Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson, Jr., VP of Partnerships and Programming with the Bridge Alliance, is respected for his leadership and strategies around social and racial justice issues.
Johnson shares his thoughts and reflections on Indigenous Peoples' Day.
A personal journey through Alabama reveals a family's buried racist past, confronting slavery, lynching, and civil-rights history while seeking truth, healing, and accountability.
I come from a long line of racists.
Tracing my ancestry back to the early nineteenth century, I discovered that my great-great-great-grandfather emigrated from Ireland and then drifted south, eventually settling in Dallas County, Alabama. Daniel Brislin called Selma home.
He was a cabinet maker, and a decent one at that. The Selma Times Journal reported that he was also exceptionally generous: “The respect and esteem in which he was held by the whole town, and especially the poor, whose staunch friend he was, was attested at his death.” A George Bailey-like figure, Brislin (our surname would morph over time into “Breslin”) was known to forgive payment on a table or a chest of drawers he crafted for a fellow Sel-towner. He regularly fashioned furniture on the commitment of a handshake, a promise, an IOU. That’s what you did in Alabama, I’m sure he would say. You trusted your neighbor.
Unless that neighbor had a different skin color.
Now, there is no historical evidence that my great-great-great-grandfather was an enslaver. And there is no suggestion that he treated the growing Black population of Selma with conspicuous disdain. But he was friendly with Edmund Pettus, the infamous U.S. Senator and white supremacist who fought for the Confederacy and who wore the distinctive costume of the Grand Dragon, the state’s ranking Ku Klux Klan officer. They walked in the same circles; they worshipped in the same churches; their children went to the same schools. To be sure, the two enjoyed the privileges of whiteness in an antebellum Alabama. No one should doubt that my forebear shared much in common with the famous bridge’s namesake.
How do I make sense of this past, this blemish on my family name, this dent to my identity? Daniel Brislin bore me, after all. Not literally; there were many Brislins and Breslins between him and me. But it seems the prejudice of my earliest forefathers only diluted over time. It never fully disappeared.
To start, I realized I could not make much sense of anything in the comfortable confines of my home. Upstate New York has its demons, but it does not carry the heavy burden of American slavery. Or at least not outwardly.
So I recently accompanied my adult daughter on a journey to our ancestral homeland. She’s been to Alabama before—we’re enormous Crimson Tide football fans—but never exactly on a civil rights pilgrimage. Specifically, I wanted to explore Montgomery’s unique legacy in the nation’s enduring struggle for racial equality. I’ve been to Selma and I’ve walked the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I’ve stood in front of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I’ve even traveled to Scottsboro. But I had never been to Montgomery. I felt I needed to go.
The city, of course, is the epicenter of the civil rights movement. The state’s house of government, Montgomery, was also the first capital of the Confederate States of America. It thus has profound symbolic importance. It was the final destination of the Voting Rights Marches organized by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and others. It boasts more than its fair (or should I say “fare”) share of historical heroes—none grander than Rosa Parks, who famously refused to surrender her seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus. Americans forget that Dr. King cut his pastorate teeth at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church across the street from the State Capitol and just around the corner from what was the first Confederate White House. It was in Dr. King’s place of worship that so much of the civil rights strategy was birthed.
Today, the Legacy Sites are the heart of Montgomery’s racial retelling. Three spaces in all, the Legacy Sites are intended to “invite visitors to reckon with [America’s] history of racial injustice in places where that history was lived.”
The Legacy Museum is a powerful and interactive object space that transports visitors from the slave ships—where more than 12 million Africans experienced the brutal conditions of the trans-Atlantic passage and more that 2 million died on the voyage (the mental image of a cemetery with several million souls buried at the bottom of the sea is hard to forget)—through Reconstruction, forced segregation, Jim Crow, and finally mass incarceration.
Freedom Monument and Legacy Park include a boat ride on the Alabama River, a major waterway supporting the slave trade.
Both are impressive. But it was at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice that my daughter and I began to understand the significance of our family’s legacy. The six-acre outdoor space is both commemoration and exhibition, deeply somber and penetratingly artistic. It tells the story of America’s racial terror lynchings. Over 4400 Black men and women were murdered because of their skin tone, tied to trees and posts and bridges, and left to hang limp and exposed. Each victim of these racial executions has their name inscribed on one of the corten steel blocks that, together, form an indelible sight. The memorial is beautiful and despairing in equal measure.
