Category: reason

By now, almost everyone recognizes that large gatherings in confined, indoor spaces risk spreading the Coronavirus pandemic. Nonetheless, 23 states are currently conducting or planning to soon conduct in-person bar exams for new applicants for licenses to practice law. Even with precautions, putting hundreds of people in indoor spaces together for many hours at a time creates serious risks of exacerbating the pandemic.

Admittedly, the danger is smaller because most bar exam takers are young and healthy. However, there are still some older bar applicants, such as lawyers moving from one state to another, who need to be licensed in their new homes. And, of course, some young exam takers have health conditions or weakened immune systems, that make them especially vulnerable, as well. In addition, exam takers could potentially spread the disease to others, including some who are older or otherwise more vulnerable to Covid.

I am not one to say that all seriously risky activities should be avoided so long as the pandemic continues. There is, I think, a strong case for moving forward with those that create enormous benefits that cannot be achieved in another way. That, however, is not true of the bar exam, where there is the obvious alternative of “diploma privilege”—giving bar cards to anyone who has graduated from an accredited law school. Four states –Utah, Washington, Oregon, and Louisiana, have adopted this approach in various forms, joining the state of Wisconsin, which has had it for in-state law schools for years. Other states should follow this example.

The standard argument against diploma privilege is that the bar exam requirement is needed to protect consumers from incompetent lawyers. But there is no evidence that bar exams actually achieve that goal, as opposed to serving as a barrier to entry that protects incumbents in the profession from competition. The quality of legal services in Wisconsin has not suffered from its longstanding diploma privilege policy. Bar records indicate that attorneys in that state have disciplinary records similar to those in other states.

Such results are not surprising. The truth is that the bar exam is a test of arcane memorization, not a test of whether the applicant is likely to be a good attorney. That’s why, as my co-blogger Orin Kerr puts it, “when it [the exam] is over you can forget everything you just learned.”

For that reason, I have long advocated the abolition of bar exams, most recently here:

The reason why you can “forget everything” immediately after the exam is that very little of the material on the exam is actually needed to practice law. It’s a massive memorization test that functions as a barrier to entry, not a genuine test of professional competence. That strengthens the case for my view that the bar exam should simply be abolished….

My general view on bar exams is that they should be abolished, or at least that you should not be required to pass one in order to practice law. If passing the exam really is an indication of superior or at least adequate legal skills, then clients will choose to hire lawyers who have passed the exam even if passage isn’t required to be a member of the bar. Even if a mandatory bar exam really is necessary, it certainly should not be administered by state bar associations, which have an obvious interest in reducing the number of people who are allowed to join the profession, so as to minimize competition for their existing members.

Defenders of bar exams argue that consumers would otherwise have little or no way to tell whether a given lawyer is competent or not. But, in reality, there are many other signals to determine that. Often, clients hire not a specific lawyer, but a firm. In that event, the firm’s reputation is a signal of quality, and firms have an incentive to protect that reputation by avoiding the hiring of incompetents. Even with solo practitioners, quality can be discerned by consulting past clients, and a variety of other mechanisms.

Legal scholar Gillian Hadfield has an excellent article making the case that barriers to information can be further reduced by eliminating prohibitions on the corporate practice of law. If corporations were allowed to provide basic legal services—as they currently do with many other professional services, such as accounting—that would reduce cost and also make it easier to signal quality. When you hire H&R Block to do your taxes, you are relying on the overall reputation of the firm, not on that of the specific person who handles your case. Legal services can work similarly.

These methods are not perfect. But they are likely to be far better than relying on bar exam passage as a signal of quality, since the latter is really just a test of memorization.

One possible alternative to “diploma privilege” is simply postponing bar exams, as some states have done. But that prevents thousands of recent law graduates from earning an income in the meantime—and blocks clients from using their services. If states are unwilling to forego the bar exam entirely, they should at least provide temporary diploma privilege for a period of, say, three years, by which time the pandemic is likely to be over, and bar exams can be safely administered.

