The United States of America has never been a democracy. Our Constitution, drafted and ratified in 1787, legalized slavery in all 13 nascent States. Eight of our presidents were slaveholders, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who owned more the 600 slaves. Though the 13th Amendment legally abolished slavery in 1865, the KKK , founded also in 1865, began to flourish in the Deep South when U. S. troops were recalled in 1877. White Supremacists used a vicious range of deterrents to keep Blacks from voting:  Deep South State constitutions and laws;  poll taxes;  literacy tests;  the "grandfather clause";  and outright intimidation, including lynchings that occurred at their peak from 1890 to 1920. Today, Trump supporters have swept through almost all State legislatures "legalizing" myriad ways to keep minorities from voting, as well as other ways to invalidate their votes. In addition to brutalizing Blacks throughout our nation's history, we must not forget the genocide perpetrated by our government against indigenous peoples who had populated the continent for millennia, culminating between 1860 and 1890 with the coup de grace of Wounded Knee. "Manifest Destiny" was not democracy. It was manifest inhumanity.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS