There was a time when white men were willing to die to set me free. When the battle hymn rang out — “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free” — it called forth a generation of fighters who, despite their flaws, challenged the racial hierarchy that had poisoned the nation’s soul. Men like Lincoln, Grant, Thaddeus Stevens, and Charles Sumner did not flinch from naming treason and demanding justice. They knew that the Confederacy’s defeat on the battlefield had to be matched by its destruction in law and culture, or else the rot would fester and return.

But after Lincoln’s assassination and Andrew Johnson’s betrayal of Reconstruction, the promise of a diverse and free America was strangled in its crib. The defeated South, shamed but unpunished, turned its rage on the most vulnerable — the freedmen who dared to stand equal. The white mobs rioted, the army withdrew, and soon, the Lost Cause mythology rose from the ashes, poisoning not only the South but the entire nation. By the time Woodrow Wilson screened Birth of a Nation in the White House and resegregated the federal workforce, the ideals of the Radical Republicans had been buried beneath the weight of white supremacy’s second coming.

Today, we are still living in the long shadow of that surrender. We still use the constitutional amendments authored by those Radical Republicans to defend our rights, but their fighting spirit — their uncompromising will to confront treason and oppression — is missing from our political leadership. Neither party stands as they once did for freedom and justice as a national cause. Instead, we see the descendants of the Lost Cause rising again, peddling fear, hate, and greed as the new currency of power in the 21st century.

And so I say: the nation needs battlers for the republic once more.

We need leaders who will not shrink from the task of teaching white Americans a different way to be — to build community rather than fear it, to reject the lie that sharing power means losing it. Whites have been taught, generation after generation, to see others as threats. Their politics have become the politics of fear and scarcity, their hearts too easily manipulated by those who trade in division. And because they remain the dominant population, the destiny of this nation rises or falls on the choices they make. This is not to single them out for condemnation, but for responsibility. Black Americans, Asians, Hispanics, immigrants — we did not build the machinery of racial hierarchy that stalks this land. It is white Americans who must dismantle it. And they will need better role models than the purveyors of grievance and hate who fill today’s airwaves.

The good news is that such men and women have existed before. White men who saw their own humanity reflected in the freedom of others, who understood that no nation can thrive while hating a segment of its own people. Men who were willing to die — not for dominance, but for the principle that no man is free until all are free. That spirit is the only antidote to the poison rising again. The nation’s future depends on whether it can summon, once more, a generation of fighters for the republic — fighters whose truth is still marching on, if only we will listen.