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Yahoo
5 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Supreme Court rules discrimination laws protect all equally, including 'majority group' members
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the nation's anti-discrimination laws apply equally to all employees, regardless of whether those complaining of bias are white or Black, gay or straight. In a short and unanimous opinion, the justices rejected as outdated and mistaken the view that "members of a majority group" must show more evidence of discrimination before they can sue and win. Instead, the justices said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has always prohibited workplace discrimination against "any individual" who suffers discrimination because of race, color, religion, national origin and sex, including sexual orientation. The law "draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs," Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said. The ruling revives a discrimination lawsuit brought by Marlean Ames, an Ohio woman who said she was demoted and discriminated against by a lesbian who became her supervisor. She was then replaced by a gay man who had less experience. Ames is a heterosexual woman. She sued her employer, the Ohio Department of Youth Services, and alleged she was discriminated against because of her sexual orientation. But a federal judge rejected her discrimination claim, and the 6th Circuit Court in Cincinnati affirmed that decision. In doing so, the judges said she could not point to "background circumstances" or statistical evidence suggesting that hers was the "unusual employer who discriminates against the majority." Law students at the University of Virginia Law School appealed her case to the Supreme Court. They pointed out that the 6th Circuit and several other courts continue to use an outdated, two-track approach to discrimination claims. This is not the standard in much of the nation, however. For example, they said the 9th Circuit Court based in California does not follow this approach, which would require more proof of discrimination from whites or men or heterosexuals. But the law students said the court should hear the Ames case and clarify the law nationwide. Although the case did not directly involve DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion, it gained added attention because of President Trump's drive to rid the government of DEI policies. Jackson said the Supreme Court for more than 50 years has steadily rejected the view that discrimination laws apply differently to different groups of people. In Griggs vs. Duke Power in 1971, "we said that '[d]iscriminatory preference for any group, minority or majority, is precisely and only what Congress has proscribed.'" A few years later, the court rejected the two-track approach, she said, "holding that Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act] prohibited racial discrimination against the white petitioners in th[at] case upon the same standards as would be applicable were they Negroes.' Lawyers for the Biden and Trump administrations had urged the court to overrule the 6th Circuit and make clear there is no double standard for deciding discrimination claims In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas noted the "majority" in the workplace differs by workplace. "Women make up the majority of employees in certain industries, such as teaching and nursing, but the minority in other industries, such as construction." "Defining the 'majority' is even more difficult in the context of race," he wrote. "American families have become increasingly multicultural, and attempts to divide us all up into a handful of groups have become only more incoherent with time." The court's ruling in Ames vs. Ohio Department of Youth Services said the Ohio court should reopen and reconsider Ames' claim of discrimination. Experts in discrimination law said the decision will have an effect in some regions but not others. "As a practical matter, more 'reverse discrimination' lawsuits may survive a motion to dismiss," said Evan Parness, an attorney at the Covington law firm in New York. Although the decision doesn't significantly change how federal district courts in California operate, it has implications for some courts in other parts of the country that require the higher burden of proof, said Elizabeth Beske, professor of law at American University in Washington. The 'background circumstances' rule was first applied in D.C. courts, after a white man sued the Baltimore and Ohio railroad company arguing he was discriminated against when jobs were instead given to Black and female applicants. The court held that 'it defie[d] common sense to suggest that the promotion of a Black employee justifies an inference of prejudice against white co-workers in our present society.' Columbia Law professor Olatunde C. Johnson said the "opinion is not surprising. It depends on a straightforward and sensible statutory reading of Title VII. The 6th Circuit's 'background circumstances' approach was not typical, so I don't expect the case to dramatically change employment discrimination litigation on the ground." Brian McGinnis, an attorney with the firm Fox Rothschild, said because the decision was unanimous, which is rare, it shows an uncontroversial and 'pretty straightforward' perspective that there is no historical basis in case law for requiring extra proof from white, heterosexual or other majority groups. And it represents an effort by the court to streamline and eliminate the need for additional steps in litigation, he said. There is some question as to how the change is applied, but McGinnis doesn't expect any issues. "There is some potential for mischief, but I don't think it will have much change on the day-to-day operations of many employers or courts," McGinnis said. 'The short answer is, it should not change much.' Savage reported from Washington and Hussain from Los Angeles. Get the L.A. Times Politics newsletter. Deeply reported insights into legislation, politics and policy from Sacramento, Washington and beyond, in your inbox twice per week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Supreme Court rules discrimination laws protect all equally, including ‘majority group' members
