“To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.” Timeless words from Voltaire that remind us to pay homage to our Black ancestors who, during the darkest days of Jim Crow, gave and risked that last full measure of devotion so that their posterity might enjoy the benefits of the United States Constitution irrespective of skin color. It was not an unreasonable aspiration.

The 13th Amendment prohibited slavery and peonage.

The 14th Amendment overruled Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s notorious declaration in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that whether free or enslaved, Black persons were disqualified for U.S. citizenship based on skin color alone. The chief justice added that Black people were endowed with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” A statue honoring Chief Justice Taney outside the Maryland State House in Annapolis endured from 1872 to 2017 — 145 years — before that odious symbol of racism was removed. To quote Shakespeare, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

The 15th Amendment extended the franchise irrespective of race.

But when Reconstruction ended in 1876, the Civil War amendments were honored more in the breach than in the observance. The Ku Klux Klan with its imperial wizard was born with its signature odious cross burnings and lynchings. For Black people, to vote or to walk erect was to sign their death warrants. A drop of Black blood meant ostracism or worse. Remember the infamous “separate but equal” decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Homer Plessy’s one-eighth Black blood was sufficient to render him a pariah to whites on a passenger train. The Louisiana statute at issue made an exception to separate but equal for Black nurses attending white children. The color line could be broken to cater to white convenience or luxury. By an 8-1 vote, the racist Supreme Court absurdly denied that white supremacist laws denoted any inferiority of Black people. Justice Henry Brown maintained in a flight from reality: “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

Racism was given prime time at the White House under President Woodrow Wilson. He notoriously segregated the federal workforce. He hosted and endorsed the racist film “The Birth of a Nation” by D.W. Griffith, effusing, “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret it that it is all so terribly true.” President Wilson conscripted Black people to fight in segregated units in World War I under the hypocritical banner of “saving the world for democracy” while crushing it at home.

Pervasive racism continued throughout the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It found expression in refusing to endorse his wife’s federal anti-lynching legislation. Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma” showcased the persistent depth of racism in 1944. The Supreme Court with such luminaries as Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis affirmed separate but equal in Lum v. Rice (1927).

Much of the media, including The Baltimore Sun, founded in 1837 in the heyday of slavery in Maryland, served as a claque for white supremacy. It profited from slave trade advertisements. It shunned abolitionists and employed dehumanizing language or stereotypes. Such shameful journalism is not surprising. To paraphrase Justice Benjamin Cardozo, the great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass journalists by. For good or for ill, journalism reports history. It does not make it.

It is a worthy endeavor to uncover past complicity in slavery, Jim Crow and white supremacy. I am not certain, however, that much is to be gained by self-flagellation. The evils touched every phase of life. Few if any could escape its tentacles. Racism should be repudiated in all its moods and tenses without sanctimony. As Jesus sermonized, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast the stone at her.”

The Sun is proud to have charted a positive approach. It has worked throughout the years to better cover all communities throughout the region. The Sun’s focus remains on building trust among all communities, including seeking out diverse voices for our pages. Our commitment to being a champion in providing a place where citizens from our entire region can be heard and included remains an important part of our core mission. The Baltimore Sun Diversity in Journalism Scholarship has been presented since 2003 through the University of Maryland to deserving journalism students within The Sun’s circulation area. And since 2024, The Sun and its affiliate newspapers such as The Capital Gazette in Annapolis and The Carroll County Times have been co-owned by me. We are one of only a few major metropolitan news organizations with minority ownership. Monochromatic journalism distorts reality or perspectives and shortchanges truth.

The greatest gratitude we can display toward our oppressed ancestors is to usher in a new dawn where character and accomplishments determine every person’s station in life. The accident of birth or skin color will not matter. It is a wonderful ambition to live for the ages.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun. This commentary was adapted from Armstrong’s April 4 testimony before the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Baltimore.