By: Sharon McMahon
Scott County Library hardcover 281 pages plus acknowledgments and notes
Published: 2024
Genre: non-fiction, history
I had never heard of the author before. Apparently, her Instagram account "Sharon Says So" has made her "America's Government Teacher." I wish I'd had her as a teacher back when I was in school! She is a smart, thorough, thoughtful instructor who gives us a look at some overlooked people in American history.
Ch. 1-3 Clara Brown (freed slave who went west)
Ch. 4-5 Virginia Randolph (educator)
Ch. 6-8 Katharine Lee Bates (writer, America the Beautiful)
Ch. 9 & 12 Inez Milholland
Ch. 10 Maria de Lopez
Ch. 11 Rebecca Mitchell Brown
Ch. 13 France / Hello girls / suffragette groundwork
Ch. 14 Anna Thomas Jeanes (philanthropist, funded Randolph schools)
Ch. 15 William James Edwards (overcomer, worked with Jeanes)
Ch. 16 Julius Rosenwald (& Sears)
Ch. 17 Booker T. Washington
Ch. 18 & 20 Daniel Inouyes
Ch. 19 & 21 Norman Mineta
Ch. 22 Claudette Colvin
Ch. 23 Septima Clark
Ch. 24-26 Civil Rights in the South
Conclusion
I was trying to figure out which twelve people were the ones referred to in the subtitle . . . because she talked about many more than the fourteen I've named in these chapters! I don't think Booker T. Washington, Daniel Inouye, or Claudette Colvin are "unsung," but we all have different understandings of history depending on where we've learned it!
I originally got this book for my sister Ann. Her book club was reading it and I requested copies from both Carver and Scott Counties. But when I delivered one to her, she'd already purchased a copy! So I returned one and decided to read the other. Then my sister-in-law had a copy she'd gotten as a Christmas gift and I thought this is kind of a thing. I'm curious! I love to learn. But do I ever have a LOT of post-it notes in this!
Page 4: Hamilton had been afraid that their efforts at the convention, in which a nation was birthed after the travail of a hot summer's labor, would not be enough. Would the union hold? Would the experiment in a new democracy ultimately prove successful? "In signing that compact he exprest (sic) his apprehension that it did not contain sufficient means of strength for its own preservation; and that in consequence we should share the fate of many other republics and pass through Anarchy to Despotism. We hoped better things."
Reading this in January 2026, I feared that were the Founding Fathers to see what our country is becoming, they would be disappointed. (Of course, they would also be shocked that women can vote and hold office, black people are free, etc.) But I am so sad for our country right now. Trump does whatever he wants and bowls down anyone who disagrees with him.
Page 9: In the distance, I saw them: auroras. The northern lights. Not the more common faint glow of green that we sometimes glimpsed from our second-floor bathroom window, but the kind that choreographed a ballet set to the unheard symphony of the universe.
She is a wonderful writer! I'm tempted to include a picture of these pages where she introduces herself. Plus, I love the northern lights. It's worth reading! Start on the left at the break.
Page 10: In the days before the internet put the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips, the library was my friend. The library, still the most democratic institution on earth, perched but a block away from my childhood home.
I love libraries! I love how she writes about the role of libraries in our society.
Page 24: If anyone tries to tell you the Civil War was a war for "state's rights," calmly look them in the eye, and ask, politely and inquisitively, what exactly the states wanted the "right" to do?
She was writing about the Dred Scott case and the real life experiences of Clara Brown who was sold and had her child taken from her and sold to someone else. She spent a lifetime trying to find her daughter.
Page 31: So no, America is not "the worst it's ever been" today, despite what some news anchors might be trying to convince you of, because if they can make you afraid, they can gain your attention and your money. Has anyone been beaten half to death on the floor of the Senate over the topic of whether it's cool to enslave people this week? No? Okay.
