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March 2021

calvert mcann lunch counter
Women sat-in at a lunch counter in Lexington, Kentucky in 1960. Photo by Calvert McCann and courtesy of the University of Kentucky Archives. © Calvert McCann.

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march on washington view
Protesters gathered at the civil rights March on Washington, DC, as seen from the Lincoln Memorial towards Washington Monument in 1963. Photo by Warren Leffler and courtesy of Wikimedia.

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rfk march on washington
Civil rights leaders met with John F. Kennedy during the March on Washington in 1963. Photo by Warren Leffler and courtesy of Wikimedia.

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spider martin bridge
Carrying satchels and suitcases, six hundred people attended the March for Voting Rights, which traveled between Selma and Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. Photo by Spider Martin and courtesy of the Briscoe Center. © Spider Martin.

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selma bridge
Participants of the third March for Voting Rights made their way over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. Photo by Spider Martin and courtesy of the Briscoe Center. © Spider Martin.

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james meredith hanged
An effigy of James Meredith, a civil rights leader and the first African American student admitted to the segregated University of Mississippi in 1962, hangs outside a window in Oxford, Mississippi. Photo by Art Shay. © Art Shay Archives Project, LLC.

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lewis march 1
Rev. Hosea Williams, John Lewis, and others were confronted by Alabama state troopers during the 1965 March for Voting Rights to Montgomery. Photo by Spider Martin and courtesy of the Briscoe Center. © Spider Martin.

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lewis troopers
Alabama state troopers beat John Lewis as other marchers ran back towards the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. Photo by Spider Martin and courtesy of the Briscoe Center. © Spider Martin.

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king casket
The body of Martin Luther King Jr. was laid in an open casket at the R. S. Lewis Funeral Home after his assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. Photo by Art Shay. © Art Shay Archives Project, LLC.

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king marchers
Following King's death, mourners and demonstrators gathered on the streets of Memphis, Tennessee in 1968. Photo by Art Shay. © Art Shay Archives Project, LLC.

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parks king march
Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks led the march King’s assassination in Memphis. Photo by Art Shay. © Art Shay Archives Project, LLC.

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Chief Seattle gave a famous speech telling the new white settlers that “we are brothers, after all” after the Squamish people were told their land would be sold. 
Chief Seattle gave a famous speech telling the new white settlers that “we are brothers, after all” after the Suquamish people were told they would have to sell their land. 

It is possible to walk down a rough, rain-lashed street in Seattle and stand near where Chief Seattle, the city’s namesake, delivered a speech considered to be one of the greatest ever given by any Native American. But you will be alone in your effort, and won’t find a statue, a sign or even an ‘X’ to mark the spot. 

Editor's Note: Bruce Watson is a writer, historian, and contributing editor at American Heritage. You can read more of his work on his blog, The Attic.

time cover perkins
Perkins made the cover of Time Magazine in 1933.

MANHATTAN — MARCH 1911 — The women had just sat down to tea when the screaming began. Fire was raging through a nearby sweatshop.  As sirens wailed, hundreds gathered to watch. A towering building was burning, its garment workers trapped, clinging in smoke and flame to upper stories. By the time Frances Perkins left her tea and ran to the scene, young women were falling from the sky. Some were ablaze.

Editor's Note: Ellen Carol DuBois is a professor in the history department at UCLA and the author of numerous books on women’s suffrage including the recent, authoritative survey, Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote, from which she adapted the following essay.

suffragettes
The right to vote eventually became the central demand of the American women’s rights movement begun by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her friends, changing women’s lives and American politics in the process. Library of Congress

Editor's Note: William Ferris is the former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

B.B. King played in Hamburg, Germany in 1971. Photo courtesy of Heinrich Klaffs.
B.B. King played in Hamburg, Germany in 1971. Photo courtesy of Heinrich Klaffs.

B. B. King’s performances and recordings defined the Blues for more than six decades. King reached out to members of each new generation with music they understood and embraced, and even into his eighties he followed a rigorous schedule of performances throughout the United States and overseas that would exhaust a much younger artist. 

Editor's Note: Douglas R. Egerton is Professor of History at LeMoyne College. The following essay was adapted from his Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize-winning book, Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America, published by Basic Books.

fort wagner
The storming of Fort Wagner, led by the African American Massachusetts 54th regiment, is now recognized as one of the most famous battles of the Civil War, thanks to books and movies such as the 1989 movie Glory.

Editor's Note: Have your own letter to the editor? Send it to editor@americanheritage.com!

To the editors,

Congratulations on your special issue on Presidential Misdeeds and the numerous essays, especially those by journalists David SchribmanCurtis Wilkie, and Ed Yoder

Editor's Note: Bruce Watson is a writer, historian, and contributing editor at American Heritage. You can read more of his work on his blog, The Attic.

trader shanendoah
The earliest versions of "Oh Shenandoah" describe a fur trapper on the Missouri River who steals away the daughter of an Indian chief named Shenandoah. 

Editor's Note: Peter Osnos was a reporter at the Washington Post and a prominent book editor and publisher in New York. He founded PublicAffairs Books in 1997 and served as its Publisher and CEO until 2005. Mr. Osnos worked with Vernon Jordan while at PublicAffairs, and adapted the following essay for American Heritage from Especially Good View: Watching History Happen, his memoirs being published in June.

Editor's Note: Thomas C. Holt is the James Westfall Thompson Professor of American and African American History at the University of Chicago and a preeminent scholar of black heritage and descendants of the African diaspora in America. He adapted the following essay from his most recent book, The Movement: The African America Struggle for Civil Rights, published by Oxford University Press. 

freedom summer
Songs like "Freedom is a Constant Struggle" and "We Shall Overcome" were common anthems sung by volunteers during the Civil Rights Movement, and particularly the Freedom Summer Project of 1964. Ted Polumbaum/Newseum

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