iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 24/08/2026

And stick around for the end of the episode where I take a look at three essays from W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington in the Atlantic archives and consider what they have to tell us about the purpose of education: youtu.be/0B5SPhDXv1U?...

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 17/08/2026

A reminder of what universities were trying to atone for: www.theatlantic.com/education/ar...

In the 1800s, the University of Virginia rented human beings as a cost-saving measure. These people—mostly men-
helped build the institution. Literally. They were mainly put to work
constructing buildings on campus. Some of their names are in the university records. Willis, Warner, Gilbert, and so on. It was never a question that renting enslaved people was something that the university would do. After all, several members of the board when the university was founded were "serial renters" of human beings. But the rented laborers weren't the only enslaved black people on campus. At any given time prior to slavery's abolition, there were between 125 and 200 enslaved people on campus

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 13/08/2026

Send me a DM and let me know how I should address the package!

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 13/08/2026

"because states built the segregated system that produced these gaps, the obligation to close them falls on states, too." www.theeduledger.com/institutions...

"Journalist Adam Harris, author of The State Must Provide: The Definitive History of Racial Inequality in Higher Education, has long argued the moral logic behind that campaign: because states built the segregated system that produced these gaps, the obligation to close them falls on states, too."

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 10/08/2026

The State Must Provide, my first book baby, a history of racial inequality in higher education, turns five today. I shared some thoughts about it on IG, but figured it might be good to share here, too: First: I wrote the book because I felt like I had to.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 28/07/2026

i think about this conversation i had with @jemelehill.bsky.social a few years back about sports betting, the fantasy sports to gambling pipeline, and the public health crisis we just willingly walked into _a lot_

Because it was sort of disguised gambling. I mean, yes, you weren’t really, because most people who are in leagues, you know, you have a pot at the end that somebody takes, and you have a second place and all that. But that’s kind of what you’re doing it for. It’s like you’re doing it for the glory. You’re doing it for the win.

But every week it’s teaching you how to individualize player performance in a way that is not necessarily always healthy when you’re screaming about why Davante Adams doesn’t get you another catch or 10 more yards or another touchdown so you can win your fantasy game.

It’s like priming you for this time. And so the pervasiveness of it has been a little surprising. Friends of mine who I just would never have considered them to be into gambling are like really in it now. And then you look at what’s happening with women’s sports with it.

The WNBA gambling is crazy. Like, I was on Twitter and somebody was complaining about—I think they had bet the over on Caitlin Clark, and they were complaining that she didn’t reach whatever point total that she was supposed to reach. And I’m just like, Oh my goodness. I mean, granted, yeah, I guess it’s great because it’s more interest in the women’s game. But at the same time, there’s going to be a level of, shall we say, degenerate interest in the women’s game, as well, because of this.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 22/06/2026

www.semafor.com/article/06/2...

One of America's oldest magazines is investing in video after seeing notable growth in its audience in recent months.

On Monday, The Atlantic's flagship podcast, Radio Atlantic, will expand to produce twice- weekly episodes. Adam Harris will host a new video episode on Mondays that promises to focus on "the stories that set the agenda for the week," complementing the current Thursday show, hosted by Hanna Rosin.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 04/06/2026

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Writers write from compulsion, from necessity. That’s why prose can feel hot on the page. I think of these two perfect sentences from Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses: “No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.” Those sentences were created by a mind that blisters from its contact with reality. AI-written stories may produce prose that wins contests, but the urgency of the desire to get the words down is never going to be there. Even if it goes forever undetected, the absence of that urgency should matter to us, just as all fakery should matter to us: a fictionalized autobiography, the imitation of a Monet. In the absence of the occasion that startles the writer into action, the ersatz artifact is meaningless, no matter how closely it mimics the real thing.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 03/06/2026

and draw attention, in particular, to this section a little bit lower in the story about the all-white city council in Eutaw, AL into the 1980s : www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

For several months, the bill was held up by a white state senator, Earl Goodwin—who’d represented Eutaw until a state-wide reapportionment in 1983. On May 9, 1984, more than 200 Black Eutawans marched to city hall to protest the delay. Eutaw’s all-white city council was a “segregated island in an integrated sea,” the Reverend Joseph Lowery, Abernathy’s successor at the SCLC, said during the protest.