Online bar exams are another possible solution. The obvious objection to them is that it is extremely difficult to prevent cheating on an online “closed book” exam. It may well be impossible to ensure that a test-taker doesn’t have study guides or reference books with her as she takes the exam. That doesn’t bother me too much, because I believe bar exams are a sham credential in any case. But even I recognize there is some unfairness in a format that rewards those most willing to cheat. In addition, not everyone has access to software and internet connections that are likely to be reliable through many hours of exam taking.

On balance, online exams seem preferable to in-person ones, or to keeping law school graduates in limbo until in-person exams become safer. But diploma privilege is a better approach than either.

For those states that stubbornly insist on holding in-person exams during a pandemic, I am tempted to revive my “modest proposal” for bar exam reform (first developed many years ago):

Members of bar exam boards… and presidents and other high officials of state bar associations should be required to take and pass the bar exam every year by getting the same passing score that they require of ordinary test takers. Any who fail to pass should be immediately dismissed from their positions…. And they should be barred from ever holding those positions again until—you guessed it—they take and pass the exam.

After all, if the bar exam covers material that any practicing lawyer should know, then surely the lawyers who lead the state bar and administer the bar exam system itself should be required to know it. If they don’t, how can they possibly be qualified for the offices they hold? Surely it’s no excuse to say that they knew it back when they themselves took the test, but have since forgotten. How could any client rely on a lawyer who is ignorant of basic professional knowledge, even if he may have known it years ago?

Of course, few if any bar exam officials or state bar leaders could pass the bar exam without extensive additional study (some might fail even with it)…. This material isn’t on the exam because you can’t be a competent lawyer if you don’t know it. It’s there so as to make it more difficult to pass, thereby diminishing competition for current bar association members…..

My proposed reform wouldn’t fully solve this problem. But it could greatly diminish it. If bar exam board members and bar association leaders were required to take and pass the exam every year, they would have strong incentives to reduce the amount of petty trivia that is tested. After all, anything they include on the exam is something they themselves will have to memorize! As prominent practicing lawyers, however, they presumably are already familiar with those laws that are so basic that any attorney has to know them; by limiting the exam to those rules, they can minimize their own preparation time. In this way, the material tested on bar exams might be limited to the relatively narrow range of legal rules that the average practicing lawyer really does need to know.

If the knowledge tested on bar exams is so important that we must ensure all practicing lawyers know it—even at the risk of exacerbating a deadly pandemic—then surely that principle applies with extra force to prominent leaders of the legal profession, particularly those responsible for setting professional standards for others. By this reasoning, they should have to take the exam on the same terms as they impose on new bar applicants. If that means taking an in-person exam during a pandemic, then so be it!

On balance, however, I will not insist on this idea, so long as the pandemic continues. I recognize that many bar association leaders are likely to be at special risk, due to age and health conditions. The “modest proposal” might be a useful reform under normal conditions. But it would be wrong to impose it now.

We should not require bar leaders to risk their lives and health for no good reason. But they, in turn, should not impose such risks on others.

Finally, critics may argue that, as a law professor, I have a self-interest in promoting “diploma privilege.” My brief response is that I have also long advocated abolishing or at least reducing the requirement that all lawyers attend ABA-accredited law schools, as well. I have also long advocated a variety of other reforms that would have the effect of reducing the demand for law school education and legal services generally—most notably reducing the number and complexity of laws.  I don’t claim diploma privilege is the optimal regulatory regime, merely that it’s superior to system under which lawyers are required to both have a diploma and pass a worthless bar exam.

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If members of Congress intend to smear the CEOs of various tech companies as censors, monopolists, and thieves, you might expect the politicians to at least keep their accusations straight. Alas, at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing Wednesday, ranking Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R–Wis.) assailed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over something that happened not on Facebook, but on Twitter.

While Democratic congressmen mostly used their time to dubiously accuse Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos of competitive practices that hurt consumers, Republicans focused on alleged political bias against conservatives on social media sites. Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) rattled off a long list of such transgressions—several of which were genuinely troubling, though not the purview of the government.

