Where race is concerned, America has had a horrible, a wretched

Shelby Steele, a scholar of conscience and witness to the long moral struggle of his nation, once spoke these sobering words: “Where race is concerned, America has had a horrible, a wretched history, and that came to account in the 1960s, with the Civil Rights victories and Civil Rights Bill and housing and so forth.” In this reflection lies a deep reckoning — a recognition that truth, though painful, is the beginning of redemption. Steele does not speak merely of history, but of the awakening of a people and the long, uneven path toward justice. His tone is neither bitter nor triumphant, but solemn — for he understands that progress, when born from suffering, carries both glory and grief.

The meaning of this quote rests upon the acknowledgment of America’s moral inheritance — an inheritance stained by the centuries-long shadow of slavery, segregation, and racial prejudice. Steele, himself a child of the civil rights generation, reminds us that before the healing came the sickness; before the victories of the 1960s came the centuries of silence, cruelty, and exclusion. He calls it “a horrible, a wretched history” not out of hatred for his country, but out of reverence for truth, for only by confronting what is ugly can a nation begin to become beautiful. His words echo the ancient wisdom that “the wound is where the light enters,” and in this case, the wound of race has been both America’s tragedy and its test.

The origin of Steele’s thought lies in his lived experience — born to a family of activists, he witnessed firsthand the seismic shifts of the Civil Rights Movement. He saw the courage of those who marched, bled, and were jailed for freedom; he saw the moral force of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who challenged a nation to live up to the words it wrote on parchment centuries before. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were not mere policies; they were acts of repentance, declarations that America could no longer hide from its own conscience. Yet Steele, ever the realist, reminds us that laws can mandate equality, but they cannot mend the heart — that healing is not complete with legislation, but must live in the soul of a people.

To understand his insight, we must look to the struggle itself. When Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat in Montgomery, it was not only a personal act of defiance but a spiritual awakening. When John Lewis was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, his blood became a symbol of moral victory — a turning point in the battle for human dignity. And when King stood upon the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and declared his dream, he was not merely describing what should be, but what must be if the nation were ever to survive its contradictions. The 1960s were, as Steele says, the era when history “came to account” — when the moral debts of centuries were called due, and a generation demanded that America’s promise be made real.

Yet even in that reckoning, Steele hears a warning. For he understands that moral awakening must be followed by moral responsibility. The victories of the Civil Rights era did not erase injustice, nor did they guarantee unity. They opened a door, but whether the nation would walk through it with humility or pride was another question. Steele has long argued that while the struggle for equality was righteous, it also left a legacy of dependency and guilt — that America, in seeking to right its wrongs, sometimes replaced equality with paternalism and courage with grievance. His words remind us that even noble revolutions can lose their way if they forget that true freedom is not granted by governments but claimed by individuals.

There is a deeper wisdom beneath Steele’s lament — the understanding that history is not destiny, but it is a teacher. America’s racial wounds, he insists, are not its curse alone but its opportunity. For if a nation built upon division can find reconciliation, then humanity itself can hope for renewal. The Civil Rights Movement was not merely an event of the past; it was the moral compass of the modern world, showing that peace and justice can arise not from vengeance, but from the conviction that all people bear the same spark of the divine. Steele’s words, though tinged with sorrow, are also a challenge: that the next generation must build not on guilt, but on greatness; not on shame, but on shared responsibility.

The lesson, then, is as enduring as it is urgent: every society must face its own truth, no matter how painful. To deny the sins of the past is to repeat them; to confront them with courage is to transcend them. We must remember the wretchedness of history not to dwell in despair, but to honor those who fought to redeem it. Let remembrance become resolve, and justice become joy. Each person must choose to see humanity in their neighbor — to act not from the fear of guilt, but from the power of grace. For as Steele teaches, peace is not born from forgetting the past, but from transforming it into wisdom.

So let these words echo through time: “America has had a horrible, a wretched history.” Yet within that admission lies the seed of greatness — the humility to change, the courage to forgive, and the wisdom to rise again. Every nation, like every soul, must meet its own reckoning. And when it does so with honesty, compassion, and vision, the shadow of its past becomes the light of its redemption.