After an extended filibuster, Goodwin relented. A county-wide referendum was required to annex the predominantly Black areas. It passed. Black representatives made quick work of the next election, winning seats on the Eutaw city council.

But investigations arose as swiftly as the victories did. The Justice Department under President Ronald Reagan launched voter-fraud probes in five predominantly Black Alabama counties, including Greene. In 1985, an all-white federal jury convicted a longtime voting-rights activist in Eutaw, Spiver Gordon, who had won a seat on the city council in 1984, of abusing the absentee-voting process. Gordon, with the help of John England Jr., among the first Black students to graduate from the University of Alabama’s law school, sued. “The suit contends the Justice Department for years ignored complaints from blacks about whites abusing absentee ballots to retain political control in poor, mostly black counties,” a Selma Times-Journal summary of the case reads. “But after blacks gained control of many public offices in those counties, the suit said, the Justice Department under President Reagan suddenly became concerned about allegations of blacks abusing absentee ballots.”

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 31/05/2026

a bonus picture of the artist as a young man, go spurs go:

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 31/05/2026

I was reading a little while back and looking at this picture I took of my granddad and thinking about warmer weather and wrote this a poem about the things we remember. It published at @theatlantic.com today:

A photo of the OP’s granddad in his garden in Montgomery, AL.

Memories of Green, a poem by Adam Harris

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 19/02/2026

also wrote a bit about Jesse Jackson: "His death is a reminder that the duty to contend with that history falls to those who are still on this Earth." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

A day later, Jesse Jackson died at the age of 84. The civil-rights leader’s two upstart presidential campaigns revealed how limited America’s political imagination was at the time; his platform would become the foundation of the progressive movement for the next three decades. Sometimes I look at black-and-white photos of Jackson—playing basketball with Marvin Gaye, standing next to King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis before he was murdered, or preparing to deliver the first joint address by a Black man to the Alabama legislature since Reconstruction. It’s easy to think of Jackson in the past. But he was also human, and lived until it was no longer this world but his friend John Lewis that he would see in the morning.

In 2019, members of Congress were preparing to discuss H.R. 40, a bill that would study reparations for slavery—a bill to atone for history. I spoke with Jackson ahead of the hearing. We talked about racism, reparations, and ultimately about hope. It felt natural to wonder where someone who had seen so much bad in U.S. history continued to draw his resolve from. Jackson told me that his own hope stemmed from the fact that the truth cannot be erased. “The truth of slavery—that Africans subsidized America’s wealth—that truth will not go away,” he said. History must be remembered. His death is a reminder that the duty to contend with that history falls to those who are still on this Earth.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 19/02/2026

on American heroes: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

America loves its heroes. The nation has made lions of the men who signed a document 250 years ago to declare independence from the English crown; it's made saints of the 55 men who
gathered in a sweaty room in
Philadelphia to draft its Constitution. Time elevates those people and their deeds to the heights of deities, and American gods must be faultless. But those heroes are not gods; they were,
indeed, men—fallible as all others.

In the same city where the Founders wrote the words that have guided the nation for more than two centuries, George Washington-the most esteemed of them—made a home as America's first president. He brought men and women he had enslaved with him, and rotated them between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon, in Virginia, so that they would not earn their liberty under Pennsylvania law. He shuffled them back and forth so that they would remain his property. These facts cannot be changed; only how they are remembered can.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 17/02/2026

all that say: in thinking about Jackson this morning & reading those old interviews--and considering time and traditions and transitions--I came across the statement he posted when Lewis died. it was a reminder of the ways that brave, dogged individuals, together, make change

On Congressman John Lewis...
We met as fellow protestors in 1960. Two weeks ago, John agreed to co-chair this year's voter registration drive. He was the gift that kept on giving.

This has been a difficult season. First, Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery, Dr. King's Chairman of SCLC's Board for 27 years, and now we have lost Rev. C.T. Vivian and John Lewis, on the same day.

In the 1960's, we broke out of the bubble of segregation. John became the valedictorian of our class.

John Lewis is what patriotism and courage look like. He sacrificed and personifies a New Testament prophet.