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the nation's anti-discrimination laws apply equally to all employees, regardless of whether those complaining of bias are white or Black, gay or straight. In a short and unanimous opinion, the justices rejected as outdated and mistaken the view that 'members of a majority group' must show more evidence of discrimination before they can sue and win. Instead, the justices said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has always prohibited workplace discrimination against 'any individual' who suffers discrimination because of race, color, religion, national origin and sex, including sexual orientation. The law 'draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs,' Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said. The ruling revives a discrimination lawsuit brought by Marlean Ames, an Ohio woman who said she was demoted and discriminated against by a lesbian who became her supervisor. She was then replaced by a gay man who had less experience. Ames is a heterosexual woman. She sued her employer, the Ohio Department of Youth Services, and alleged she was discriminated against because of her sexual orientation. But a federal judge rejected her discrimination claim, and the 6th Circuit Court in Cincinnati affirmed that decision. In doing so, the judges said she could not point to 'background circumstances' or statistical evidence suggesting that hers was the 'unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.' Law students at the University of Virginia Law School appealed her case to the Supreme Court. They pointed out that the 6th Circuit and several other courts continue to use an outdated, two-track approach to discrimination claims. This is not the standard in much of the nation, however. For example, they said the 9th Circuit Court based in California does not follow this approach, which would require more proof of discrimination from whites or men or heterosexuals. But the law students said the court should hear the Ames case and clarify the law nationwide. Although the case did not directly involve DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion, it gained added attention because of President Trump's drive to rid the government of DEI policies. Jackson said the Supreme Court for more than 50 years has steadily rejected the view that discrimination laws apply differently to different groups of people. In Griggs vs. Duke Power in 1971, 'we said that '[d]iscriminatory preference for any group, minority or majority, is precisely and only what Congress has proscribed.'' A few years later, the court rejected the two-track approach, she said, 'holding that Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act] prohibited racial discrimination against the white petitioners in th[at] case upon the same standards as would be applicable were they Negroes.' Lawyers for the Biden and Trump administrations had urged the court to overrule the 6th Circuit and make clear there is no double standard for deciding discrimination claims In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas noted the 'majority' in the workplace differs by workplace. 'Women make up the majority of employees in certain industries, such as teaching and nursing, but the minority in other industries, such as construction.' 'Defining the 'majority' is even more difficult in the context of race,' he wrote. 'American families have become increasingly multicultural, and attempts to divide us all up into a handful of groups have become only more incoherent with time.' The court's ruling in Ames vs. Ohio Department of Youth Services said the Ohio court should reopen and reconsider Ames' claim of discrimination. Experts in discrimination law said the decision will have an effect in some regions but not others. 'As a practical matter, more 'reverse discrimination' lawsuits may survive a motion to dismiss,' said Evan Parness, an attorney at the Covington law firm in New York. Although the decision doesn't significantly change how federal district courts in California operate, it has implications for some courts in other parts of the country that require the higher burden of proof, said Elizabeth Beske, professor of law at American University in Washington. The 'background circumstances' rule was first applied in D.C. courts, after a white man sued the Baltimore and Ohio railroad company arguing he was discriminated against when jobs were instead given to Black and female applicants. The court held that 'it defie[d] common sense to suggest that the promotion of a Black employee justifies an inference of prejudice against white co-workers in our present society.' Columbia Law professor Olatunde C. Johnson said the 'opinion is not surprising. It depends on a straightforward and sensible statutory reading of Title VII. The 6th Circuit's 'background circumstances' approach was not typical, so I don't expect the case to dramatically change employment discrimination litigation on the ground.' Brian McGinnis, an attorney with the firm Fox Rothschild, said because the decision was unanimous, which is rare, it shows an uncontroversial and 'pretty straightforward' perspective that there is no historical basis in case law for requiring extra proof from white, heterosexual or other majority groups. And it represents an effort by the court to streamline and eliminate the need for additional steps in litigation, he said. There is some question as to how the change is applied, but McGinnis doesn't expect any issues. 'There is some potential for mischief, but I don't think it will have much change on the day-to-day operations of many employers or courts,' McGinnis said. 'The short answer is, it should not change much.' Savage reported from Washington and Hussain from Los Angeles.
