something a friend found. Thought would pass along:
As I stared at Doug Jones's Alabama victory map tonight, I was struck by how much it looks like the most consequential map in American history - the one that Abraham Lincoln used to determine his political strategy before the Civil War. During Secession Winter, Lincoln stared at this map of the slave states that showed each county by how economically dependent it was on slavery. The darker the shade on the map, the more slaves lived there. He saw that the western part of Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland and Delaware weren't dependent on slavery at all - so he negotiated their stay in the Union as border states, and created West Virginia. He then looked at the darkest shades on the map, and predicted that South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama would be among the first to secede. For the entirety of his presidency, Lincoln carried this map wherever he went, and it can be seen in several portraits of him.
157 years later, the trauma of slavery shapes our world. If you ever needed any proof, just look at these two maps side by side. The descendants of those enslaved, after migrations, KKK terrorism, marches and struggles, now vote where their ancestors were once counted as economic assets. And they voted for Doug Jones. In 2017, Black Alabamans heard a sorry excuse for a man say that America was "great" during slavery. They heard him loud and clear, and they clapped back so hard, so rooted in the spirit of justice it will impact our national political landscape for years.
Roy Moore is a sexual predator, a religious extremist, a racist, you name it. But also, Roy Moore is not a student of history. He did not respect the ground he walked on. He did not see that on the same dirt his ancestors once treated others as property, their descendants were now citizens who fought for the franchise, who heard every insult he hurled, whose power in numbers handed him his ass.
We have a ton of problems. But there are very few countries in the world that write history in all caps like we do. Let's keep fighting.