Andrew Young and I prayed for John Lewis and C.T. Vivian on Thursday as we convened those who I went to jail with in 1960.

Good Night, I will see you in the morning. #GoodTrouble

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 17/02/2026

thinking about the conversation I had with Jesse Jackson in 2019: "The truth of slavery—that Africans subsidized America’s wealth—that truth will not go away. It’s buried right now, but as each generation becomes much more serious, it will be grappled with." www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

Jesse Jackson: Well, first of all, we had been freed without being made equal. There’s historical continuity between blacks being amassed in prison after 246 years of legal slavery. When there was a contest about it [in Dred Scott v. Sandford], the Supreme Court ruled that blacks had no rights. [After emancipation and the Civil War] those who had been slave masters became segregation masters. They took our freedom away from us; they began to lock up blacks by the thousands to do prison labor, farm labor—the whole range. They just put us back in slavery.

We finally, in 1954, broke the backbone—legally—of that system [with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision], but we were never—there was never repair for damage done. Two hundred and forty-six years of slavery, then legal Jim Crow and [nearly] 5,000 lynchings without a conviction. And even today, discrimination by extension of that system has not completely ended.

So we had been fighting for repair. We fought against the barbarism for our freedom; now we’re fighting for our equality. We are the foundation of American society—not the bottom, the foundation. When the Declaration of Independence came, we had been enslaved for 157 years. We made cotton king. We are due a different kind of recognition.

Harris: Do you personally have hope that there will be payment for that legacy of slavery?

Jackson: The truth of slavery—that Africans subsidized America’s wealth—that truth will not go away. It’s buried right now, but as each generation becomes much more serious, it will be grappled with.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 30/01/2026

But I was also thinking about theories of action and the ties that bind us. I keep a lot of journals and write animating quotes from readings at the beginning of each. I started a new one a few weeks ago and have three this time.

ON THE TIES THẠT BỊND us

Life itself is nothing until it is lived, it is we who give it meaning,
and value is nothing more than
the meaning we give it.
Jean-Paul Sartre,
"Existentialism is a humanism:
P.51

How did one talk of the guilt that came from not dong the things that one wanted so much to do?
Richard wright, A FATHERS LAW
P. 35

Men do not like to feel themselves in dangers. Yet it is because there are real dangers, real failures, and real earthly damnation that words like victory,
wisdom, or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance and it is because man has something to lose and because
he can lose that he can also win.

Simone de Beauvoir
THE Ethics OF AMBIGUITY
p. 34

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 30/01/2026

An American story. www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

As the great believer cautioned,
treachery says up when down;
it"
'scatters whole families"
without second thought or sound. "New occasions teach new duties"; again we've found this to be true, and the only question lingering
is what are we to do.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 21/01/2026

I interviewed Jerry Cirino, who championed Ohio’s bill, a couple of times for a story in 2023. This, about holocaust denialism in the classroom, continues to stand out. (deleted and reposted bc of typos.) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

"What were saying simply is that different sides of issues, like the Holocaust-denier thing that I mentioned earlier, should be given open discussion," he told me in July. He was referring to a question that he's gotten several times since his bill first came out: What should professors do if a student continues to present dissenting views about the Holocaust? Earlier this year, Cirino was admonished by a colleague, State Representative Casey Weinstein, after he refused to unequivocally say that Holocaust denialism is outside the realm of legitimate
classroom debate. "There's no question that it happened, but if I were teaching a class, and somebody came up and said they doubted whether it really happened the way everybody had reported it, the choice for the professor is that you can throw that student out of class, you can fail them, you can tell the other students to harass them, or you can persuade the student with the preponderance of evidence that the Holocaust happened," he told me. "You may or may not convince the student, but that's the kind of
dialogue that should be happening."

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 21/01/2026

Attributing all of this to the Trump administration gives them undue credit for something state lawmakers have been forcing through their legislatures www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/u...

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 21/01/2026

Looking forward to this conversation on Thursday. If you’re in DC, I hope you’ll join us! dclibrary.libnet.info/event/15511624

Miracle Children author talk with Erica Green and Katie Benner

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 20/01/2026

As a follow-up, I asked, well... what if money wasn't an issue? He said he would likely still eliminate the history major and others in favor of more focus on STEM fields bolstered by a broader general-education curriculum. www.theatlantic.com/education/ar...

