By JOHN GUESS, JR.
Lindsey Graham died on Saturday, July 11 2026.
Within 24 hours of his death, America had already begun deciding which Lindsey Graham history would remember in his obituary. Both Republicans and Democrats recalled his private kindnesses. Ukraine remembered a defender of freedom. Israel recalled a loyal friend. News pundits talked about a senator who understood foreign policy, cultivated relationships across the aisle and spent more than two decades at the center of American power.
But as a Black American, I found myself reacting to these descriptions of the man by asking these questions: Where are we in his obituary? Where is the Lindsey Graham who rejected the existence of systemic racism in America? Where is the politician who pined for a return to the“ good old days of segregation,” and then explained he was being sarcastic and returned comfortably to the corridors of American power? Talk of these things might appear in some accounts. Perhaps tucked near the bottom of a lengthy obituary in a brief nod to some of the“ controversies” in his life. But placement is power.
What appears first in an obituary tells us what America has decided matters most. What appears near the bottom tells us what may be remembered but need not define the man. This is how national memory is constructed. I do not question that Graham sincerely believed in defending Ukraine. I do not doubt his commitment to America’ s alliances. Black Americans need not deny any of that.
But must we surrender the historical evidence of this man to participate in the national mourning of his passing? To Washington’ s foreignpolicy establishment, Graham’ s support for Ukraine may represent
LINDSEY GRAHAM WHO GETS TO WRITE HIS OBITUARY?
the defining moral commitment of his career. To a Black family in South Carolina, the senator’ s insistence that systemic racism did not exist may reveal something equally important about the boundaries of his moral imagination. Who decides which becomes the headline and which becomes the footnote?
Black Americans have spent generations fighting for access to American institutions. We have fought to vote, attend universities, enter corporations, serve in government and walk through museum doors that once excluded us. But access is not authority. Black Americans still hold too little authority within the institutions that decide what America remembers. We do not exercise equal power in major newsrooms writing the first drafts of history. We do not lead enough publishing institutions producing political biographies. We do not sufficiently shape foundations’ funding of historical scholarship. Too few museums are led by Blacks who have the power to determine which individuals and narratives are preserved as historically significant.
Black America too often enters national memory as a correction. A protest. A paragraph added after criticism. We may be allowed to
41 challenge in some small way the obituary of someone who has impacted our lives like Graham. But we rarely get to frame it. This is why whether Graham was“ a racist” may be the least interesting question about his racial legacy. The label invites an argument about his heart that none of us can resolve.
There is a harder question. How could a man considered sophisticated enough to understand the historical forces shaping Europe remain so resistant to understanding the forces shaping Black America? How could history be so present to him when discussing Vladimir Putin and distant when discussing racial inequality at home? These are not merely questions about Lindsey Graham. They are questions about the political class. And perhaps about America itself.
Whoever writes the obituary does more than describe the dead. The obituary instructs the living. It tells us which virtues deserve admiration, which failures deserve forgiveness, which contradictions deserve examination, and which wounds can be quietly moved toward the bottom of the page.
Lindsey Graham’ s obituaries are being written now. Black Americans should read them carefully. Not simply to ask whether we agree with the portrait, but to ask a consequential question: Who had the authority to choose the portrait?
The answer may tell us a lot about what those in power want us to remember – and little about what actually should be enshrined in our national memory. n
John Guess Jr. is CEO emeritus of the Houston Museum of African American Culture. An unflinching advocate of civil rights, he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Johns Hopkins University in 2023.