I'm not a huge fan of history, but I do know that it's important to study it and to be aware of how the past can repeat itself. I like how she puts things into perspective. (She wrote about Preston Brooks beating Charles Sumner to the point that "he was not able to resume his seat in Congress for three years" back in 1856.) Rhetoric can distract us from issues.
Page 36: Wherever she went, Clara became known for her kindness and her tenacity. If someone arrived in Colorado Territory, scrawny from hunger and with not a penny to their name, Clara would give him a place to sleep and food to eat until he could find employment.
This is the kind of hero I want to read about! This is the kind of person I want to be.
Page 42: "She took Christianity to mean for someone to be Christ-like if they were a Christian. And I joke with my students that there are people who go to the church, to the mosque, to the temple, and there are those that follow their religion. And those are not necessarily the same people."
This is what Dr. George Junne said in his eulogy of Clara Brown. Religiosity and faithfulness are not the same thing. I love that Clara was Christ-like.
Page 52: From as far back as she could remember, Virginia had been taught to do the next needed thing. Don't worry about tomorrow, her mother reminded her, tomorrow will worry about itself. Virginia was always focused on the task at hand. What I could do next, Virginia thought as she arrived at school one morning, is fix this godforsaken driveway.
Virginia Randolph was a force to be reckoned with! She moved ahead with educating black children despite no help from the white government. One thing at a time. Progress, not perfection. I like how she made a huge difference just by doing the next needed thing.
Page 55: "However, I would like to think I was chosen because I was a good teacher, and needed to share my knowledge and skills with others. . . . When Mr. Jackson Davis appointed me to look after his Negro schools . . . he started a trend never to be abandoned; namely, the trend that there will always be someone caring and looking out for the education of Negro boys and girls. I leave the convictions of my parents as the heritage - a genuine belief in the power and glory of education."
This made me think of my parents and their strong beliefs about the importance of education. For Randolph to persist without financial or other supports . . . her perseverance amazes me.
Page 74: Henry Durant expected women who graduated from Wellesley to be fully on par with graduates of Harvard and Yale, and his watchwords were, "Aspiration! Adventure! Experiment! Expansion! Follow the gleam!"
Women's health was poorly understood at the time, and it was a common belief among men that pursuing too much education made a woman unfit for childbearing, as it diverted too great a blood supply to the brain and away from reproductive organs. Durant refuted this, arguing that a proper education strengthens the body and mind.
Wow. This seems so bizarre to me that people actually believed things like this (and probably, some still do . . . ) I'm thankful for people like Henry and Pauline Durant founding Wellesley for women in the 1870s.
Page 79: At the turn of the twentieth century, two women who lived together as partners were sometimes referred to as being in a "Boston marriage," with the subtext being that they were quietly in a romantic relationship.
I'm pretty sure I've heard of this before, but I'm writing it here to try to remind myself if I hear "Boston marriage" what it is referencing. Part of me is curious to dig into how this phrase came into being, but I have a lot of blogging left to do!
Page 91: The enduring appeal of the song, she said, "is clearly due to the fact that Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood."
I love this positive attitude toward humanity. The fact that "Katie" Bates, who wrote and sang America the Beautiful, acknowledged people's love of her song without being a glory hog makes me happy.
Page 96: My favorite line from "Sister Suffragette" - perhaps one of the greatest lyrics written by the Sherman brothers and delivered perfectly by Glynis Johns - is, Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group, they're rather stuuuuuuuupid. The look on John's face, with her huge doe eyes and her stilted vibrato, is priceless.
This made me laugh. And go to YouTube to find the clip from Mary Poppins. (This line is at :55.) My curiosity did not allow me to skip this reference . . . McMahon is talking about Inez Milholland and her work as a suffragette.
Page 98: Because they knew that a huge part of the country's opposition to their suffrage was opposition to Black women being enfranchised, white women were often willing to not just look the other way but to intentionally exclude Black women for the purposes of appeasing white men.
Oh, this makes me so sad. I remember when I first learned that voting rights for women and voting rights for black people were often at odds . . . . That last line "for the purposes of appeasing white men" just irritates me. But I know it is true. I'm so glad that God's love isn't dependent upon our skin or our gender.
