Gisa Zach

“History is written by the victors” is a well-known quote often attributed to Winston Churchill. In war, that certainly is true, as the victors almost always write the history. In societal struggles, what seems to happen is that those who “come out on top” get to choose what is taught as history. With respect to racial matters in the United States, that decidedly has been the situation, as the struggles of people of color (whether Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latin Americans, or African Americans) have, more often than not, simply not been a significant part of historical studies in American schools. This is true, whether it is the story of The Trail of Tears, the oncelegalized discrimination against Asian immigrants, the history of slavery from 1619 through the end of the Civil War, or further, in the case of all Black people, the struggles precipitated by the immense failures of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow. It is this last cataclysm that is most pertinent to the retelling of Easter, 1906.