Howard Graduate Caps a Four-Year Fight for Access

Howard Graduate Caps a Four-Year Fight for Access

Howard Graduate Caps a Four-Year Fight for Access

At Howard, Britney Wilson was both an advocate and critic.

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Major kudos to former Nation intern Britney Wilson who graduated this past May from Howard University with a flourish of collegiate honors: Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and a laudatory profile in the Washington Post, detailing her four-year struggle to make Howard more accessible for handicapped students like herself.

A Nation intern over the summer of 2011, Wilson wrote an important piece for thenation.com decrying the dangers of classifying students according to their intellectual ability.

At Howard, the Brooklyn-born Wilson was both an advocate and critic. She penned a column for the Hilltop campus newspaper: Mut(e)iny: The Silent Rebellion in which she railed against Howard’s social cliques, lamented the scarcity of student-scholars and celebrated the propensity for a math class to suddenly veer into a discussion of black history.

We look forward with great anticipation to Wilson’s next move, which will involve law school and a possible career as a litigator attacking the remaining legal foundations of social discrimination.

We cannot back down

We now confront a second Trump presidency.

There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.

Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.

Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

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Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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