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Oct 22, 2024 | 
eugenelmeyer.com | Gene Meyer |Eugene Meyer
“It’s just a phase.” That was what my German-born Jewish great grandmother Henrietta Giballe Previn is said to have remarked on the rise of Adolph Hitler to power in the early 1930s. The Previns had immigrated to the United States in 1886: Henrietta and Moritz (later known as Morris), with their then three children, my grandmother Rose, and great uncles Arthur (ne Ott0) and Leo.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
eugenelmeyer.com | Gene Meyer |Eugene Meyer
In recent long-delayed acknowledgement of our own dark past, many Confederate monuments have been taken down throughout the South and in border states. Though there are some resisters (“fine people on both sides,” Trump said at Charlottesville, Virginia when neo-Nazis sought to preserve the prominent statue of Robert E. Lee), by and large these relics of the Lost Cause have been consigned to the dustheap of history, or at least relocated to less prized locations.
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Sep 23, 2024 | 
eugenelmeyer.com | Gene Meyer |Eugene Meyer
“Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round,” from a poem by Langston Hughes, is a new documentary that tells the all-but-forgotten story of the fight 65 years ago to desegregate Glen Echo Amusement Park, a destination for decades for white Washngtonians but barred to non–whites until a coalition of Black students from Howard University and largely Jewish residents of nearby Bannockburn mounted a successful months-long protest.
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
eugenelmeyer.com | Gene Meyer |Vincent Morris |Eugene Meyer
For many of my former Washington Post colleagues and, apparently, for many DC-area readers, the reductions in local coverage and locally-based correspondents have been more than disheartening.
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Jul 18, 2024 | 
eugenelmeyer.com | Gene Meyer |Eugene Meyer
It was not yet morning in America. Nor was it mourning in America. That had already happened, in 1963 (JFK), and in 1968 (MLK, RFK). Four years after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace, President Ford had presided over a time of relative normalcy. Watergate was in the rear view mirror. The war in Vietnam had finally come to an ignominious end. Ford’s pardon of Nixon still rankled many. “The son of a bitch has pardoned the son of a bitch,” my colleague Carl Bernstein famously said.
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Jul 2, 2024 | 
eugenelmeyer.com | Gene Meyer |Eugene Meyer
It was a time of relative comity, when Senate Republicans joined with the Democratic majority to overcome a filibuster and pass the most significant civil rights legislation in a century. Segregation had prevailed throughout the South and even in border states like Maryland ever since the end of Reconstruction with the corrupt bargain of 1877 that restored white supremacy to the defeated Confederate states in a contested presidential election. This time the country was still reeling from the Nov.
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Jun 18, 2024 | 
eugenelmeyer.com | Gene Meyer |Eugene Meyer
Juneteenth – June 19th — became a federal holiday in 2021. It marks the date in 1865 when the enslaved people of Texas learned of their freedom 2 1/2 years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and months after the Confederacy had surrendered and the North had seemingly won the Civil War. But, 159 years later, the fight continues. Only last week, an overwhelming majority of House Republicans voted to reinstall a Confederate memorial statue in Arlington National Cemetery.
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Jun 4, 2024 | 
eugenelmeyer.com | Gene Meyer |Eugene Meyer
For the 80th anniversary of D-Day, I am reposting what I wrote five years ago on the 75th, which itself reprised my coverage of the 50th anniversary for The Washington Post and a subsequent solemn visit my wife Sandy and I made to the site in July 2009.
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May 7, 2024 | 
eugenelmeyer.com | Gene Meyer |Eugene Meyer
It’s been a rough spring on the Morningside Heights campus, where I spent four years nearly a lifetime ago. Sixty years ago I was fortunate and grateful to graduate from Columbia College, the Ivy League undergraduate school within Columbia University. I didn’t think much about it then, but as time has gone by I’ve come to appreciate the education — and the opportunity — to study and learn at Columbia, the recently much-disparaged institution. I was an American history major.
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Apr 13, 2024 | 
eugenelmeyer.com | Gene Meyer |Eugene Meyer
The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Patapsco River — the western leg of the Baltimore Beltway and the way in and out of the Port of Baltimore — has dredged up not only issues of bridge safety, reconstruction and the tragedy that cost lives and treasure when the container ship Dali collided with the structural piers that could not withstand the collision. It has also triggered a discussion of the iconic bridge’s very name.