Page 102: The next day, newspapers around the country published horrifying stories of violence and harassment at the hands of men who would deny women the vote. One of the organizers, Dora Lewis, said, "We were jostled, humiliated, insulted, and deprived of the right of protection. In our ranks were the foremost women of America, college women, social workers, lawyers, physicians, wives of Senators and Representatives, and all these were allowed to be insulted and their lives jeopardized by crowds of drunken men. The police would not even rope off the streets for us . . . the militiamen who were present along the route were all drunk." The granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton was hit by an intoxicated man while the nearby police did nothing. Another attempted to scale a float and throw a woman off it. Hundreds of demonstrating women had bruises creeping across their bodies and faces the next day. The only group that even attempted to help the marchers fend off the swarms were a troop of Boy Scouts.
After the parade, people immediately called for the chief of police to be fired. Newspapers ran images of what the crowds looked like during the suffrage parade compared to what they looked like the next day during the inaugural parade - in one, crowds clog the streets in chaos. In the other, the newly sworn in president is helped to proceed in an orderly fashion down the same road, the crowds standing neatly behind the lines set up by the police.
The Women's Political Union, a suffrage group, sent a telegram to Woodrow Wilson that arrived shortly before his inauguration. It read: "As you ride today in comfort and safety to the Capitol to be inaugurated as the President of the people of the United States, we beg that you will not be unmindful that yesterday the government, which is supposed to exist for the good of all, left women, while passing in peaceful procession in their demand for political freedom, at the mercy of a howling mob on the very streets which are being at this moment sufficiently officered for the protection of men."
Ugh. Sometimes I hate learning about American history. There is so much injustice in our past! And in our present . . .
Page 105: There are Pueblo ruins in New Mexico that are a thousand years old. Well-organized civilizations existed here long before anyone settled New Amsterdam or Jamestown or even before Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
Yes, many die-hard 'Muricans forget that there were people here before any Europeans showed up . . . McMahon goes on to tell the story of Adam Fortunate Eagle going to Italy and claiming he "discovered" it.
Page 106: But the point was made: Adam Fortunate Eagle was featured in the international news with his "America did not need to be discovered by Europeans, it was already occupied" message.
This is a wonderful story and Wikipedia tells me that his trip took place in 1973. He was born in Red Lake, Minnesota! Interesting man.
Page 112: When her husband died in the 1850s, nearly everything they owned, right down to the clothes on her own back, became property of the state. If she wanted to keep her trunk of wedding gifts, the dishes on which she few her children, the chairs upon which they sat, she would have to buy them back from the government of Illinois. With the exception of the family Bible and a hymnal, she had nothing of her own.
I cannot fathom living in a time when I was the property of my father and then my husband and without them, I could have no rights at all. "Women had few rights of their own - not to own property, not even legal rights to parent the children she birthed." Women of the current era take for granted the rights that other women fought for all their lives!
Page 122: When Rebecca died in 1908, her strength having been slowly sapped by tuberculosis, an article in The Wilsonville Review mentioned that the WCTU was planning a marble monument to her. The Review wrote, "While a monument of marble would serve to perpetuate her memory, far richer monuments are the churches she has fostered, the schools she has founded, the libraries she has opened, the Sunday schools she has established, and men and women who are better men and women for having come in contact with her influence."
What a great testament to her impact! I'm sorry she worked herself to death, but what an amazing woman. I confess when I looked up the Spirit of Idaho Women statue McMahon references in a later paragraph, I saw "the Idaho capital" and thought, "What IS the capital of Idaho? Boise?" Yes.
Page 125: The women did not try to conceal their identities, didn't come armed, didn't break any glass or invade any private offices. They weren't there to kidnap members of Congress; no faux gallows waited outside the building. They came peacefully, stayed in the section designated for visitors, and left peacefully, confident that they had made their point.
