Leonard Pitts Jr. Columns category, Page 5

Leonard Pitts Jr.: Activism is not a popularity contest

“He wears the clothes of a dissenter, but there’s a logo on his back.” — from “Damn It, Rose,” by Don Henley. When he died, Martin Luther King was likely the most hated man in America. This is a fact obscured by decades of veneration so intense that even conservatives...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: America has always run from the truth of itself

Robert E. Lee has retreated from Richmond. Again. The first time, you will recall, was in April of 1865, when he and his tattered army abandoned the city, fleeing east before finally surrendering at Appomattox Courthouse to federal forces commanded by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. This latest — and, one...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Texas’ shameful betrayal of women

Can we first just say how bizarre it is? Yes, it’s invasive, and hypocritical, too, and we’ll get to that soon enough. But first, let us spare a moment for how purely, intensely and prodigiously strange it is. As you’ve likely heard, Texas’ new anti-abortion law, which the Supreme Court...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Right-wing radicals have stated their aims. We better believe them.

It’s been five years since I first speculated in this space about the end of American democracy. In doing so, I felt like a man climbing out on an especially creaky limb. But as hyperpartisanship rose to ever more bizarre extremes, as the misinformation crisis left ever more people babbling...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: The wisdom of experience is a priceless gift … that many spurn

Many years ago, one of my sons came to me, excited about a promotional offer from some bank. I no longer remember the offer or the bank, but I do remember telling him not to fall for it; I had accepted a similar offer years before, and it cost me...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Tired of marching for what should already be ours

He said many profound things that day. He said America had given African Americans “a bad check.” He said he had come to remind the nation of “the fierce urgency of now.” He said we might hew “out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” He said, “I...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: The dots in Afghanistan had names

Last week, at least two men fell from a U.S. military plane as it climbed into the skies above Afghanistan. In video taken from the ground, they are so small you almost have to squint to see them. They seem roughly the size of a period, the end to some...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Racial temper tantrum can’t last forever

Chris Rock described it as a kind of temper tantrum. This was in 2011. “When I see the tea party and all this stuff,” the comedian told Esquire, “it actually feels like racism’s almost over.” He likened the tea party — with its street theatrics, overwrought histrionics and overt panic...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Skepticism can make you blind

They told them they had bad blood. What they actually had was syphilis, but the U.S. Public Health Service never shared that diagnosis with the almost 400 African American men, most of them poor and under-educated sharecroppers, they recruited for a secret study at Tuskegee Institute in 1932. Indeed, health...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Let’s talk about the things they will not learn

Let’s talk about the things they will not learn. “They” meaning K-12 students in Tennessee. Not that the Volunteer State is alone in passing laws and standards to restrict the teaching of African American history. To the contrary, a number of states — Oklahoma, Texas, Florida and more — have...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Is human compassion so hard for them?

Gunther Hashida killed himself last week. We don’t know why. At this writing, we don’t even know how. What we do know is that Hashida, an 18-year veteran of the D.C. police force, is the fourth cop to die by his own hand after responding to the Jan. 6 insurrection...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: She is 8, and gunfire is her ‘normal’

She is 8 years old. That’s … what? About third grade? Too young for boyfriends. Too young for R-rated movies. Too young for algebra or a learner’s permit. But she has already experienced her second shooting. It happened a little over a week ago in Washington, D.C., outside of Nationals...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Where vaccines are concerned, ignorance is death

We live in ignorant times. By now, surely this is obvious beyond argument to anyone who’s been paying attention. From the Capitol insurrectionist who thought he was storming the White House to Sen. Tim Scott’s claim that “woke supremacy is as bad as white supremacy” to whatever thing Tucker Carlson...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Democracy worth the trouble every time

It was, let us say, an interesting weekend for democracy. Call it a tale of two cities. One is Dallas, where thousands of so-called “conservatives” — the word has less meaning by the day — gathered in support of Donald Trump and his ongoing efforts to delegitimize a free and...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Critical race theory and losing the privileges of whiteness

Here you go: I have forgotten more about race than most people have ever known. Apologies if that sounds like braggadocio, but there’s a point that needs making. I’ve spent the better part of 40 years researching and writing about the history and dynamics of race in America — and...
Robert C. Koehler: Terrence Floyd asks, why did you kill my brother?

For Derek Chauvin, nine minutes and 29 seconds have turned into 22½ years — the prison sentence he recently received for the murder of George Floyd. Chauvin famously knelt on Floyd’s neck last year, as he lay handcuffed and helpless, for those nine-plus minutes, while three colleagues stood by, indifferent...

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