America lost two very different figures this September. Bobby Cain, little known outside his small county in Tennessee, died quietly at 85. Charlie Kirk, a nationally recognized conservative activist, was shot while speaking at Utah Valley University at the age of 31.
Both men’s lives touched on the same subject—race. But the comparison ends there. Cain’s courage was measured in jeers and bruises. Kirk’s notoriety was measured in applause.
Bobby Cain’s ordeal
In 1956, Cain became the first Black student to graduate from a desegregated public high school in the South. For this, he suffered constant harassment.
On his third day of classes, he was ambushed outside Clinton High and beaten with sticks until police intervened. Violence followed him through his senior year, including another attack near graduation.
“Sometimes I pushed back. Sometimes I just walked away,” he later recalled.
Unlike the Little Rock Nine, Cain had no federal escorts.
“We did not receive any special protections. … The Little Rock nine, on the other hand, were escorted into the school by the 101st Airborne unit,” he explained years later.
He was also isolated.
“If any white students had gone out of their way to be nice to us, they would have been jumped on,” Cain said of his lonely senior year.
From this hostility, Cain found resolve: “It came to me for the first time that I had a right to go to school. I realized it was those other people who were breaking the law, not me.”
Cain lived quietly for decades, remembered in his hometown as a man whose scars reshaped American life.
Charlie Kirk’s rise
Kirk’s life unfolded in the glare of cameras. At 18, he founded Turning Point USA and built a lucrative brand attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. He told young audiences that systemic racism was a myth and equity efforts were unfair to whites. Surrounded by supporters and security, he thrived on applause for dismissing racism as irrelevant.
His assassination was a tragedy, but the context differs sharply from Cain’s ordeal. Cain was attacked for his very existence in a white school; Kirk was targeted for his words. Political violence is always wrong, but it does not retroactively sanctify a message. Cain’s courage was tested daily. Kirk’s boldness was rhetorical.
What the young miss
Many of Kirk’s admirers cannot fathom what Cain endured. They have not faced mobs screaming at them for daring to attend class. To them, racism is a debate topic, not a lived terror.
That is why DEI matters. The legacy of segregation remains visible: wealth gaps, shorter life expectancies, and discriminatory housing patterns. Cain’s scars did not fade into equality; they hardened into reminders of unfinished work.
When Kirk mocked DEI, young listeners heard vindication. What they should have heard was the echo of Cain’s beatings and the truth that justice has always been paid for in pain.
They should also research DEI themselves. Born from the civil rights and affirmative action movements of the 1960s and 1970s, DEI was designed to address systemic barriers that had been built over centuries. Today, it aims to ensure fair opportunity in schools, workplaces, and communities, not “special treatment.” To reject it without knowing its roots is to confuse ideology with truth.
The true lesson
Cain and Kirk both spoke to race in America, but from opposite ends of history. One bore blows so children he’d never meet could walk into a classroom freely. The other told students those wounds no longer mattered.
As memorials to Kirk appear on campuses and in churches, younger Americans must realize that if they want to understand courage, they should start with Cain’s scars—and recognize that the inequities he fought still echo in today’s battles over DEI, education, and justice. ∆
Jill Stegman is a writer and community advocate based on California’s Central Coast. To respond with an opinion for publication, email it to letters@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Pets 2025.
Outstanding column, Ms. Stegman. Thank you.
Ms.Stegman’s characterization of followers of the late Charlie Kirk is extremely simplistic. To her, those who advocate and support the radical ideas of Charlie Kirk, such as having a family, going to college, getting a job, and God forbid, going to church, are people who have never faced adversity themselves. As someone who had the privilege of attending Mr. Kirk’s memorial at Cal Poly, I dare say I never saw a single Rolls Royce nor chouffer arrive. I did see folks in sandals, suits, camouflage hats, and cowboy boots wait in a blocks long line. I dare say these were the kind of folks that have faced adversity in their lives. Poor is poor, whether Black or White. I know who those people were, I grew up with them. Just as many of society’s marginalized people want, all they want is a day’s pay for a day’s work.
It would be interesting to know what tax bracket Ms. Stegman falls into. What real adversity has she herself faced? Does she know what it’s like to be actually poor? How close to the beach is the house she owns? How new is her Tesla?
Until you’ve lived it, don’t bother writing about it.
What difference does it make whether the writer is poor or rich? Leave it to a right winger to go with the ad hominem attack when the rest of their argument avoids the issue of Kirk’s racism, which is well documented. Damn, I know that pesky fly will be on me for these comments. Oh well.
Michael:
Well….since you did leave the door open…sure.
