The Patriot Post® · Who Gets to Tell Black History?

Annette Hubbell was baffled.

Surely the San Diego County Library wasn’t attaching racial conditions to her onstage celebration of great women in American history. Surely a public institution wasn’t saying that the renowned abolitionist Harriet Tubman or the civil rights heroine Mary McLeod Bethune were off-limits because the actress portraying them had the “wrong” skin color.

So when Hubbell was informed that the one-woman performance she’d been engaged to perform must exclude any black characters, she pushed back. Was the library really telling her, she asked, that as a matter of policy she could “only honor women of courage and integrity if they’re white”?

Rebecca Lynn, the library supervisor, minced no words: “That’s pretty much it.”

There had been no accusation that Hubbell’s portrayals in her show, “Women Warriors: Remarkable Women Who Transformed the World,” were in any way disrespectful. No one claimed that she had ever resorted to caricature or mockery. Hubbell had performed “Women Warriors” in hundreds of venues nationwide, to enthusiastic audience acclaim.

Yet now she was being told that none of that mattered as much as skin color — hers, and that of the women she intended to depict.

“That’s pretty much it.” With that terse response, a government official was affirming that racial identity trumps artistic intent, historical truth, and moral achievement. Wasn’t it precisely this kind of racial gatekeeping that the civil rights movement had struggled to overturn?

Hubbell is an actress who devotes herself to bringing American history to life. Her show consists of first-person portrayals based on the actual words of women she admires. Over the years she has portrayed figures ranging from 17th-century Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet to black abolitionist Sojourner Truth to first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

In December 2023, the Rancho Santa Fe branch of the San Diego County Library contacted Hubbell to perform on March 21, 2024. It was agreed that she would feature Tubman, Bethune, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. But two weeks before the performance, Hubbell was asked to replace Tubman and Bethune with two white women because, she was told, the library’s administrators were “uncomfortable with you performing a black character as a white woman.”

What the library demanded amounted to erasing black history from a public program. Tubman and Bethune were excluded not because their lives were unimportant or their stories unsuitable but because the person telling those stories was of the “wrong” race.

That inversion is worth lingering over, especially during Black History Month, which exists to ensure such stories are told and remembered. Yet here was a public institution concluding that sometimes they should not be told at all. The impulse to honor black history became, perversely, a rationale for withholding it.

The library’s decision sprang from the premise, fashionable in progressive circles, that racial identity is the most morally salient fact about a person. Hubbell’s reverence for her subjects, her faithful use of their own words, and her long record of successful performances counted for less than her pigmentation.

A fundamental principle of the civil rights movement was that public policy should be steadfastly race-blind. “Classifications and distinctions based on race or color,” Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s chief counsel, wrote in a 1948 brief, “have no moral or legal validity in our society.” That was Martin Luther King Jr.‘s great dream — that Americans would be judged by their character, conduct, and merit, rather than by the color of their skin. That remains the only alternative to a world in which identity becomes destiny — in which permission to speak, to represent, or even to admire is rationed according to ancestry.

When San Diego County officials canceled her performance, Hubbell turned to the courts. Represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, she filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court.

San Diego County quickly realized it had no legal leg to stand on. Rather than pursue a court fight, it agreed to a settlement acknowledging it had violated Hubbell’s constitutional rights. The county paid her $60,000 and committed itself to race-neutral treatment of performers going forward.

The lawsuit had barely been filed when Hubbell learned she was suffering from a virulent form of thyroid cancer. The disease is usually terminal, and her doctors give her only a few more years. Speaking publicly after that diagnosis, she emphasized the theme that has animated her stage work: shared humanity. “We are all humans,” she said. “We want to find the things that unite us, not the things that divide us.”

All Annette Hubbell wanted was to stand before an audience and tell stories of women whose lives are testaments to courage, sacrifice, and moral leadership. Facing a shortened future, she speaks not about grievance but about connection: She reminds her listeners that suffering, hope, and heroism are part of our common humanity, and no government has the authority to ration empathy by skin color.