We just fell back. The season of darkness is coming on. But this year, more than any I can remember, that darkness feels existential, not just seasonal.
As a professor, I’ve watched it settle over my students throughout 2025 like fog. They talk about despair as if it’s wrapping its fingers around their throat. They talk about how the news makes them want to pull the covers over their heads every day.
What do I say to them?
Read more history. Find the lesson and the mission: the 20s are always terrible, so keep your eye on the prize that will be the 2070s and get us there with democracy intact.
History—that patient teacher, that relentless witness—has something to say about tomorrows.
My family has been taking notes for four hundred years. American centuries follow hundred-year cycles. Within those cycles, every “20s” decade is a crucible of cruelty. Every “70s” brings bold rays of light breaking through.
The 1620s were the dawn of the African slave trade in Virginia, when many of my nameless African ancestors arrived alongside the European ones who enslaved them. The 1670s brought Bacon’s Rebellion—called by many a rehearsal for the American Revolution. My ancestor Giles Bland was killed taking up arms against Virginia’s Royal Governor William Berkeley.
The 1720s. Richard Bland was just a young boy when Virginia passed a law in 1723 making it nearly impossible to free enslaved people. Not long after, he would be old enough to understand that some of the people enslaved by families like his shared their bloodlines — even as the Church insisted they were inferior. But when the 1770s came, he helped write the words with his cousin Thomas Jefferson that founded our nation: all men are created equal.
In a slave state like Virginia, they had to know those words were catalytic—that once spoken, they could not control how they would reshape the world. Jefferson himself trembled at what he had set in motion. Yet he—and Richard—spoke the words anyway.
A century later, Frederick Bland endured the 1820s and 1830s, and when his son Edward David was born in the 1840s, he began guiding and encouraging him so that, by the time both gained their freedom, Edward was ready to rise and help lead their neighbors in seizing the opportunities of the 1870s. From the same house where ancestors had been held in bondage came a father and son preparing a community for a new era of freedom and civic engagement.
Another century turned. My grandmother, Mamie Bland, was born in 1916 in southern Virginia, not far from the Jordan’s Point plantation where Richard Bland lived. The 1920s slammed doors shut everywhere. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act banned interracial marriage. The Immigration Act closed America’s doors. The Ku Klux Klan reached its peak—millions strong—motivated equally by their demonization of Catholic immigrants and Jews as by their hatred of Black Americans. America First meant America for white Protestants only.
But Mamie survived to see the 1970s. All of her daughter and son-in-law’s activism of the 50s and 60s bore fruit. Desegregation went into high gear. The Vietnam war ended. And interracial couples like my parents enjoyed the first decade in which their marriages were legal in every state.
Now we are here. The 2020s. Another decade of cruelty. Nativism rises like flood water. Voting rights stripped away. Books banned. Antisemitism and Islamophobia poison our communities. Authoritarian voices grow shameless in their contempt for democracy.
I am raising two children in this darkness. They ask why they should believe anything will truly get better. And I tell them: The 20s are always dark. The 70s are always remembered for bold rays of light breaking through.
The victories of every “70s” are never completely permanent. We spring forward, then we fall back. The pattern is not a steady march toward justice—it is a rhythm, a tide, a seasonal turning between light and dark.
So why keep faith now? Because as my family has learned across ten generations, the cruelty of every “20s” is followed by the breaking open of every “70s.” Not because of destiny, but because ordinary people refused to give up.
Giles Bland rose up in arms in the 1670s. Richard planted the seeds in the 1720s that blossomed in the 1770s. Frederick guided and encouraged his son Edward David so that, once freedom came, Edward was ready to rise and help lead their neighbors in the 1870s. Mamie absorbed these lessons and acted boldly, raising her daughter to continue the fight through the 1970s and beyond. My mother acted decisively so I could raise my children to see the 2070s in a nation more just than the one into which she was born. And now I’m raising my children to defend and expand democracy the way my grandmother helped raise all of us and the way Edward David Bland helped raise her.
Ten generations of my family have witnessed this pattern. We have only reached every “70s” because young people in every “20s” refused to give up. They organized, protested, voted, ran for office, and defended democracy when it seemed weakest.
The job of America’s young people today is to do the same. If present and future generations rise to these challenges the way our ancestors did, our democracy will not only survive—our nation will thrive again.
Because here in America, the darkest hour has never been the last hour.
Keep your eye on the prize.
Ben Jealous is a former national president of the NAACP and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