When it was his turn to speak, Sensenbrenner brought up the very recent example of Donald Trump Jr.’s post about hydroxychloroquine getting taken down, and asked Zuckerberg to justify this move. But it was Twitter, not Facebook, that took such action against Trump Jr.

“I think you might be referring to what happened on Twitter,” said Zuckerberg in response. Indeed, as Zuckerberg noted during the hearing, Facebook has “distinguished itself” by supporting free expression to a much greater degree than rival social media companies.

That’s part of the reason why conservative calls to regulate social media for political bias seem so untethered from reality. There are some legitimate concerns about bias on the platforms, but Congress is not the correct authority to adjudicate them, and lawmakers who envision a role for government intervention on this front continue to embarrass themselves.

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California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is engaging in the Golden State custom of meddling with the wording of ballot initiatives to influence voter behavior.

Ballot initiatives and referendums are supposed to be a way for California voters to bypass entrenched political interests when lawmakers refuse to consider policies that voters support or pass laws that they do not. Yet California’s political class has a long history of putting its thumb on the scale to influence the outcome of the vote. One of those mechanisms is writing the initiative summary. That power is vested in the attorney general, who is beholden to a political party whose work and budget is heavily affected by voters’ behavior.

This November, California voters will have 12 propositions to consider along with all the candidates running for office. But for two of the ballot initiatives, Democratic Attorney General Xavier Becerra has used his power to subtly control how the initiative is summarized, in one case to help it pass, in the other, to turn voters against it.

Proposition 15 would scale back some of the government limitations of Proposition 13, the decades-old law that severely restrains the ability of state and local governments to raise taxes, particularly on property. Proposition 15 would eliminate the prohibitions on increasing the tax rates on commercial properties. This will lead to likely billions more in revenue for the state as a result of significant tax increases.

But you won’t find any references to tax increases in Becerra’s just-released summary. Instead, the title of Proposition 15 reads that it “increases funding for pubic schools, community colleges, and local government services by changing tax assessment of commercial and industry property.” To be fair, the full description of the bill does make it clear that the state expects there will be a “net increase in annual property tax revenues of $7.5 billion to $12 billion.” But rather than presenting Proposition 15 as a tax increase, it’s deliberately framed as some sort of market correction, saying it will require that these properties “be taxed based on current market value.”

Dan Walters, a longtime columnist on Sacramento politics, noted that Proposition 15 is sponsored by labor groups and endorsed by the Democratic Party, of which Becerra is a member and leader. By shielding and downplaying the tax increase that will result from the initiative passing, he is attempting to influence how voters perceive it in a way that favors his party.

By the same token, but in the opposite direction, consider Proposition 22. This ballot initiative is a response to the passage of A.B. 5 in 2019. A.B. 5 severely constrains the ability of individuals in California to work as freelancers and independent contractors and forces employers to hire them as employees and pay them benefits. It’s a deliberate attack on rideshare services and the entire gig economy, but the bill was written so broadly it has hampered the work of freelance writers, musicians, beauticians, and thousands of citizens who actually don’t want to have employers and want more control of their own hours and working conditions. All of this is for the benefit of labor unions in California, which see the gig economy as undermining their influence and membership.

The entire law is terrible and should be tossed out, but failing that, companies like Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, and drivers have introduced Proposition 22 to specifically exempt rideshare and delivery drivers from A.B. 5. But that would not be what unions want, and Becerra gets thousands of dollars in donations from unions representing both state and private sector employees.

So when Proposition 22 was first circulated, the title said it “changes employment classification rules for app-based transportation and delivery workers.” But now that it’s going to be on the ballot, Becerra has altered the title so that Prop. 22 “exempts app-based transportation and delivery companies from providing employee benefits to certain drivers and delivery workers.”