Time Magazine
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
What the Reconstruction Era Can Teach Us About the Politics of Shame
There are three key elements of the Redemptionist reaction that especially resonate in the present. First and foremost, the rhetoric of their movement insisted that racial equality is an inherently foolish and futile pursuit due to the intractable incompetence and inferiority of people of African descent wherever they are found on the globe. In an 1867 address to Congress, President Andrew Johnson proclaimed that 'Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people…wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.' Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna, in the majority opinion for Williams v. Mississippi, an 1898 ruling that narrowed the scope of anti-discrimination claims to the explicit text of law, declared that the Negro race 'by reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependencies,' has 'acquired or accentuated' certain habits, temperaments, and characteristics that mark them separate from whites in their carelessness, dishonesty, docility, and lack of 'forethought.' Popularly, the banner of Black incompetence was carried by demeaning depictions in material and theatrical culture, as well as in D.W. Griffith's racist epic film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which portrayed Reconstruction-era Black legislators as 'comically' idiotic, necessitating the violent restoration of white rule. This rhetoric is, unfortunately, resonant with today's attacks on 'DEI,' with critics insisting that efforts to recruit, incorporate, and promote Black talent in higher education, the military, and in many workplaces amount to the dangerous promotion of incompetence. President Donald Trump, for example, immediately and falsely blamed a horrific Washington, D.C. plane crash on DEI hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration, despite no supporting evidence and overwhelming testimony to the contrary from aviation officials. Meanwhile, figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have made attacking and dismantling DEI a large part of their public persona, while ignoring legitimate concerns about their unprecedented lack of qualifications for their own roles. High-profile Black leaders like former Harvard president Claudine Gay or former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, Jr., have been targeted for defamation and harassment to drive them out of their positions, similarly to Black elected officials and business leaders in the Reconstruction era. The consequence of these campaigns is a revival, from the highest offices of the land, of the Redemptionist lie that common sense should treat Black people as presumptively unfit for positions of authority or public trust. Those who believe otherwise, then, are caricatured as foolish and sentimental. These arguments frequently draw their legitimacy from pseudoscientific racism and the related idea of the backwardness of African diasporic peoples—and expand much further than politics. From Silicon Valley to the media landscape, people in positions of power are reintroducing theories of racial hierarchy under the guise of defending 'free inquiry' or 'realism.' As the Scientific American and The Guardian have documented, a network of actors is actively working to launder eugenics-era thought into legitimacy, cloaked in appeals to genetic science, meritocracy, and market rationality. From Tucker Carlson's monologues, to Elon Musk's offhand remarks about intelligence and heredity, to the administration's executive order against teaching the social construction of 'race,' a new generation of elites is reanimating the old canard that racial inequality is not the legacy of injustice but the reflection of the fundamental inequality of natural 'racial' kinds. Second, we are encouraged to feel shame because of the perversity of consequences. Whatever the good intentions of the last decade or so of racial progressivism, we are told, we have only exacerbated crime, deepened distrust, and stood in the way of economic rationality. Take, for example, the so-called 'Ferguson Effect,' the notion that protests against police brutality demoralize police and exacerbate crime. Just as the reactionary historiography of Reconstruction, led by William Dunning, cast Reconstruction as a misguided, radical experiment in Black suffrage and governance, the Ferguson effect casts protest movements like Black Lives Matter as accelerants of violence and civic decay. Both assert a kind of intuitive 'common sense' that masks deep ideological anxieties. The Dunning historians appealed to the logic of natural racial hierarchy, while proponents of the Ferguson effect draw on a racialized sense of law and order where public safety is presumed to hang precariously on police exercising sweeping authority and compelling broad deference and admiration. In both cases, dissenting scholars have had to work uphill to replace myth with measurement. As social scientists like David Pyrooz and Richard Rosenfeld have shown, the Ferguson effect—when tested across dozens of major cities—fails to reveal a coherent national trend. Rigorous studies consistently find that changes in policing behavior, while real in some places, did not drive national crime patterns, and where proactive policing declined, crime often did not rise at