Longtime Roanoke educator Mignon Chubb-Hale at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. monument at the foot of Henry Street in Roanoke. She’ll conduct a local Black History Tour through Gainsboro later this month. | Photo by Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Our nation formed more than two centuries ago, and the history of African Americans stretches back to its beginnings. All of which makes Black History Month, aka February, a fuzzy abstraction in certain ways.

But Tuesday morning, Mignon Chubb-Hale showed me how it doesn’t have to be that way.

She was a schoolteacher for 30 years, one of the first black educators ever assigned to once all-white Wasena Elementary. Later she served on the Roanoke School Board.

Chubb-Hale took me and photographer Kyle Green on a mini, black-history tour of Northwest Roanoke. It was a preview of a formal tour she’ll conduct later this month for Roanoke Parks and Recreation. Much of that history she lived.

“She’s like a walking encyclopedia,” said Melida McKee, a city recreation coordinator.

The tour wasn’t a bit fuzzy or abstract. Instead, we heard pride — tempered with some pain — and saw bricks and mortar, concrete and bronze, flesh and bone.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

Is the recent dust up over the New Black Panthers and their alleged voter intimidation in the 2008  presidential elections the product of “fantasies” by conservatives over how they could use the issue against President Barack Obama?

Yes, says a conservative appointee to the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights, Abilgail Thernstrom.

From Politico:

“This doesn’t have to do with the Black Panthers; this has to do with [conservative] fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration,” said Thernstrom, who said members of the commission voiced their political aims “in the initial discussions” of the Panther case last year.

“My fellow conservatives on the commission had this wild notion they could bring Eric Holder down and really damage the president,” Thernstrom said.

. . .The commission chairman, Gerald Reynolds, said Thernstrom is attacking the commission out of pique dating back to a dispute about organizing a conference scheduled for this fall. “The allegation that there’s any interest in bringing down the Obama administration is false — and it’s a lot more; it’s personal and petty.”

Thernstrom, who had openly mocked the commission’s hearing on the case, put her dissent in writing last week in National Review, where she said the incident was “racial theater of very minor importance” and “small potatoes.”

Thernstrom was appointed by President George W. Bush, by the way.