The exhibition is also allegorical. Visitors navigate the space by walking under blocks that are attached to rods by noose-like connectors, unsubtly suggesting that we are all spectators and participants in a real-life lynching. The blocks themselves resemble both coffins and the human form. The durability of the steel stands in contrast to the frailty of the deceased. The indifference of the executioner is powerfully vanquished by the permanence of the blocks themselves.
Lynchings were a display of racial power – THE most jarring and vicious show of racial control invented by man. The snapping of the neck or the suffocation that occurred were meant to convey dominion. Lifeless bodies were left for all to see. Nineteen of these gruesome demonstrations were staged in Dallas County during the Jim Crow era, the second-highest number in the entire state. Selma claims its share of them.
Deep down, I know that my great-great-great-grandfather must have been part of that terror. In a sense, then, that terror now courses through my veins. And my daughter’s. Aside from facing our past through education, dialogue, and raised awareness, I can’t shield us from the cruelty we inherited.
They say that silence is acquiescence. At best, Daniel Brislin stayed mum while Black persons in Selma and throughout the South were subjected to unimaginable cruelty, torn from their families, treated with scorn and reprisal, lynched for the most inconsequential “transgressions,” and taught that the white patriarchy considered them morally inferior. My condemnation of his silence is easy, trite, almost. And yet even in this vastly polarized moment, I think we can all agree that any form of racial dominion is wicked. It is now; it was then. I journey on.
Beau Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair in Government at Skidmore College.
WASHINGTON—For high school students across the country and the world, it’s college application season, where one decision can change the trajectory for a teenager’s entire life. However, some students of color aren’t even exposed to all of their options, in particular, minority serving institutions (MSIs).
In the United States, MSIs, which include historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs), enrolled over 5 million undergraduate and graduate students in 2016. That’s around 25% of total college enrollment, according to 2015 data.
High schoolers can apply to any school they want, but some say they aren’t being exposed to all the options they deserve. Deborah Santiago, the co-founder and CEO of Excelencia in Education, an organization dedicated to the success of Latino students in higher education, is one of them.
“Institutions have a responsibility to do that marketing [to students,]” said Santiago. “...At Excelencia, we focus more on...what institutions are doing to reach out to students. Students already have a lot of burden and expectation to do some of the homework to figure out what’s a good fit for them.”
One study found that when college recruiters are sent across the country to high schools, they tend to visit schools in wealthier neighborhoods with predominantly white student bodies. That means many students of color, who often live in lower-income areas, are not having college recruiters visit them, and if they are, they’re not recruiters from MSIs.
College Campus Tours LLC (CCT) is an educational consulting firm that is working to bridge that gap. For almost 30 years, instead of relying on colleges to come to students, CCT has been bringing students to colleges through its diverse bus tours. They offer a variety of tour groups, including an HBCU tour and a Latino college tour.
Owner and President of CCT, Shaun Lain, said there is a substantial difference between having high schoolers meet with college recruiters and having students actually visit college campuses.
“Most people learn through visual, auditory, or tactile [experiences.] ...[Students] need to smell, feel, and touch if this is the right environment,” said Lain. “You can’t do it on a view book, you can’t do it online. You need to go there and see the environment, see the experience that the college has [to] offer.”
Art student Amalia Muñoz attends an HSI in the western suburbs of Illinois, Waubonsee Community College. She said she didn't remember her high school having college recruiters from diverse institutions, and it wasn’t until she actually got on Waubonsee’s campus that she learned about its diverse offerings.
“When I attended some events, like orientation, I remember [seeing] tables for a Latina/Latino club. I know [the Hispanic community] is a big thing, big enough for us to get emails,” said Muñoz.
Lain said it’s important for students to have access to multiple higher education institutions and see what they have to offer before actually committing to a college.
“We want to make sure that students get a good glimpse on what speaks to them, and that's why we want to emphasize them actually getting on a bus,” said Lain.
Although CCT does help bring students to diverse college campuses, its services may not be accessible to all students and their families. Santiago said financial literacy and familial support are among the most crucial factors when making college decisions.
