Wake of Echoes

SLAVERY & NAZIS In 1787, Constitutional Convention delegates came to a " Three-Fifths " compromise when deciding how many representatives each state should be allowed in the U.S. House of Representatives. Southern states wanted to count their slaves. Northern states didn't think they should. Thus the three-fifths rule that said each slave could be counted as three-fifths of a human being . Seventy years later, in 1857, a slave named Dred Scott petitioned to buy his freedom because his owners had moved from a slavery state to a free state. In what is largely seen as the most horrendous ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, the court said that residing in a free state did not entitle Scott to his freedom and that, furthermore, African Americans were not and never could be citizens of the United States .  Roughly seventy years after that, Adolf Hitler was rising to power in Germany, espousing the idea that some races are inferior to others, including blacks and Je...

Bureau of Ships Collection, U.S. National Archives. According to the Veteran’s Administration, approximately 850 World War II vets are dying every day.  There are only about two million left.  Last year, I chaperoned a middle school field trip to the Warhawk Museum in Nampa, where we got to listen to some of them describe their experiences.  Their hair was white and thin, their skin wrinkled and spotted.  Their hands shook, their joints were rheumy; their eyes watered.  Some were soft-spoken, some loud.  They couldn’t always hear the questions we asked; they couldn’t hear each other.  But at the end of the day, they stood arm in arm – brothers in arms still, though the war ended sixty-five years ago. I imagined another in their ranks:  one who might have stood by their side.  I like to imagine that he would have stood by mine.  I don’t know.  He was my grandfather.  He died in 1984, but forty years earlier, he was in the Na...