If there was some isolated mountain top in the American hinterlands - and if Black folks had the pickaxes and backhoes - we could craft a new Mount Rushmore for American presidents who were most attentive to and successful in meeting our needs.
There is a case for Joseph R. Biden’s smiling face to be on it. As Biden has said far too often to far too many audiences - No, I’m serious. Not a joke.
Biden’s mug on the Black Mount Rushmore has nothing to do with sentimentality. It’s strictly business. When it was about the business of Black Americans, Biden handled far more of it than most American presidents.
Hell, for most presidents, we were either slaves, subhumans who should still be slaves or uppity ungratefuls who don’t know how lucky we are to be allowed to call ourselves Americans. (No matter our role in actually, you know, building the country into what it is today.)
Before writing out the Biden plaque at the base of Black Mount Rushmore, let’s spell out who won’t be on the mountain.
Who Won’t be on the Black Mount Rushmore:
Off the bat, if you owned us, raped us, beat us or sold us, no mountain memorial for you. That eliminates hugely consequential presidents whose exploits eventually benefited all Americans - George Washington and his many important firsts, Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase…sorry, not enough. Not when you schemed to keep us enslaved despite our work for you in a free state (Washington). Not when you likely raped and impregnated a teenage girl you owned (Jefferson).
Abraham Lincoln is on the actual Mount Rushmore, and, if I was carving out that Black Mount Rushmore, I’d put him on ours, too.
Lincoln famously said he’d preserve the Union with slavery or without it. He said he didn’t see white people and Black people as equal. And Frederick Douglass wanted to jack him up over his harebrained notion to send our ancestors back to Africa - despite the fact that, by the 1860s, many had been in America for generations and only knew it as their home.
There was the Emancipation Proclamation, which sought to free those enslaved in states that were in active rebellion against the Union. The proclamation had limitations, but it was a forceful move toward Black liberation. So, up you go, Abe.
Theodore Roosevelt is on the actual Mount Rushmore, but he wouldn’t be on the Black Mount Rushmore. Having dinner with Booker T. Washington at the White House ain’t enough.
Rather than TR, put Ulysses S. Grant on the Black Mount Rushmore.
Yes, Grant is better known as a general than as a president. But he did big things for Black Americans back in the day. Grant signed legislation in 1875 that outlawed segregation in public accommodations and transportation. He created the Department of Justice, in part, to help fight the Ku Klux Klan. And he sent federal troops to the South to protect Black folks from the violent vengeance of defeated, enraged white southerners.
Barack Obama would be on the mountain. How can you have a Black Mount Rushmore and exclude the only Black person to ever serve as president?
The symbolism of Obama’s election, his competence and professional administration of the government, made clear that a Black person could hold the highest office in the land and do the job with great skill. The Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, provided health care to huge swaths of the country that didn’t have insurance - including millions of Black Americans.
Lyndon Johnson goes on the mountain. There’s all of that civil rights legislation he signed, and he made Thurgood Marshall solicitor general and, later, the first Black justice on the Supreme Court.
Now, the case for Biden on Black Mount Rushmore.
Oh, I know Black Mount Rushmore would have one more president than the one in South Dakota. Who says our mountain couldn’t be bigger?
Biden signed an expansion of the child tax credit, which lifted millions of children - including millions of Black children - out of poverty. He signed legislation providing $16 billion to HBCUs. He promised to nominate a Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court, and he followed through with Ketanji Brown Jackson. He selected as his running mate another Black woman, Kamala Harris, who has succeeded him as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.
No one could have guessed Biden would have that record after a single presidential term based on his time in the U.S. Senate, where he questioned the wisdom of busing for school desegregation, befriended segregationists, wrote a crime bill that led to mass Black incarceration and stood by as his Judiciary Committee colleagues tore into Anita Hill, the Black woman who had alleged that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her.
During his speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, Biden said he had made many mistakes during his public service career.
Still, the last four years of his half-century career are viewed with great favor by many Black Americans. Now, where would that new Rushmore go? Colorado…Hawaii…?