![]() ![]() ![]() Washington to dine at the White House and resisted pressure to remove a black female postmaster in Mississippi, yet he “shared the dream of Anglo-Saxon imperialism” and held “ideas of racial superiority.” Indeed, it was not until the 1960s that President Lyndon Johnson’s relentless advocacy and Martin Luther King Jr.’s courage combined to help secure the civil and voting rights of all Americans. Grant effectively cracked down on the Ku Klux Klan, the post-1877 years featured the rise of Jim Crow and a renewed disenfranchisement of black voters. Meacham provides a sturdy history of this steady but halting progress, primarily through the prism of presidential leadership. ![]() The author contends that throughout American history, presidential leadership and citizen activism have overcome “hours in which the politics of fear were prevalent” to “lift us to higher ground,” particularly in relation to civil rights. In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a divided nation about “the better angels of our nature.” Lincoln’s words failed to prevent civil war, but they serve as a template for the latest book from Pulitzer Prize winner Meacham ( Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, 2015, etc.). An esteemed historian and author chronicles America’s never-ending fight to live up to her ideals. ![]()
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