The author of this article as well as yourself find it easier to talk about race rather than class. It’s pretty wild for anyone to actually ask the question, “What difference does it make whether the writer is poor or rich?” It makes a huge difference. That’s the problem with your generation, assuming you are a Boomer. You’ve replaced economic opportunity with a DEI smokescreen. It’s been a nice trick, but as the last election shows, it’s over. We want jobs and upward mobility, the kind your generation enjoyed despite riding on the coat tails of your parent’s generation’s accomplishments, which have now been replaced by diversity picks and quotas. What happened to our industrial base? What happened to the dollar? No, these are the questions that cannot be asked. Instead, you ask why the rich cannot understand what it’s like to be poor. What you should ask, sir, is why the minute a person of color, living in the hood, gets rich, immediately moves out to more, shall we say, vanilla neighborhoods? Why is that? Is it because the values of the more “vanilla” members of our society don’t include shooting a customer service worker to death at McDonalds because they ran out of ice for their coca cola? Is it because the values of the more “vanilla” members of our society include public service, patriotism, actual literacy, respect for the law and the officers of the law? Is it because the few members of the more “vanilla” society that actually do believe in God, feel they don’t need a priest (nor the power hungry bureaucracy staffed by pedophiles behind them) to intercede on their behalf to have a personal relationship with their creator?? What is it about poverty and (Protestant) values that created the very country you live in, that bother you so much?
The more you push DEI, the more angry you make the public. No one is getting ahead. We want gainful employment and a future for our children that doesn’t include living in cardboard boxes.
If you, as well as Ms Stegman, disagree, prove it. Sell your “portfolio,” sell the house or houses you presumably own, liquidate your 401k or pension, and join us. You too can live in some run down apartments by the train tracks surrounded by graffiti and scumbag gangbangers, work two low paying jobs, and lie to your stepson every day that his future is great, that in America you can be brown and Muslim (as he is) and all you need is a college degree. If I’m white, have a college degree, a veteran, and find myself barely able to pay my bills, what chance do you really think he has? No, our problem isn’t racism, it’s structural. It’s a system created by Boomers that locked in generational wealth and doomed the rest of us, no matter what our skin color is. Anyone who says otherwise is just a race hustler. Unlike you, liberals, and Ms.Stegman, I love my country and no amount of money will ever change that.
Lastly, the illegals and their sympathizers burning the American flag as they waved a certain foreign flag in the street in LA a few months ago, are your people. Those are the people your disgusting party (Democrats) are drooling to register. Are you proud of that? Those are your party members, congratulations. And people like you wonder why a large portion of actual Americans wish for an American version of the Freikorps? If the American flag keeps getting burnt in the street, it may happen. There’s plenty of unemployed veterans running around that feel used up and spit out by the liberals that sent them off to war, only to return to a country on the verge of bankruptcy. Unless you actually love your country or served in its military, you have no idea how it feels to see the American flag lit on fire in the street. Try lighting the US flag on fire in a small town.
Keep it short Fly. Your lengthy posts are quite inane, considering you’ve said it all before in thousands of nauseating words on these pages that bear little resemblance to reality. But, carry on.
Smith:
My words may not resemble YOUR reality, but they represent mine and millions of other Americans. You can take my pen when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
My words bothers you because as a liberal gazette read by well to do liberals, it exposes you to something you’d rather not read and that you don’t normally encounter. If it bothers you, just stick to the NYTs, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, CNN, or the funny papers. Otherwise, feel free to critique my points, point by point.
Do we need to go down the historical record? Just because I criticize your party and liberals doesn’t mean Republicans had no part to play. Both parties signed off on NAFTA, deregulated the banks, and enacted the CFTA. The difference is our party doesn’t want flag burners in it.
I’m a history major, I’m happy to go through the 20th century with you, decade by decade, lol. It won’t be pretty though, but I promise to hold your hand as we visit the graveyards, soup kitchens, and orphanages. Would that help? Maybe I can break it down into a level you might understand…3rd grade.
Interestingly, the two negative commentators above do not focus on the distinctions I raise between the motivations of Cain and Kirk and decide to attack me and others personally. I don’t need the hand of an obviously biased “history major” to mansplain the events of the past decades, since I have witnessed them myself and have certainly researched them. How quickly the conversation devolves into partisan politics when the point was to honor a true hero whose courage was manifest by his actions, not rhetoric. Can you not acknowledge this.
I want to hear about Charlie Kirk like I need a hole in the head.
It’s interesting how casual Ms.Stegman can use a sexist comment and describe my writing as “mansplaining” yet I never critiqued her or any other woman’s gender. I think this is what is called a double standard. Since my remarks offered to walk anyone through the last 125 years and Ms. Stegman herself admits she lived through all of those years, neither do I engage in ageism, though clearly, having lived through the last 12.5 decades as she admits, the comedic material is there. I mean, one could really riff with that. I wouldn’t dare though, right? I mean, it’s not nice to mock our elderly, it would be in such poor taste. Figures like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosis, and Diane Feinstein come to mind, so drunk on power they either died in office or wandered the halls of the White House, having lost their wits and thrown out office by their own party. No, these aged politicians are respectable people, right, right? When they speak or write, it’s manna from heaven. No, we need to take what these invalids say and do seriously, after all, like Ms.Stegman, they come from a generation who took the bounty their parents created by winning and dying in WWII and, never knowing a day of deprivation or precarity themselves, threw it all in the trash for the rest of us.