This rephrasing makes it appear that the bill takes away something that these people are entitled to rather than clearly explaining that what Prop. 22 does is allow drivers to continue working as freelance contractors and not as full-time employees. In exchange, they’ll be giving up certain benefits that full-time employees receive.

Now, of course, reading the ballot initiative itself will explain more accurately what it does, and we’ll no doubt be getting massive media blitzes from both sides. But that title has been specifically written to make it appear as though a benefit is being forcibly taken away from these drivers, even though many drivers would rather be gig workers for any number of reasons.

This isn’t the first time Becerra has made such a change, and he’s not the first attorney general to use his authority this way. Becerra used his position two years ago to describe a proposition scaling back gas taxes as “eliminat[ing] certain road repair and transportation funding.”

When Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), possibly soon to be named Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick, served as attorney general, we saw her do something similar. When some pension reformers introduced a ballot initiative in 2015 to try to do something about the financial ticking time bomb of public employee pension debts consuming municipal budgets, Harris used her position to change the way it was framed.

Her office summarized the bill by saying that it “eliminates constitutional protections for vested pension and retiree healthcare benefits for current public employees… .” This made it appear as though the proposition would cause current public employees to lose their current pensions and healthcare benefits. But that simply wasn’t true. It allowed cities and voters more flexibility to decide how or whether to expand pension offerings in the future. But it specifically stated that it did not scale back any existing benefits or agreements for public employees.

But the unions, of course, hated the proposition, and Harris’ description was for their benefit. The backers of the proposition fought the rewording but failed. They then yanked the initiative rather than wage a costly battle to overcome the way the proposition had been presented to voters.

Kevin Kiley, a Republican state assemblyman from Rocklin, has proposed taking the power to summarize ballot initiatives away from the attorney general and handing it over to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, which has a pretty solid history of accurately and impartially describing the content and potential consequences of bills and propositions.

Kiley’s proposed amendment to the state’s constitution has, predictably, gone absolutely nowhere. Maybe he should consider a ballot initiative.

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After I covered the clashes between protesters and federal law enforcement in Portland, Oregon, last week, I had a long epistolary conversation with one of the federal officers, to whom I promised complete anonymity, who had been stationed inside the federal courthouse that was at the heart of the conflict.

During a two-hour texting session, we war-gamed how the standoff between Portland protesters and federal forces might end:

1. The street battles go on nightly for however long until some other issue in the world knocks it sideways.
2. There’s a huge uptick in COVID-19 cases that forces state officials to limit protests due to public health.
3. Support for protesters grows so large, the Feds give up and essentially say, We’re out. Keep your own side of the street clean, Portland.
4. A rioter kills/severely injures a federal agent and the response is a tsunami of agents cracking down on even the perception of violence.
5. A federal agent kills a protester, even in self-defense, and the already inflamed state of the nation’s affairs combusts.
6. An event elsewhere (i.e., George Floyd 2.0) draws national interest and protesters elsewhere.
7. The federal building is breached/damaged enough to force occupants out, and Feds abandon the building.
8. Local officials continue to make a giant mess, trying to shift problems they’ve spent years letting happen onto Feds.
9. The protesters breach water/electric systems and make the building uninhabitable.
10. There’s a full-on terroristic attack with a vehicle against agents/building.

With the announcement today by Oregon Governor Kate Brown (D) that federal agents will be leaving downtown Portland tomorrow, it looks like none of our predictions were correct, though barring backdoor conversations we as yet know nothing of, some combination of 3 and 8 seems to explain the move.

I was at the protests all last week, and I saw no inclination on the part of the crowds to back down. In fact, I saw just the opposite.

Sure, the majority of protesters were peaceful. But the 200 or so that had been showing up in front of the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse every night since the feds showed up (in response to what was said to be local authorities’ demonstrated lack of willingness to stop the violence against federal property) were growing in both numbers and tactics.

