1:03 PM
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On playing the game the right way: "[It] 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..." adamhsays.substack.com/p/pandemoniu...
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.
December 26, 2025 at 6:36 PM
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The thing I've loved the most about the team this season--Wemby aside--is that, quite importantly, it's all the other guys doing their jobs well. And I keep thinking about the fact that while drafting Timmy set the dynasty in motion structurally, the Memorial Day miracle did it emotionally.
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.
December 26, 2025 at 6:12 PM
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adamhsays.substack.com/p/on-time
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
December 25, 2025 at 4:08 AM
adamhsays.com
reminded of a “no comment” moment a few years ago when I was writing about a school district secession in Louisiana: www.theatlantic.com/education/ar...
(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."
December 22, 2025 at 2:27 PM
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The waitress brought the food, the recruits thought Tuberville went to the bathroom, and he just… never came back. The next day he announced he was leaving for Cincy.
"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.
December 17, 2025 at 5:59 PM
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First, you should know that Texas Tech’s chancellor, Brandon Creighton, is the author of the state’s bill overhauling higher education governance. He assumed office last month.
Creighton, justifying Tech’s policy.
December 3, 2025 at 6:07 PM
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🤔
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.
December 2, 2025 at 2:10 PM
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My essay from April on the dismantling of the department, and the administration’s commitment to returning American education to a time before the Civil Rights Act, when the nation’s most vulnerable students were largely unprotected: www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/o...
“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.“
November 18, 2025 at 5:25 PM
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www.mississippifreepress.org/mississippi-...
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.
November 5, 2025 at 3:54 PM
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me for the entire half
a text thread of expletives and astonishment
October 23, 2025 at 2:56 AM
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The reason I thought to share is because I asked the provost what would happen if the university were given a large sum of money: “even if the state were to miraculously open the coffers for state institutions, Summers said he would likely still eliminate the history major..”
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. “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.
October 21, 2025 at 8:54 PM
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And shoutout to archivists who preserve letters like this one: "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."
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
October 21, 2025 at 5:52 PM
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Thurgood Marshall: "If only the principle of color-blindness had been accepted by the majority in Plessy in 1896..."
memo Thurgood Marshall sent to his colleagues in 1978 as they were deliberating about the Bakke case which both upheld and limited AA: memo Thurgood Marshall sent to his colleagues in 1978 as they were deliberating about the Bakke case which both upheld and limited AA:
October 15, 2025 at 3:54 PM