One Black lawyer. A bar that twice refused him. A seat on the highest court of a former slave state. And a campaign of terror outside the courthouse, riding to take that state back at gunpoint. That was the ground Jonathan Jasper Wright stood on when he became the first Black justice on any state supreme court in America. He kept the robe on while Reconstruction collapsed around him. When the case came that could have bought him peace — bless the new governor, and go along — he dissented, and they drove him from the bench on a charge they could not prove. The men who took the state are a footnote now. The justice they erased waited a century for his portrait to go back on the wall. He held the law when holding it was the most dangerous thing a Black man in South Carolina could do. Jonathan Jasper Wright needs to be remembered.

What do you do when you cannot win? Charles Caldwell — born enslaved, blacksmith, Mississippi state senator, captain of a Black militia company — was lured into a Clinton store cellar on December 30, 1875, and shot at the clink of a Christmas toast. The bullet did not kill him at once. So he made a decision. He told his killers to carry him up out of the cellar and into the street, in broad day, where the whole town could watch — and to remember they were killing a gentleman and a brave man, never a coward. He could not stop the bullets. He could decide what they would mean. Congress investigated; no one was punished; Reconstruction in Mississippi was over. But Caldwell turned his own murder into testimony and refused to let his killers write the story. Charles Caldwell needs to be remembered.