"Recruit the whole family, you don’t just recruit that individual student. A student relies on their family and support to be able to be successful,” said Santiago.
At CCT, on average, their Latino college tours cost just under $235 per day, per person. While this includes bus transportation, some merchandise items, and sightseeing activity fees, it does not include the recommended $40 per day for dinner, additional money for souvenirs, or transportation to and from the departure cities—which are all larger, metropolitan cities.
Lain said that because many people come from different financial backgrounds, through CCT, he tries to expose students to successful career paths in case they are not receiving proper support from their high school guidance counselors.
“It hurts me to my heart when motivated students go to college and complete college, but they major in something that really can't propel them for the next 40 years,” said Lain. “We go through those five essential majors of the unemployed and we go through those five majors of the employed, because it's very important that they realize that we need to have transferable skills.”
Myla S. Roundy is a third-year journalism student at Howard University. She is a fall 2025 Common Ground Journalism fellow and the investigative section editor of the student-run newspaper, The Hilltop.
California’s teacher shortage highlights inequities in teacher education. Supporting and retaining teachers of color starts with racially just TEPs.
The LAist reported a shortage of teachers in Southern California, and especially a shortage of teachers of color. In California, almost 80% of public school students are students of color, while 64.4% of teachers are white. (Nationally, 80% of teachers are white, and over 50% of public school students are of color.) The article suggests that to support and retain teachers requires an investment in teacher candidates (TCs), mostly through full funding given that many teachers can’t afford such costly fast paced teacher education programs (TEPs), where they have no time to work for extra income. Ensuring affordability for these programs to recruit and sustain teachers, and especially teachers of color, is absolutely critical, but TEPs must consider additional supports, including culturally relevant curriculum, faculty of color they can trust and space for them to build community among themselves.
Hundreds of thousands of aspiring teachers enroll in TEPs, yet preservice teachers of color are a clear minority. A study revealed that 48 U.S. states and Washington, D.C have higher percentages of white TCs than they do white public-school students. Furthermore, in 35 of the programs that had enrollment of 400 or more, 90% of enrollees were white. Scholar Christine Sleeter declared an “overwhelming presence of whiteness” in teacher education and expert Cheryl Matias discussed how TEPs generate “emotionalities of whiteness,” meaning feelings such as guilt and defensiveness in white people, might result in people of color protecting white comfort instead of addressing the root issues and manifestations of racism.
Isolation and pushout of teachers of color, as well as their resilience in the field is well documented. What’s less known is the struggles of teachers in training of color in TEPs and what helps them thrive. Our recent research documented two case studies that involve future teachers of color (FToC) affinity groups. What we found in this study and our continued research of FToCs is that many of these TCs experienced a dominating presence of whiteness and added labor on their part to advocate for their needs.
This manifested in different ways as we saw from just one cohort of FToC. Over the FToC meetings, TCs shared their joys and challenges, but ultimately used the time to organize to better the program. They drafted up key issues and suggestions for TEP leadership and requested a meeting with the director. Several issues were addressed by FToC members, one being poor relationships with cooperating teachers (the classroom teacher they served their practicum with). Another major issue was not having support to teach Ethnic Studies classes, which meets the new California requirement for high school graduates to take an Ethnic Studies course. Not only did they express that the TEP was ill prepared to train candidates in Ethnic Studies, but they experienced resistance to being placed in Ethnic Studies classrooms despite a robust Ethnic Studies program in the partnering school district. When candidates were placed with an Ethnic Studies teacher, they were with a white cooperating teacher.
In general, FToC members felt that coursework was absent of culturally relevant pedagogy. When classes were centered around race and justice, they felt that white voices overpowered the classroom and that their white instructors allowed this. Candidates wanted instructors to take more accountability for enforcing a balanced conversation, instead of candidates of color feeling left out of these conversations despite their lived experiences of racism. Overall, there were very few critical instructors of color in the program that the TCs of color could trust.
Yet, despite the group’s efforts, all while student teaching and completing coursework, the director responded to their concerns with, “I hope this doesn’t sound dismissive, I think a lot of things you bring up sound like very generic things that are not feeling prepared to teach. I think it’s really normal to feel like you’re not prepared to teach.”