all. Importantly, the best accounts have not only rejected the broad claims of de-policing as a driver of crime but have also emphasized the dangers of clinging to these narratives. The fact that cities like Boston and Baltimore are currently experiencing record homicide declines undercut the notion of a generalized crime wave and affirm something protestors proclaimed: that differences in police approaches matter immensely. Another pillar of Redemptionist rhetoric is the feminization of progressive politics. From Reconstruction to the present, reactionary voices have sometimes attempted to discredit movements for racial justice by portraying their advocates—especially white women—as naïve, sentimental, meddling, and destabilizing. During the postbellum years, white female abolitionists and teachers working with freedpeople were mocked as ' nigger schoolmarms,' accused of spreading delusion and disorder, and often singled out in violent retributions. These women played a vital role in founding schools, advocating suffrage, and supporting Black citizenship, but were often cast by their critics as insubordinate, hysterical, or morally corrupting. This gendered stigma echoed through how Reconstruction itself was characterized—less a serious project of transitional justice and constitutional refounding than a crusade driven by feminine sentimentality run amok. As recent historians have shown, many white women brought genuine moral and pedagogical commitments to the work of abolition and Reconstruction, but navigated a public discourse that portrayed their efforts as irrational and disruptive. Their work, particularly in the South, became one of the earliest battlegrounds where political femininity was equated with moral overreach, excess, and social breakdown. This trope has only persisted today as figures like Christopher Rufo and other conservative intellectuals have revived a strikingly similar line of attack. Writing in City Journal, National Post, and across the digital right, they framed 'wokeness' and progressive racial discourse as symptoms of what they call the 'feminization of American culture.' The rise of DEI and new norms around pedagogy, student activism, and campus protest culture is attributed to a dangerous excess of 'feminine' traits—emotionality, overprotection, inclusivity, and moralistic judgment. This narrative not only ridicules the intellectual and political work of women but also seeks to cast entire movements for justice as self-indulgent and unserious. It is an old trick: to attribute the presence of injustice not to the powerful who perpetuate it, but to the women and marginalized people who criticize it. What makes this rhetoric particularly potent is that it insists on old gender hierarchies as the norm. To understand this history is not merely to lament its repetition, but to arm ourselves with clarity. The reemergence of scientific racism, the delegitimization of Black leadership and achievement, the panic over DEI and protest, the feminization of justice—are not isolated phenomena. They are part of a coherent tradition of backlash, one that knows how to speak the language of realism and reform while advancing the cause of domination. The task, then, is not simply to refute the lies with better data, though that matters. It is to refuse the shame that seeks to make us forget what we glimpsed, however briefly, in the streets in 2020 and beyond: the possibility that this country might confront how far it is from the scale and scope of its promises, and seize upon that reckoning to remake itself. We will either find a way to remember that aspiration without apology. Or, we will watch another moment where the tentative promise of reconstruction curdles and congeals into something genuinely worthy of our collective shame. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His forthcoming book is
Associated Press
03-05-2025
- Sport
- Associated Press
This Date in Baseball - Albert Pujols becomes the 4th player with 3,000 hits and 600 home runs
May 4 1869 — Henry Chadwick published his first annual baseball handbook. The book eventually evolved into Spalding's Official Baseball Guide. 1869 — The Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first all-professional team, played its first regular season game and beat the Great Westerns of Cincinnati 45-9. 1871 — The Fort Wayne Kekiongas beat the Cleveland Forest Citys, 2-0, in the first game played in the National Association. In the 127 games during the 1871 season, there were a total of four shutouts. 1910 — The Browns and Cardinals played home games in St. Louis, and President Taft, not wanting to offend either club, saw parts of each game at Robinson Field and Sportsman's Park. 1931 — In an effort to put less strain on his leg, Babe Ruth plays first base as Lou Gehrig moves to right field. 1939 — Boston rookie Ted Williams became the first player to hit a home run that cleared the right field seats at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. It was his first at-bat at Detroit. The Red Sox edged the Tigers 7-6. 1944 — Blacks were allowed to buy grandstand seats for the first time in St. Louis history. St. Louis was the last of the major league clubs to integrate seating. Negroes had been restricted to the bleachers. 1963 — Bob Shaw of the Milwaukee Braves sets a major league record by committing five balks. 