A timely lesson from a tiny town long ago

Recently, a friend gave me the book “A Stronger Kinship” by historian Anna-Lisa Cox. It tells of Covert, Michigan, a small town 30 miles from my friend’s childhood home. 

His nearly all-white high school had played them in sports, yet only now was he learning that more than a century ago, Black and white residents of Covert had “lived as equal citizens,” as the book puts it. 

As far back as the 1860s, they treated each other as neighbors regardless of race, farming side by side. Black men not only...