“If we suddenly received more dollars,” he told me, “we’d have to ask some pretty hard questions about where we’d want to invest those dollars—and again, I’d point to enrollment figures.” If the demand is for the fields with clearly prescribed career pathways, that’s where the resources should flow, he said. “We are obligated to make sure that we’re serving those students in the best way possible, and for that money, we need to focus on the liberal-arts core curriculum of the university,” he told me.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 20/01/2026

If you’re interested, B&N has the ebook of The State Must Provide available for $1.99 at the moment www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-state-...

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 17/01/2026

“If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, ‘brethren!‘ Be careful, teachers!”

The late Eugene Talmadge, in my opinion, possessed
one of the better minds of Georgia, or even America. Moreover, he wore the Phi Beta Kappa key. By all measuring rods, Mr. Talmadge could think critically and intensively; yet he contends that I am an inferior
being. Are those the types of men we call educated?
We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated
experience of social living. If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, "brethren!"
Be careful, teachers!

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 15/01/2026

Revisiting this piece I wrote in 2023: "This year is defining moment for American higher education, one that will decide whom institutions admit, who will teach those students, and what those professors can teach." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

In the months that have followed, Republican state legislatures and governors have made other efforts to overhaul higher education. Texas lawmakers, for example, passed bills that banned DEI initiatives at the state’s public colleges and redefined tenure—lawmakers had considered banning tenure altogether but ultimately reached a compromise—and listed vague reasons a university can fire a tenured faculty member, including “conduct involving moral turpitude” and “unprofessional conduct that adversely affects the institution.” Free-speech advocates fear what that could mean in practice. Texas A&M University suspended and censured a professor after she allegedly made a “disparaging remark” about the state’s lieutenant governor. (She was reinstated after an investigation found no clear evidence of wrongdoing, and the institution’s president resigned.) And in June, the Supreme Court upended more than four decades of precedent when it ruled the race-conscious admissions systems at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to be unconstitutional.

Adam Harris: The government finally puts a number on the discrimination against Black colleges

This year is a defining moment for American higher education, one that will decide whom institutions admit, who will teach those students, and what those professors can teach. For those on the right, it’s a reclamation, clawing back a set of American institutions that they believe have veered too far to the left. But for many administrators, professors, and historians, these changes risk destroying the pillars—shared governance, academic freedom, free inquiry—that have held up the world’s greatest system of higher education for more than a century.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 15/01/2026

Traditions gain salience through time and consistency. They are what we choose to do across the years. When they are interrupted, when we stop choosing them consistently, they lose that. The chancellor said it’s not going away entirely—that remains to be seen—but it’s already lost some of its heft.

It is our sincere hope that we move toward programming that is not confined to a single event or moment but instead supports ongoing learning and deeper understanding. This work is about helping us live our lives with purpose
where service to all becomes a lived experience.

In short, the MLK Dinner is not going away - rather we are in a moment of transition and the work of this task force will help us create its next iteration.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 13/01/2026

Fast forward, it’s 1978 and the court is deliberating in the case. I’ve threaded this one before, it’s worth reading: The short of it is Thurgood Marshall cut to the heart of the case.

Supreme Court of the United States
Washington, 2. q. 20542
CHAMBERS OF
JUSTICE THURGOOD MARSHALL
April 13, 1978
Re: No. 76-811, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
MEMORANDUM TO THE CONFERENCE I repeat, for next to the last time: the decision in this case depends on whether you consider the action of the Regents as admitting certain students or as excluding certain other students. If you view the program as admitting qualified students who, because of this Nation's sorry history of racial discrimination, have academic records that prevent them from effectively competing for medical school, then this is affirmative action to remove the vestiges of
slavery and state imposed segregation by "root and branch." If you view the program as excluding students, it is a program of "quotas" which violates the
principle that the "Constitution is color-blind."
If only the principle of color-blindness had been accepted by the majority in Plessy in 1896, we would not be faced with this problem in 1978. We must remember,
however, that this principle appeared only in the dissent. In the 60 years from Plessy to Brown, ours was a Nation where, by law, individuals could be given "special"