1966 — Willie Mays broke the National League record with the 512th home run of his career in a 6-1 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers at Candlestick Park. Mays passed another Giant, breaking the mark established by Mel Ott in 1946. 1969 — The Houston Astros set an NL record by turning seven double plays against the San Francisco Giants. First baseman Curt Blefary participated in all seven. 1975 — Bob Watson of the Houston Astros, sensing baseball history, raced around the bases on Milt May's home run and crossed the plate at Candlestick Park in time to score major league baseball's 1 millionth run, seconds ahead of Dave Concepcion of Cincinnati. 1980 — Chicago White Sox first baseman Mike Squires caught the final inning of an 11-1 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers. He was the first left-handed catcher to play in major league baseball since Dale Long in 1958. 1981 — New York Yankees relief pitcher Ron Davis strikes out eight consecutive batters in a 4 - 2 victory over the California Angels at Anaheim Stadium, tying an American League record set by Nolan Ryan. 1987 — Candy Maldonado hit for the cycle to help the San Francisco Giants overcome a six-run deficit and beat the St. Louis Cardinals 10-7. 1991 — Chris James drove in nine runs with two homers and two singles, breaking Cleveland's club record for RBIs and leading the Indians to a 20-6 victory over the Oakland Athletics. 1996 — The Texas Rangers became the first American League team in 79 years to pitch consecutive one-hitters as Roger Pavlik held Detroit to a fifth-inning home run in a 3-1 win. Ken Hill one-hit Detroit on May 3, retiring the last 26 batters he faced. 2001 — Raul Mondesi of the Blue Jays went 4-for-4, with two homers, two doubles and six RBIs, leading Toronto to an 8-3 victory over Seattle. 2002 — Barry Bonds hits his 400th home run with the San Francisco Giants. 2015 — Toronto Blue Jays hitting coach Brook Jacoby was suspended 14 games for his postgame conduct toward the umpire crew assigned to the April 29 game at Boston. Jacoby was accused of pinning umpire Doug Eddings against a wall in a dugout tunnel at Fenway Park, putting his forearms up near the ump's neck following Toronto's loss. 2018 — Dodger Rookie Walker Buehler and a trio of Los Angeles relievers combined for the franchise's 23rd no-hitter in a 4-0 victory over the San Diego Padres in the opener of a neutral-site series at Monterrey, Mexico. In just his third start in the majors, Buehler went six innings before Tony Cingrani, Yimi Garcia and Adam Liberatore closed it out. 2018 — Los Angeles Angels slugger Albert Pujols got his 3,000th hit, reaching the mark with a broken-bat single in a 5-0 win against Seattle. Pujols joined Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Alex Rodriguez as the only players in baseball history with 3,000 hits and 600 homers. 2021 — The minor leagues start their season, after having been on hiatus since September of 2019 due to the Coronavirus pandemic. In the interim, the governing structure, Minor League Baseball, has been thoroughly reorganized and in effect replaced by the Professional Development League. 2022 — By pitching 7 innings of one-hit ball, Adam Wainwright gets credit for a 10 - 0 win by the Cardinals over the Royals. It is the 202nd time that the battery of Wainwright and C Yadier Molina have combined on a win, tying the all-time record set by Warren Spahn and Del Crandall of the Boston and Milwaukee Braves. _____
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Secret Recordings Show President Roosevelt Debating Military Desegregation with Civil Rights Leaders
More than a year before Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt heard arguments from the civil rights leaders of the era for the desegregation of the military in preparation for the wars in Europe and Asia that would soon engulf the U.S., but a generally sympathetic FDR said the nation was just not ready to see "Negro" troops fighting alongside whites. The remarkable exchanges were caught on recording devices Roosevelt had secretly installed in the basement under the Oval Office. FDR had a microphone hidden in a desk lamp and an on-off switch in a lower desk drawer to feed the device in the basement called a "Continuous-film Recording Machine." The intent was to record press conferences, but the machine was often left running and would catch exchanges such as the meeting with the civil rights leaders, according to the Miller Center nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia. The center highlighted the Roosevelt tapes in its archives to mark the 80th anniversary of FDR's death at age 63 of a cerebral hemorrhage at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945. Read Next: Pentagon Turns Focus to Potentially Privatizing Commissaries, Military Exchanges In the Oval Office on Sept. 27, 1940, A. Philip Randolph, a Black labor leader and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, made the case for what would now be called the "inclusion" part of diversity, equity and inclusion, in the military: "Mr. President, it would mean a great deal to the morale of the Negro people if you could make some announcement on the roles the Negroes will play in the armed forces of the nation." Roosevelt tried to interject, apparently to note that only 11 days earlier he had signed into law the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 that established a draft for all