By David Christy, News Editor Enid News & Eagle From our very
founding as a nation, Americans have clung to stereotypes and to
assumptions that history has proven simply were untrue. Only
people of substance who owned property should have the right to
vote said states after the Constitution was ratified and we
became a democratic nation. Women not only had no voting rights,
they were not allowed to attend medical school and become
doctors. African-American men were not capable of anything other
than hard work on plantations, and certainly were not the equal
of white men when it came to military service. All these
inequities we now see as utter folly were very much embedded in
American society and thought in pre-Civil War America, and
sometimes beyond. But the fires of inequality can only last as
long as they are stoked, and from the pages of the American
Civil War this nation found out first-hand African-Americans
were more than up to the task of carving out valor and glory on
the field of battle While it too