The author is making a not-very-subtle comparison to some of the current administration's tactics and excuses for awful behavior, I think.
Page 126: As soon as possible, he said, you will need to get your tonsils removed. But in the meantime, he said, "Here, take these," handing her strychnine and arsenic pills, common (though deadly) treatments for infection in the decades before penicillin.
How awful! Instead of helping her heal, Inez Mulholland's doctor was poisoning her!
Page 128: They summoned another doctor. This one prescribed strong coffee and more strychnine.
I'm so glad to live in an era when doctors have a better understanding of the body and what is good for it!
Page 135: One of the best-known Hello Girls was a take-charge gal with a baby face named Grace Banker.
These women who operated the telephone switchboards right in the midst of the war, relaying vital messages, were instrumental in getting things to change for women.
Page 141: Tellingly, Cher enjoyed more retirement benefits than the Hello Girls. That didn't change until 1977, when Merle Anderson of the Signal Corps, with the help of lawyer Mark Hough, finally got the attention of Congress.
Cher was a carrier pigeon. The Hello Girls were trying to gain official military status (and military benefits) since they had worn military uniforms, worked in the military, etc.
Page 159: Anna believed that people could decide for themselves what their community needed, and that people of all races should have equal seats at the table.
Anna Jeanes made life-changing decisions with her money! What a blessing that she asked people what they most needed. She helped especially with small, rural schools and she didn't want recognition.
Page 160: From our vantage point, this is ludicrous. Booker T. Washington has long been criticized for engaging in respectability politics - that if Blacks just acted the way that white people wanted them to, then there could be racial harmony. Washington, some feel, was participating in the system of white supremacy.
McMahon goes on to point out that Washington and other like him were working within an inherently racist system and doing the best that they could.
Page 161: The Jeanes Story, published by former Jeanes Teachers in 1979, has a complete list of all of the teachers, including pictures of some of them. The overwhelming majority are African American women, but a tiny handful are men.
I'd love to see this book, but I need to get through the pile I already have on hand!
Page 162: They knew their work was important. But they had no way of knowing the true, lasting impact they had on generations of students, on the American South at large, and consequently, on America as a whole.
Yeah for teachers who make a difference in children's lives!
Page 163: But I love what one Jeanes teacher, Mildred Williams, said on this topic: "Gloom and pessimism must not overshadow the good which has grown out of the several years of the Civil Rights laws. Optimism must prevail and persistent movements continue, using every useful weapon at hand to make the dream, as stated by one of America's most recent forth-right Black leaders (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) a reality."
Yes to optimism and persistent movements!
Page 169: Within a few years, Sears was making money hand over fist. The company figured that the average American had several competing catalogs at their house, and they purposely made the trim size of theirs just a little smaller than their competitors. Logic said that when Edith in rural Kansas neatly stacked the catalogs in her home, the smallest one would go on top. They wanted the first catalog under your hand to be Sears.
Obviously, most of us don't use catalogs for shopping any more, but I thought this was brilliant! I remember the Sears catalog we used to have back in the 1970s . . .
Page 175: Here again is the AND, the nuance that we must embrace with history. Our minds want to categorize people into one of two camps: Good or evil. Angel or demon. Most often, that viewpoint denies people the fullness of their humanity and can overlook positive contributions or ignore negative impacts.
She really is a good teacher and writer. I'm glad I read this book.
Page 179: Though he had long been generous with his time and money, after turning fifty, he felt lighter, less encumbered by the weight of riches.
She's writing about Julius Rosenwald and his philanthropy. He gave money to Jewish charities, an orphanage, Tuskegee Institute, etc. I love that he realized that he had more money than he needed and chose to be generous!
Page 193: The singular pain of the country of his ancestry attacking the country of his heart twisted his face. In a world where many Americans already hated the Japanese, it was like watching a slow-motion nightmare play out before his eyes.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor obviously changed American history in a huge way, but the seismic shift for Japanese Americans is heart-breaking. I'm kind of shocked at how incredibly patriotic many Japanese Americans were, even though the United States government treated them so badly.