principle of color-blindness prevents the University from
giving "special" consideration to race when this Court, in 1896 licensed the states to continue to consider race, is to make a mockery of the principle of "equal justice under
law."
As a result of our last discussion on this case, I wish
also to address the question of whether Negroes have "arrived." Just a few examples illustrate that Negroes most certainly have not. In our own Court, we have had only three Negro law clerks, and not so far have we had a Negro Officer of the Court. On a broader scale, this week's U.S. News and World Report has a story about "who
Runs America." They list some 83 persons -- not one Negro, even as a would-be runnerup. And the economic disparity
between the races is increasing. According to the latest
report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights:
"While the average jobless rate for whites fell from 7 percent in 1976 to 6.2 percent
in 1977, the average unemployment rate for blacks increased 13.8 percent to 13.9 percent during that period.
black unemployment
rate thus was more than twice as
great as that for whites during 1977.
For workers of Hispanic origin, the average jobless rate dropped from
11.5 percent in
1976 to 10 percent in 1977 but unemployment among Hispanic was still l. 6 times higher
than that among whites."
The dream of America as the melting pot has not been realized by Negroes -- either the Negro did not get into the pot, or he did not get melted down. The statistics on
unemployment and the other statistics quoted in the briefs

of the Solicitor General and other amici document the vast gulf between White and Black America. That gulf was brought about by centuries of slavery and then by another century in which, with the approval of this Court, states
were permitted to treat Negroes "specially."
This case is here now because of that sordid history. So despite the lousy record, the poorly reasoned lower court opinion, and the absence as parties of those who will be most affected by the decision (the Negro applicants), we
are stuck with this case. We are not yet all equals, in large part because of the refusal of the Plessy Court to adopt the principle of color-blindness. It would be the cruelest irony for this Court to adopt the dissent in Plessy now and hold that the University must use
color-blind admissions.
Sincerely,
T.M.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 12/01/2026

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/o...

“ The national reconsideration of how the American story was told in history and popular culture, whose achievements were included in that telling, and strategies to account for all of the years of
inequality, were attacked immediately. Some white Americans viewed policies intended to help address a legacy of discrimination against others as a discrimination against themselves, which led to lawsuits. Cases like Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which fought the affirmative action strategy at the university's Davis School of Medicine, sought to dismantle the apparatus that would enforce the Civil Rights Act. As soon as rights were won, they were
disputed. By the end of President Trump's first term in office, he assumed that fight - beginning an assault on a bastardized version of critical race theory not long after Mr. Rufo blasted it on Fox News - and sought to blunt the momentum around books, articles and reports that examined the full breadth of American
history, such as the 1619 Project.”

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 09/01/2026

2) Frederick Douglass, on hypocrisy: “The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families,— sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers, leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate.”

members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cow- skin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and
claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for the purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of pu- rity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred infuence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole fami- lies,— sundering husbands and wives, parents and chil- dren, sisters and brothers, leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate. We see the thief preaching
against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 09/01/2026

Two final things: 1) Tom, his family, and their ilk gushed about Judah Benjamin‘a New Year’s Eve 1860 speech favoring secession. From the NYT the next day: “His closing declaration, that the South could never be subjugated, was greeted by the galleries with disgraceful applause.”

WASHINGTON, Monday, Dec. 31.

The scene in the Senate to-day was the most intensely exciting that was ever witnessed in that chamber. Senator BENJAMIN, of Louisiana, who, it had been reported, would make a conciliatory speech, gave out that he would make a parting secession speech, -- an announcement which drew an immense audience. Every corner was crowded. The lobbies were full. Senator BENJAMIN spoke calmly throughout, but the character of his speech at the close opened up to everyone the new era in national affairs. His closing declaration, that the South could never be subjugated, was greeted by the galleries with disgraceful applause, screams and uproar. It was evidently the act of persons who had purposely packed the galleries. For this demonstration the galleries were promptly cleared, but as the people passed out, remarks were current among the mob such as "That's the talk " -- "Now we will have war" -- "BENJAMIN's a brick" -- "D -- n the Abolitionists" -- "ABE LINCOLN will never come here."