There were maybe 2,000 people outside the courthouse on Saturday night, with the usual provocations by demonstrators—flaming trash and high-powered fireworks—and responses by the feds, C.S. gas, rubber bullets, and arrests. But there was something else too: a new festiveness, marching bands, t-shirt kiosks, and, beamed onto the side of the courthouse, a high-tech light show with the names of people murdered by police, as well as piggy-faced cops with x-ed out eyes.

“The visuals projected on the side of the building had a pretty high production quality,” a friend messaged me. He also indicated he was part of a private message thread where designers were figuring out how to support the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which in Portland was getting pretty mixed up with what was happening at the courthouse.

The stream of support was widening, creatives and moms and vets and vendors and any other person in Portland, steeped in BLM-sympathy and/or Trump-antipathy, having a place to show support. There might be no movies in Portland, no concerts, no bars, but there was a show to go to every night, one you could help grow.

It is unknown whether the show will go on. Acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf tweeted this morning, “As I told the Governor yesterday, federal law enforcement will remain in Portland until the violent activity toward our federal facilities ends. We are not removing any law enforcement while our facilities and law enforcement remain under attack.”

Someone will need to blink first, and, unless things turn truly ghastly, I have no doubt demonstrators will stay as long as the feds do. And when they go, will those who’ve made the building the locus of their passion and ire pull the building down brick by brick? I don’t think so. They are energized to fight against a perceived enemy, and now that enemy appears to be going home.

“DHS got local support,” my contact said, as to why the feds are leaving now. “If we don’t have to be there because the state and local [agencies] are agreeing to do their job, we aren’t needed. It’s that simple.”

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Federal agents in Portland, Oregon, who were sent to quell months-long protests in the city, will begin pulling out tomorrow, Gov. Kate Brown (D) announced Wednesday.

The tactical teams, who arrived in Portland in early July following a June 26 executive order from President Donald Trump, were charged with protecting federal property and supporting local police against “rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists,” but their presence appears to have only emboldened demonstrators who refocused their efforts around protesting the feds.

Demonstrations spread across the country after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, forcing new life into the conversation around police reform. Whether you think protests in Portland—and across the country more generally—were peaceful likely hinged on where you read about them. ABC, for instance, reported Sunday that protesters in California set a courthouse on fire, vandalized a police station, and assaulted police officers after a “peaceful demonstration intensified.”

But casting protests as either peaceful or violent is an oversimplification. Nancy Rommelmann provided some nuanced coverage on the subject for Reason:

The fence-rattlers take a break to light some garbage on fire and throw it over the fence.

“Why are you doing this?!” a young woman implores whoever will listen. “You’re giving them a reason to shoot at us!”

She and the young man she’s with confer. “We’ve got to try,” she tells him.

I ask them what they’re trying.

“When they start the fires, we come and try to stop them,” the young man says. He both puts out the fires himself and explains to the crowd why the tactic is only going to make things worse.

In short, some protesters were violent, some weren’t. The dominant media narrative has largely omitted that distinction, leaving many people outside confused over what exactly was happening on the ground. One thing that is not disputed, however, is that the feds’ arrival made the situation much worse.

As Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown highlights, agents with the Department of Homeland Security (which oversees the officers deployed by Trump’s executive order) aren’t trained in crowd control tactics. Rather, they’re drilled in how to fight on a battlefield. So perhaps that explains why someone like Donavan LaBella, who was merely standing across the street from federal agents, was pelted with munition and later required facial reconstruction surgery. There was also at least one report of a protester being scooped up and detained in an unmarked van and a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union that details federal officers shooting photographer Mathieu Lewis-Rolland 10 times leaving him with “severe lacerations, welts, and bruises all over his upper body.”

“Unfortunately, thanks to the federal government flooding our neighborhoods with billions of dollars of military equipment and property over the years,” writes Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), “the line between peace officer and soldier of war has become increasingly blurry.”

Before leaving, federal agents will work with Oregon State Police to ensure security at the federal courthouse in Portland, which has been the subject of repeated fireworks attacks from protesters.