I would encourage all of us to step back and really appreciate Ms.Stegman for who she really is, as if visiting a museum. Rather than observing dated objects, we can observe dated concepts. After all, her words are a reflection of her entire generation, swaddled in the kind of material security that those of us who came after her will never know. Instead, we will be forced, like mules, to pay for her social security check knowing we, ourselves, will never receive one. For one so quick to signal your own virtue, madam, where is the justice in that?
Having been raised by a feminist and finally out of the closet, butch lesbian, your sexist slander is nothing new. It characterizes the 1970s and 80s for me, as well as my late mother’s alcoholism. Born in 1948, she was much happier stopping drinking and coming out of the closet, have you ever considered doing the same thing, Jill? You might actually discover what the word “love” means instead of projecting your own dysfunction on others.
RIP mom.
Seeing the old photographs and video footage of the children integrating schools during the 1950’s, I was always impressed by the courage it must have taken to run a gauntlet of snarling, hate-filled faces in order to enter school. My hat is off to people like Bobby Cain who endured it to bring an end to racial discrimination in schools, so that students could be judged on their own merits and achievements, and not upon group membership.
While it is no longer the 1950’s, the current battle is still over racial discrimination. While people like Bobby Cain fought to end racial discrimination, proponents of DEI seek to maintain it. When those who advocate for DEI, like Ms. Stegman, argue that it does not seek “special treatment” for the beneficiaries of it, they ignore the fact that “special treatment” is the very essence of DEI. Any system which provides preferences for admission or hiring on the basis of group membership in order socially engineer representational goals, instead of by the highest objective personal merit and qualifications, is necessarily based on “special treatment”.
There are some who argue that somehow admitting and hiring using DEI preferences is not discriminatory, but they never can explain how choosing those with lower objective scores and qualifications because they belong to a desired group, is not discrimination.
While I had heard of Charlie Kirk previously, I had never followed him and knew little about him. But from the footage of him debating leftists, it appeared he was pretty skilled with confronting advocates of things like DEI with the inherent contradictions in their arguments. Saying that DEI is not discriminatory is inherently contradictory.
As usual, the right wingers have false premises, distortions and lies.
Kirk argued there was no such thing as systemic racismn, LMAOROG.
Redlining for $100 Alex? (That was Gov’t AND banks!)
Education: Inequities in school funding and access to resources can lead to significant racial gaps in educational outcomes. (WE FUND IT MOSTLY THROUGH PROPERTY TAXES)
Criminal Justice: The system shows widespread bias, disproportionately affecting people of color through policing, sentencing, and mass incarceration.
Black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans. RATE.
Yeah, like the US leading in ‘freedom’, we lock up almost 25% of the total in prison/jail, world wide. Yep, less than 5% of worlds population, yet we hold 25% in our PRISON INDIUSTRIAL COMPLEX!
Kirk, like Cheeto in DC, used racismn to push his talking points. Not all who support the Repugss are racist, but probably 95% of those that consider themselves racist, support that party!
DEI simply TRIED to get 200+ years of rascist garbage out of hiring, education, H/C, etc.
Boston Fire Department in 1970, was 99% white, even though the black population was almost 10%
NY City police in 1970, almost 97% white, even though minority population was almost 23%
DON’T WORRY CHEETO WILL GUT TAXES ON THE RICHEST, AGAIN, AND LEVY TARRIFS ON EVERYTHING, AGAIN, THAT WILL SOLVE THE “MIDDLE CLASS” sinking from 65% of US population in 1980 to about 45% today.
Woohoo let’s celebrate by knocking down a historic building so we can build a grand “ball room”
Thank you Jill Stegman for the excellent research and truth telling you do. And thanks to the other commenters who call out the rightwing talkers promoting propaganda filled with falsehoods and bias copied from fox *news and rt/tv.
The truth tellers will not stay silent, and we can defeat this Jim Crow/fascist regime with peaceful protests and boycotts of the oligarchs with the “3.5% Rule.” That is around 12 million patriotic Americans using our Free Speech and Right to Assembly to peacefully defeat the hate and cruelty of this Trump dictatorship.
Maga, Trump and the GOP want to take us back to the Jim Crow era, with a Putin style dictatorship.
No Thanks!
Scott J.
Not all conservatives own televisions nor even have the time to watch it, we’re too busy working and paying the taxes required to subsidize the profits of banks and medical cartels through bailouts. We’re a little more concerned about the financial viability of the US than giving a rats ass about who sleeps with whom or what one’s “identity” is.
People like you live in the kind of cacoon that only money buys, where, as Maslow points out, you can look down on us at the bottom of the pyramid, trying to survive, and lecture and moralize from on high. That’s why you lost the last election and will lose the next. As a matter of fact, keep pushing your left wing agenda, it makes sensible people leave (like I did) and join the party that doesn’t admit nor desire those who burn our national flag in the street.