Like Frederick Douglass, we can find inspiration for this moment in the oldest story of rebirth and renewal.

Those with power who are planning our resurgence from the coronavirus need imagination and, above all, the humility of a long view of the human drama. To buoy myself one recent morning, after reading so much bad news, I did what the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass had done at an earlier moment of crisis: I sat and reread the Book of Genesis. One of the most profound rebirths, at least in spiritual and literary terms, occurs in the first eight chapters of that oldest story of all.

The president is the latest in a long line of conservative politicians to see minority voters as a threat.

On March 30, the Republican id burst forth when President Trump said that the latest congressional stimulus bill “had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Two days later, the Republican House speaker in Georgia, David Ralston, admitted that an expansion of absentee voting would be “extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”

The pandemic is reminding Americans of the importance of government.

In August 1861, several months after the secession of 11 southern states and the outbreak of the Civil War, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared that “nations seldom listen to advice from individuals, however reasonable. They are taught less by theories than by facts and events.”

The United States is currently being educated by facts and events. And, as in other times of crisis—war, economic collapse, natural disasters—even those who do not like government are realizing that they need it. Government can protect them; it might save their life and livelihood. Irony will not die in the time of the coronavirus; even many of those who believe the federal government should not intervene in society except for national defense, and would happily privatize most elements of public life, are now straining to have government save society. With this issue, we have a long history.

For three years Dan Kildee sat in David Blight’s high school classroom watching his teacher bring history to life. They didn’t even have to leave the building — though they did that too, like when Blight stood in the middle of a field at Gettysburg describing Pickett’s charge, the crucial maneuver in the Civil War’s most famous battle.

The University of North Carolina agreed to pay the Sons of Confederate Veterans $2.5 million—a sum that rivals the endowment of its history department.

On the eve of Thanksgiving, the University of North Carolina Board of Governors agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by the North Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) over a Confederate monument that had stood for more than a century on the university’s flagship campus, in Chapel Hill, before demonstrators toppled it in August 2018.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, he dreamed of a pluralist utopia.

In the late 1860s, Frederick Douglass, the fugitive slave turned prose poet of American democracy, toured the country spreading his most sanguine vision of a pluralist future of human equality in the recently re-United States. It is a vision worth revisiting at a time when the country seems once again to be a house divided over ethnicity and race, and over how to interpret our foundational creeds.

He would see the Republicans as the antithesis of everything he fought for.

In 2012, I took part in the Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage, an annual trip to Alabama led by Representative John Lewis. On a Sunday afternoon I walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma next to Kevin McCarthy, now the Republican House minority leader, his wife and children at his side.