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During an interview with Fox News host Chris Wallace 10 days ago, President Donald Trump mocked the idea of dumping the names of Confederate officials from military bases. America won two “beautiful World Wars that were vicious and horrible” from bases such as Fort Bragg and Fort Lee, he said. “[N]ow they want to throw these names away,” he scoffed. “What are we going to name it? We’re going to name it after the Rev. Al Sharpton?”

Sharpton would probably agree that there are far better candidates than him: black veterans of the two wars Trump mentioned (and several others) who were deprived of honors they were due and instead brutally attacked or lynched after they returned home.

Trump claims that purging Confederate names would be tantamount to wiping out American history. But the history of many of these black soldiers, who valiantly defended their country even as their country failed to defend them, has been wiped out. Fixing that is not only the right thing to do but might also help put out current racial fires, which are at least partly fueled by the gnawing feeling that racial progress has stopped—if not reversed—under this president.

Ten federal bases are named after Confederate officers, including some who resigned from the U.S. military to fight against the Union army in some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. By renaming these installations after black soldiers who did their duty, Uncle Sam would prod Southern states to de-Confederatize by example, not through lectures and arm-twisting, and thus also avoiding concerns about federalism and states’ rights.

Blacks had served in previous wars before President Abraham Lincoln belatedly—and reluctantly—allowed them to sign up in the Union army and fight for emancipation. Whites, even many slavery opponents, were terrified at the prospect of armed black men, according to the Equal Justice Institute’s horrifying 2016 report, Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans. They were also worried that allowing blacks to serve would mean that the country would have to “treat [the black man] as a victor” who was “entitled” to “all decent and becoming respect,” as an Ohio congressman put it at the time. Eventually, around 180,000 blacks signed up and 40,000 died in the American Civil War. After the war, Southern newspapers systematically stoked white fears about armed black soldiers stirring up trouble. One result was the 1866 Memphis massacre, in which dozens of blacks were raped, injured, and killed—their homes, churches, and schools destroyed.

Ten years later—in the North—the presence of one of the first black cadets at the U.S. Military Academy West Point, Johnson C. Whittaker, a former slave from South Carolina, so incensed his white peers that they brutally beat him, mutilated him, and left him bound and unconscious on the dorm floor. Instead of charging the culprits, West Point authorities accused Whittaker of orchestrating his own attack and successfully court-martialed him and expelled him. But at least he survived. In the next few decades, several black soldiers, especially those stationed in predominantly white towns, were lynched on trumped-up accusations without an investigation or trial as Jim Crow’s reign of terror gripped the South.

Black soldiers who insisted on donning their uniform off-duty were particularly triggering to whites. Private James Neely, a veteran of the Spanish-American war, was shot and killed in 1898 because he dressed in uniform and ordered a soda inside a pharmacy like white folks, rather than outside as black people were supposed to do. His fellow veteran, Fred Alexander, was mutilated, castrated, and burned at the stake when he returned home to Leavenworth, Kansas, after rumors spread that he had murdered a white woman two months earlier—never mind that the local police’s working theory was that she was a victim of a robbery gone wrong.

Such attitudes did not change for another century.

Thanks to appeals by the brilliant civil rights activist and co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People W.E.B. Du Bois (a man whose name, along with that of the great black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, should also be emblazoned on federal buildings), around 380,000 blacks signed up to serve in World War I. Du Bois urged them to temporarily suspend their grudges against their country and “close…ranks shoulder to shoulder with our fellow white citizens.” But the military, too, was segregated, so these volunteers could not actually fight “shoulder to shoulder” with their “fellow white citizens.” In fact, only 42,000 blacks were allowed in combat and only in separate divisions from whites.

One of these soldiers, Henry Johnson, along with another black private, successfully rebuffed a nocturnal attack by 24 German soldiers on their French base. Even though his gun jammed and he was shot multiple times, Johnson continued to fight with his bare hands and rifle butt, killing four Germans and wounding at least a dozen. The French awarded Johnson the Croix de Guerre, their highest honor for valor, and newspapers in America were filled with stories of his heroism.