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 09/01/2026

I realize I haven't talked much about Is This America here! I've been working on it for the last several years. Excited for you all to read it. More soon, but for now:

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 09/01/2026

No concern except to tell his mother that he was sorry Richard, who they held in bondage, had escaped. You’ll also note, here, a later attempt to edit the letter which is faded—an attempt to change “fellow did it” to “was taken away” and further strip Richard of any agency.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 09/01/2026

But he wasn’t worried about Civil War actually happening. “I do not think it is the spirit of the 19th century to fight over an abstract principle and in event of a seperation, slavery must be but an abstract question to the people of the North,” he wrote to his mother in May.

Thomas to his Mother, believing slavery would no longer be an issue to the north after secession

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 09/01/2026

“We must either make up our minds to fight under the stars and stripes, wherever our services may be called for, or we must resign at once and free ourselves from that solemn oath,” he wrote to his Aunt Emily in April 1861.

Text of Thomas Rowland letter to Aunt Emily, describing resigning from West Point

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 06/01/2026

“the new south slams up against the old”

The psalm says joy comes in the morning, but it doesn't say it always lasts.
Rarely a week goes by when I don't think about what Granddaddy saw-what he knew. The playwright Lorraine Hansberry once wrote, "The New South slams up against the Old." Even as Black folks have had their rights expanded, explicit voter-suppression efforts have sought to curb them.
America has a tradition of mucking up its critical junctures.
N OCTOBER 9, 2019, I could not muster more words than "Wow." Steven Reed had just been elected the first Black mayor of Montgomery in the city's 200-year
history. I pulled out my phone to call my mom. It had been only 20 years since Emory Folmar was the mayor. We laughed thinking about what Granddaddy would have had to say about it. He might have worried, the same way Black folks his age worried when Barack Obama was elected president. White people have not historically taken this sort of Black advancement lying down.
I'd begun digging into what happened at Eutaw by then. I knew more of the story—why things were the way they were and how significant that 1870 election was.
More than a year later, Raphael Warnock became the first Black Democrat to represent a former Confederate state, and Georgia's first Black senator. The day after Georgians made history, insurrectionists rioted at the Capitol.
I have to imagine Granddaddy would have seen that coming.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 06/01/2026

2) The psalm says joy comes in the morning but it doesn’t say it always lasts.

Granddaddy took me to church with him on Sundays in Montgomery, in a small brick chapel on Decatur Street. It’s where I learned my hymns and that too many perfumes combined can fill up your lungs like smog. The preacher would flip open his Bible. “Weeping may endure for a night,” he would say. I’d look at Granddaddy, who always knew the verses. He’d join the congregation: “But joy cometh in the morning.”

August 11, 1969, must have felt like morning in Eutaw.

Bodies packed into the courthouse. Sweat dripped from the folks braving the balmy Alabama heat. It was a day of celebration. They called it “Independence Day”—complete with a parade, speeches, and a ball. A century later, Greene remained roughly 80 percent Black, and after a special election, six of the seven seats on the county commission were held by Black farmers. For the first time, Black people controlled a county government in Alabama. “To me, the Greene County victory is more important than the mission of Apollo 11,” Ralph Abernathy, the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said during his speech that day. “The astronauts found only rocks covered with dust on the moon. In Greene County, we found human beings living a life of misery and poverty, exploited by the white power structure over which poor Black people had no control.”

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 28/12/2025

I’ve been trying to find video from the event, but I’ve been scrolling through some of the live tweets from it and this one from @lottiejoiner.bsky.social stuck out:

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 27/12/2025

grateful for every moment I got to spend with her. she truly believed in the importance of sharing her experience because America has a habit of forgetting. in may 2019, I interviewed her again on stage in DC:

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 27/12/2025

I missed the AP story when it ran earlier this month. It included this photo of Jo Ann taken by Bethany Mollenkof on the day she and I sat at her table in her LA home in 2019. I was working on a project interviewing those who desegregated America’s schools. Not the laws, the people.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 26/12/2025

On playing the game the right way: "[It] is both a principle and a practice. Like anything we would hope to be good at—writing, parenting, friendship, democracy—the principle is easy to follow intellectually, but much more difficult to live out..." adamhsays.substack.com/p/pandemoniu...