Unfortunately, this does sound dismissive. Unfortunately, experiencing such challenges related to racism and whiteness is not generic, should not be “normal,” and is not what all new teachers experience. As former classroom teachers and teacher educators of color, we know that TEPs need to be intentional with supporting TCs of color. A start might look like creating the space, time and resources for an FToC affinity group. Furthermore, FToC must be supported by the institution, where the faculty of color or students of color who run them are materially supported, through course releases or financial compensation. Relatedly, TEPs need to hire more critical professors of color so that the labor does not fall on just one professor to hold space for TCs of color. As 91% of tenure track instructors in TEPs are white, programs need to commit to a collective racial literacy, where all instructors have an understanding of how structural racism operates, can teach in culturally sustaining ways, and are versed in the unique needs of teachers of color.
We can learn from this case study of one FToC, whose members were not just aspiring teachers but stepped up as leaders to advocate for a better TEP experience. There must be more intention to sustain teachers of color in the profession, beginning with preservice teacher education. TEPs must be intentional in creating equitable and racially just teacher education that is needed to combat whiteness and enact change to better the experience for future teachers of colors and in turn, their students.
Hui-Ling S. Malone is a Public Voices fellow of The OpEd Project and the University of California Santa Barbara, where she is an Assistant Professor of Education.
Paula CT Sevilla is a Ph.D. Candidate in Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Zohran Mamdani, October 26, 2025
In a sweeping rebuke of President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda, voters in three key races delivered historic victories to Democratic candidates Zohran Mamdani, Mikie Sherrill, and Abigail Spanberger—each representing a distinct ideological and demographic shift toward diversity, equity, and inclusion.
On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist and state Assembly member, was elected mayor of New York City, becoming the city’s first Muslim mayor. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears to become the state’s first female governor. And in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, a moderate Democrat and former Navy helicopter pilot, won the governorship in a race that underscored economic and social policy divides.
These victories, which came just one year after Trump’s return to the White House, are widely seen as a repudiation of his administration’s policies and rhetoric. “Democrats are smoking Donald Trump and Republican extremists,” declared House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries on X.
Mamdani’s win in New York City was particularly symbolic. Running on a platform of affordability, police reform, and inclusive governance, he defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent, and Republican Curtis Sliwa. “My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty,” Mamdani said in his victory speech. “I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. But let tonight be a message: New York belongs to all of us”.
He continued, “We are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn. This is a mandate for change, and we will deliver exactly that—with empathy, transparency, and a government that reflects our diversity”.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer praised Mamdani’s “well-earned and historic victory,” calling it “proof that inclusive leadership can triumph over fear-mongering and division”.
In Virginia, Spanberger’s win marked a significant shift in a state that had been trending Republican. Her victory over Earle-Sears, a Trump-aligned candidate, was decisive—earning 56.1% of the vote to her opponent’s 43.7%. Spanberger, a former CIA officer and congresswoman, emphasized pragmatic governance and reproductive rights throughout her campaign.
“This is a win for every Virginian who believes in facts, fairness, and the future,” Spanberger said on election night. “We are building a commonwealth where every voice matters—regardless of zip code, background, or belief”.
Political analysts noted that Trump’s influence may have hindered Earle-Sears’ chances, as voters expressed concern over national instability and the erosion of democratic norms.
In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill’s gubernatorial win reflected the power of a center-left coalition focused on economic recovery, education, and public health. Her campaign emphasized bipartisan solutions and rejected Trump-era polarization.
“Our assignment everywhere is to send the strongest fighters for the working class wherever possible,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in support of Sherrill’s victory.
Sherrill herself framed the win as a call for unity: “New Jersey chose hope over fear, facts over fiction, and inclusion over exclusion. We will govern with integrity and compassion”.
Exit polls and post-election analyses suggest that these wins were not isolated but part of a broader voter backlash against Trump’s second-term agenda. From immigration crackdowns to rollbacks on civil rights, many voters viewed the elections as a chance to restore balance and reaffirm democratic values.
These results make one thing clear: Americans are rejecting authoritarianism and embracing leaders who reflect the nation’s diversity and champion equity and inclusion.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum. He is also the publisher of the Latino News Network.