Page 213: He ignored the advice of people who said he's never get elected as a Democrat and insisted that the reason he wanted to be a Democrat was that he thought that the Republicans wanted to protect property - what we have - but the Democrats wanted to protect people - who we are.
She's writing about Daniel Inouye and I've never heard the difference between the two major parties expressed quite like that.
Page 220: Bush said that "one of the important things about Norm's experience is that it reminds us that sometimes we lose our soul as a nation. That the notion of all equal under God sometimes disappears. And 9/11 certainly challenged that premise. I didn't want our country to do to others what had happened to Norm."
It's amazing how much fonder I have become of George Bush since Trump got into office the first time. The author is writing about Norman Mineta and quite frankly, the way she intertwined his story with Daniel Inouye's got a bit confusing.
Page 241: Education wasn't only liberation, she came to realize; education was self-sufficiency. It was independence. It reduced your vulnerability, because it was much harder to cheat someone who could read and do basic sums. It was connection, allowing you to read and send letters to your loved ones. It was faith, because it let you read your scriptures.
I agree with Septima Clark's estimation of the value of education.
Page 243: Moral panics have been around since this country's inception, with the Salem witch trials being among the first widely publicized (and deadly) panics. Since then, moral panics have been used as a tool to subvert and dismantle movements that the dominant caste views as a threat. And this included civil rights.
I hate that this is a thing and people get whipped into a fury over a non-issue.
Page 256: But these were not fringe beliefs in many of the evangelical churches in the South. This was how most white Christians at that time and in that place interpreted the scriptures. It was what they heard from their pulpits, and what they wanted taught in schools. White supremacy and white Christian identity are inextricably linked in American history. Facts don't require our personal approval for them to be facts.
Oh, this makes me so sad. How did people who love the Lord decide to support racist beliefs and practices as though it was God-ordained?
Page 259: "When I tried to squeeze past him, he raised his bayonet and then the other guards moved in and they raised their bayonets. They glared at me with a mean look, and I was very frightened and didn't know what to do. I turned around and the crowd came toward me. They moved closer and closer. Somebody started yelling 'drag her over this tree, let's take care of that n****r!'"
These were ordinary white Arkansans whose vitriol was such that they were suggesting that a child seeking an education deserved to be lynched.
I had not ever heard of Elizabeth Eckford, but the thought of a teen girl being faced with this much hatred (simply because of her skin color) is just horrific.
Page 269: You'd be mistaken if you believe that Black women did not speak up. You'd be mistaken if you thought that Black women did not risk their personal safety to work for justice. You'd be mistaken if you thought these facts were never going to see the light of day again, swept under the rug of today's moral panic, the moral panic of learning about the real, true, beautiful, infuriating, horrific, meaningful history of the United States and calling it by some other boogeyman name like Critical Race Theory (it's not) or labeling it a divisive concept (it's only divisive if lies and cover-ups benefit you in some way.)
What is done in darkness must come to light.
This book is so powerful in presenting the stories of ordinary people who did extraordinary things.
Page 277: Claudette Colvin, the brave fifteen-year-old who refused to give up her seat, asked to have her criminal record expunged. Her request was finally granted in December 2021. She said in an interview when the request went through that she wanted her grandkids to "know that their grandmother stood up for something. Against the injustice in America. The laws will change, and a lot of people, not only myself, paid the price and made sacrifices. We are not where we're supposed to be, but don't take the freedom that we do have for granted."
Claudette Colvin was another extraordinary teenager who stood up for what she believed was right.
Page 281: I'd want you to know that despite all the things Gouverneur Morris got wrong - like the unfortunate whalebone - there was something he got very, very right. America at her best is just. She is peaceful. She is good. And she is free. And it is us, the small and the mighty, who make America great.
Not again, but always.
Nice. She wrote a wonderful book that I can finally return to the library!
