If there were a remote mountaintop in the American backwoods – and blacks had the pickaxes and backhoes to do it – we could build a new Mount Rushmore for the American presidents who are most attentive to our needs and most successful in meeting them.
There is a strong argument that Joseph R. Biden’s smiling face should be on it. As Biden has said far too often to far too many listeners: No, I’m serious. No joke.
Biden’s face on the black Mount Rushmore has nothing to do with sentimentality. It’s purely business. When it came to the issues of black Americans, Biden cared much more than most American presidents.
To most presidents, we have either been slaves, subhumans who should still be slaves, or snooty ingrates who don’t know how lucky we are to call ourselves Americans (no matter what role we actually played in making the country what it is today).
Before we inscribe the Biden memorial plaque at the foot of the black Mount Rushmore, let us clarify who will not climb the mountain.
Who will not be on the black Mount Rushmore:
If you owned us, raped us, beat us, or sold us, you have no mountaintop monument. That excludes presidents of enormous importance whose heroic deeds ultimately benefited all Americans – George Washington and his many important firsts, Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase… sorry, that’s not enough. Not when you planned to keep us enslaved in a free state despite our work for you (Washington). Not when you probably raped and impregnated a young girl who belonged to you (Jefferson).
Abraham Lincoln is on the real Mount Rushmore, and if I were to carve out that black Mount Rushmore, I would put him on ours, too.
Lincoln famously said he would preserve the Union with or without slavery. He said he did not consider whites and blacks equal. And Frederick Douglass tried to get him on his lame-duck idea of sending our ancestors back to Africa – despite the fact that by the 1860s many of them had already lived in America for generations and knew it only as their home.
There was the Emancipation Proclamation, which was intended to free slaves in states that were actively rebelling against the Union. The proclamation had its limitations, but it was a strong step toward black liberation. So, let’s go, Abe.
Theodore Roosevelt is standing on the real Mount Rushmore, but he wouldn’t be on the black Mount Rushmore. A dinner with Booker T. Washington in the White House isn’t enough for him.
Instead of TR Ulysses S. Grant, put it on the black Mount Rushmore.
Yes, Grant is better known as a general than as a president. But he did great things for African Americans at that time. In 1875, Grant signed a law that banned racial segregation in public facilities and public transportation. He founded the Department of Justice, in part to support the fight against the Ku Klux Klan. And he sent federal troops to the South to protect African Americans from the brutal revenge of defeated, angry white Southerners.
Barack Obama would be on the mountain. How can you have a black Mount Rushmore and exclude the only black man who has ever been president?
The symbolism of Obama’s election, his competence and his professional governance made it clear that a black man could hold the highest office in the land and carry out his task with great skill. The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, provided health insurance to large parts of the country that did not have health insurance – including millions of black Americans.
Lyndon Johnson goes to the mountain. He signed all the civil rights laws and appointed Thurgood Marshall as Attorney General and later as the first black Supreme Court Justice.
Now the Biden case at Black Mount Rushmore.
Oh, I know Black Mount Rushmore would have one more president than the one in South Dakota. Who says our mountain can’t be bigger?
Biden signed an expansion of the child tax credit that lifted millions of children – including millions of black children – out of poverty. He signed a law that provides $16 billion for HBCUs. He promised to nominate a black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court, and he kept pace with Ketanji Brown Jackson. He named as his running mate another black woman, Kamala Harris, who succeeded him as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.
No one would have guessed that Biden would have such a record after just one term as president, given his time in the U.S. Senate, during which he questioned the wisdom of school busing to desegregate schools, befriended segregationists, authored a crime bill that led to mass incarceration of black people, and stood by as his colleagues on the Judiciary Committee attacked Anita Hill, a black woman who had alleged that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her.
In his speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday evening, Biden said he had made many mistakes during his career in public service.
Yet the last four years of his 50-year career are viewed with great approval by many black Americans. Where would this new Rushmore go? To Colorado… Hawaii…?