Americans, but Randolph continued: A speech or an announcement by Roosevelt on desegregation of the military "would have tremendous effect" because discrimination in the ranks "is the irritating spot among the Negro people." "They feel that they -- they're not wanted in the various armed forces of the country, and they feel they have earned the right to participate in every phase of the government by virtue of their record in past wars for the nation. And they're feeling that they're being shunted aside, that they're being discriminated against, and that they're not wanted now," said Randolph, who would become a main figure in the 1962 March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. would make his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech. Also present at the Oval Office meeting was Walter Francis White, then head of the NAACP. White backed up Randolph on desegregation and told Roosevelt that, at least in the Northern states, "Negroes and whites go to school together, they play on the same athletic fields. And yet, when it comes to the Army, fighting for democracy, they say, 'Well, Negroes are not good enough. They've got to be shunted aside.'" Roosevelt told White that his arguments had merit and added that he would be approving Black troops for non-combat service but desegregation would take more time: "Well, you see, Walter, my general thought on it is this -- it's a thing that we've got to work into," FDR said. At the Oval Office meeting with the civil rights leaders, Navy Secretary Frank Knox told Roosevelt that desegregating the Navy would risk violence between whites and Blacks. "You have a factor in the Navy, which is not present in the Army, and that is that these men live aboard ships," Knox said. The problem was to find "a way to permit the Negro to serve the Navy without raising the question of conflict between white men and Black men together living in the same ship." At that point, White appeared to rile the president by reminding him that there were "petitions from 85 American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts, California to Maine, protesting against discrimination" in the military. Roosevelt shot back: "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah." Roosevelt also appeared to be thinking out loud about ways to increase the opportunities for Blacks to serve in the military, and made what would be seen today as a cringeworthy suggestion to Knox. "Another thing, Frank, that I forgot to mention. I thought of it about, oh, a month ago, and that is this: We are training a certain number of musicians on board ship -- the ship's band. Now, there's no reason why we shouldn't have a colored band on some of these ships, because they're darn good at it. And that's something I wish you would look into," Roosevelt said. The tapes provide a "fabulous window into the texture of another time," said Marc Selverstone, the Gerald L. Baliles professor and director of presidential studies at UVA's Miller Center. "We get to hear a largely unscripted FDR. Here, he's more or less winging it with the reporters and, as a result, you can hear him in perhaps a more authentic way," said Selverstone, who also is co-chair of the Presidential Recordings Program at the Miller Center. Roosevelt decided to make the recordings after he felt he had been misquoted by reporters at a press conference in the summer of 1940. He wanted the recordings to serve as possibly a more accurate record than his stenographer could provide but employed the device for less than three months. The recordings began in August 1940, and the last one was made on Nov. 8, 1940. The placement of the recording device under the Oval Office was a closely guarded secret, and none of the visitors to the Oval Office knew they were being recorded, Selverstone said. The existence of the tapes did not become known until the 1980s. "As a historian, I think it's essential that we all have a better understanding of what has come before to understand why we are in the situation we are today," Selverstone said in commenting on the value of the tapes. "It helps to humanize history. You get a sense of the emotion involved" and a sense of "how the country has been able to move ahead and overcome certain dimensions of its history that are not terribly attractive." Selverstone also noted that it was first lady Eleanor Roosevelt who arranged the Oval Office meeting between the civil rights leaders and FDR as part of her advocacy for desegregation in the military and society as a whole. At a time when many white people thought that Black Americans were incapable of flying an airplane, Eleanor Roosevelt went on her own to the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama to show support for the Tuskegee Airmen To the consternation of the Secret Service, and her husband, the first lady climbed into the back seat of a two-seater piloted by the legendary instructor Charles Alfred "Chief" Anderson, believed to be the first Black American to obtain a commercial pilot's license, and they took off for an hourlong flight over Alabama. The flight generated huge publicity and support for the Tuskegee Airmen. "She had a ton of moxie and was quite bold and forthright, particularly with her husband, to get on the right side of history," Selverstone said. Related: Battle of Manila 80th Anniversary: Reclusive Son of Gen. Douglas MacArthur Makes Rare Statement