There’s a lot of shorthand in baseball—the sort of jargon in every profession which becomes a barrier to entry. They’re often aphorisms. One that I’ve appreciated while watching the Guardians—particularly in the Terry Francona and, now, Stephen Vogt managerial eras—is: Play the game the right way. It’s easy to define, hard to do. Playing the game the right way means running hard to first every time a ball is hit into play. It means keeping your head up when you’re on the bases, and keeping the defense honest. Laying down a bunt or punching a ball as far as possible into the outfield grass when a man is at third and you have an out to give. It’s about getting someone on base, getting them over, and getting them home.

Playing the game the right way is both a principle and a practice. Like anything we would hope to be good at—writing, parenting, friendship, democracy—the principle is easy to follow intellectually, but much more difficult to live out, especially when things get hard. The easy way out–glossing over fundamentals–would be, well, easier. But the right way is about discipline. Sure, it won’t always be perfect, but on the grand balance, there is always the chance of success if the process is right.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 26/12/2025

The thing I've loved the most about the team this season--Wemby aside--is that, quite importantly, it's all the other guys doing their jobs well. And I keep thinking about the fact that while drafting Timmy set the dynasty in motion structurally, the Memorial Day miracle did it emotionally.

It’s Memorial Day, May 31, 1999, and the Spurs are in the Western Conference finals—one series away from the big dance. There are 12 seconds left in the fourth quarter. The Spurs, down 18 points in the third, have clawed their way back to within two. Sean Elliott, the Spurs forward, doesn’t so much as pirouette as look like someone just bumped into his shoulder on the street. His pinkie toe is practically hugging the sideline as he catches the ball. Somehow—divine intervention, maybe—Elliott composes himself with a hop and one dribble while orienting his body toward the hoop. His heels hang out-of-bounds, the balls of his feet planted firmly inside the line. Rasheed Wallace, the Portland Trail Blazers power forward, uses every bit of his 7-foot-4-inch wingspan to try to get a hand on the ball. It is no use. Elliott’s eyes lock on to what he can see of the rim as he rises with the picturesque form of basketball-shooting manuals.

“He fires the three,” Bob Costas, the NBC announcer, says. “And he hits it!” The Alamodome erupts—logically, some Trail Blazers fans must be there, but it seems like all 35,000 people in the arena have joined in an ebullient chorus. About 20 miles away, at our home on Randolph Air Force Base, my living room erupts in screams as well.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 25/12/2025

adamhsays.substack.com/p/on-time

Heritage, an entreaty to repose
I saw what my ancestors saw
last night,
just after we laid the kids down
to sleep.

A cloudless sky - so clear; the pale
moon - light
casts shadows of crepes right upon
my feet.

I once said a prayer on a night
Like this:
That the Lord of my granddaddy
keep us!

Staring up at the black, speckled
abyss

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 22/12/2025

reminded of a “no comment” moment a few years ago when I was writing about a school district secession in Louisiana: www.theatlantic.com/education/ar...

(Browning did not respond to a request for comment from The Atlantic on LinkedIn. When I called his office, I was put on hold for 30 minutes before the line went dead. Each subsequent call was sent directly to voicemail.) "What I do is I let my actions speak, and how I conduct myself and how I treat people speak."

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 17/12/2025

The waitress brought the food, the recruits thought Tuberville went to the bathroom, and he just… never came back. The next day he announced he was leaving for Cincy.

"The waitress brought our food out, and we thought (Tuberville) went to the bathroom, but
he never came back to dinner," Danzey said. "Then next thing I know, the next day, he made
an announcement that he's going to Cincinnati." The next morning, when Danzey and other recruits were set to take a tour of the campus, Texas Tech offensive line coach Chris Thomsen (also the team's interim coach) told the group
Tuberville was gone.

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Adam Harris @adamhsays.com · 03/12/2025

First, you should know that Texas Tech’s chancellor, Brandon Creighton, is the author of the state’s bill overhauling higher education governance. He assumed office last month.

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