But upon his return, Johnson, who hailed from North Carolina (the home of Fort Bragg), inspired more fear than gratitude. Sen. James K. Vardaman (D–Miss.) had been warning that letting black men defend the flag would “inflate his untutored soul with military airs” and that would be a “short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.” Black soldiers’ patriotism, in other words, was a threat, not a virtue to Vardaman because it would give them the street cred to spearhead calls for equal treatment. Unsurprisingly, when Johnson spoke out against the mistreatment of blacks, he was discharged and stripped of his disability payments. He died penniless at the age of 32. He was finally awarded the Purple Heart in 1996 and the Medal of Honor in 2015.

His plight was nothing compared to what other black veterans of the Great War faced. Concerns that they were getting too defiant were among the reasons that 25 anti-black riots erupted in cities across the country, in what became known as the Red Summer of 1919. Countless black soldiers were assaulted and beaten and at least 13 were lynched, according to the Equal Justice Institute.

Six of these lynchings occurred because black soldiers allegedly disrespected, eyed, or otherwise behaved improperly with a white woman. Whites had become convinced that black soldiers stationed abroad had developed a sexual appetite for white women after having interacted freely with them in Europe. One particularly tragic victim of such attitudes, it seems, was Clinton Briggs in Lincoln, Arkansas. His “crime” was that he didn’t move far enough to let a white woman pass on the sidewalk. She angrily confronted him, attracting a mob that drove Briggs into the wilderness, chained him to a tree, and riddled him with 50 bullets.

Bud Johnson, another veteran, was waiting to board a steamboat in Florida to return to Alabama after attending his father’s funeral when he was arrested because he fit the description of someone who had assaulted a white woman. As the police transported him to the station, a mob surrounded the vehicle (a common tactic at that time), captured Johnson, tortured him, crushed his skull, and gave the pieces to onlookers as souvenirs before dumping his body in the river, according to Equal Justice Institute’s report. His relatives had to battle alligators to recover some of his remains.

The hope of Du Bois and others that black service in World War I would help black advancement backfired badly as it ignited even more anti-black violence. Still, 1.2 million blacks signed up for World War II. Despite America’s wartime rhetoric of democracy and human rights, the Army itself practiced segregation, as did the rest of federal government. Black military servicemen stationed in the South could not enter restaurants where their German prisoners of war were allowed. There were signs in latrines separating out sections for black soldiers and those for German POWs and white soldiers. Even in death, black veterans were segregated with communities like Taylor County, Georgia, erecting separate plaques for them in their war memorials.

Not only were black WWII veterans denied the same G.I. benefits as white veterans, but they continued to face violence, sometimes in the very buses and trains that carried them home. As with WWI veterans, their veteran status and record of service was often a burden rather than a benefit, especially if they publicly challenged the Jim Crow order.

Lynching in America documents over 10 attempted and successful lynchings of WWII veterans, including Marine Timothy Hood. He was shot and wounded by his bus driver after he removed a Jim Crow sign from a trolley in Bessmer, Alabama. Then the police chief arrived and finished him off.

Particularly poignant is the story of Hosea Williams. He was badly injured during his service in France and returned home with a Purple Heart and a cane. When he attempted to drink from a white fountain in Georgia, a white mob brutally attacked attacked him and left him for dead. He survived and, along with his fellow veteran, Medgar Evers, went on to become a prominent civil rights leader, helping to organize the Selma march. (Evers was later assassinated by a white segregationist.)

Black veterans like Williams and Evers and Johnson have more than earned the right to have military bases named after them. One needn’t buy into the 1619 Project’s claim that America fought the Revolutionary War to maintain slavery to think such men should be honored. One only has to believe that the opposite of Confederate values should define America. That’s what America will signal by replacing the names of Confederates, who fought against this country’s freedoms, with those of black veterans, who fought for them.

President Trump is right that America shouldn’t wipe out its history. He is just wrong about which side needs to be remembered—and honored.

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