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On a cool, breezy Monday afternoon, a crowd of drunken, rowdy men gathering in the nation’s capital stared in astonishment as a striking figure headed toward them. It was a regal young woman riding a magnificent white horse, wearing a gold crown and a flowing white cape.
The woman’s name was Inez Milholland, and on that day in March 3, 1913, she was about to make history. Dubbed the “poster girl of radicalism,” the 26-year-old was the scion of a wealthy family who had become a lawyer, a labor activist and an advocate for the poor. She was an open advocate of free love — the belief that government shouldn’t limit how women express their sexuality — and proposed to the man who would become her husband.
But Milholland’s critics called her radical because she believed that all American women were entitled to vote — and she was willing to defy authorities in dramatic ways to demonstrate her beliefs. On that day, she was leading a procession of some 5,000 women through Washington for the nation’s first major suffragist parade.
The men’s astonishment, though, soon turned to rage. They attacked Milholland and the marchers with curses, spitting on them and slapping some in the face. Police standing by did nothing. The only group that defended the women was a Boy Scout troop.
Milholland’s flair for the dramatic and her public speaking skills helped put the suffragist movement on America’s front pages. Yet she never lived to see the ratification in 1920 of the 19th Amendment, which recognized women’s right to vote.
She collapsed while giving a suffragist speech in Los Angeles, “like a wilted white rose” at the podium. She suffered from pernicious anemia and ignored warnings to ease her grueling speaking schedule. Her last public utterance was, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for their liberty?” She was 30 at the time of her death.
Her life sounds like a movie, but Milholland’s crucial role in American history was eventually forgotten. Most historians preferred to focus on men on horseback leading other men into battle.
But Sharon McMahon, a former high school government teacher, has resurrected Milholland and others like her in “The Small and The Mighty,” her new book that has topped the New York Times bestseller list. In her book, McMahon highlights the fortitude of citizens who changed America even though they had “the least amount of political, social and economic power.”
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“The best Americans are not always famous,” she writes. “They are the people who went for broke when everyone else yelled turn back. They are those who know that one becomes great because of who they lift up, not who they put down.”
McMahon’s roll call of unsung heroes and heroines include:
- The teenage girl who rode 40 miles overnight in the rain during the Revolutionary War – twice as far as Paul Revere two years earlier – to warn the Connecticut militia that the British were coming.
- The “gay feminist badass” who wrote the lyrics to “America the Beautiful,” the classic patriotic song.
- The Black teenager who refused to give up her bus seat to a White woman in Montgomery, Alabama, nine months before Rosa Parks did.
- The Jewish man who built a fortune in business but found more joy in spending it on erecting schools for poor Black students across the South.
McMahon’s book, though, is more than a historical reminder — it’s a civic sermon that may inspire Americans during this turbulent time for the country. For some Americans, this holiday season brings few tidings of joy. Many have lost faith in American institutions, and a majority believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.
But McMahon’s book evokes the spirit of the Christmas story. The small can turn into the mighty — whether it’s a child born in a manger to a poor, teenage mom or the unsung people that McMahon chronicles in her book.
McMahon, host of the “Here’s Where It Gets Interesting” podcast, says she isn’t arguing that the rich and famous don’t make history.
“My argument is that they’re not the only people that matter, as we’ve often been taught,” she tells CNN. “The small can be mighty. It’s not just the mighty who are mighty.”
McMahon’s book offers two lessons for how everyday Americans today might move forward with new purpose.
In an undated black-and-white photograph, an unsmiling, bespectacled Virginia Randolph stares at the camera with a look that conveys resolve and confidence. She needed every measure of those qualities to do what she did. Randolph, a pioneering educator, is one of the characters that McMahon profiles in her book.
Randolph was born to parents who had been enslaved and grew up in the Jim Crow South during an era where lynching was common and millions of Black Americans were stripped of their basic citizenship rights. Despite those obstacles, McMahon says Randolph went on to become one of America’s greatest educators, on par with Booker T. Washington, the civil rights leader who founded Tuskegee University.
Randolph started off teaching Black children in a rural school that was “little more than a shack stuck in a pit of red mud.” She would go on to establish and administer schools in Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia that educated thousands of Black students.
She also pioneered teaching methods used throughout America and abroad. Randolph, who never married, adopted at least 14 children (some estimates said that at least 59 children boarded with her because they couldn’t afford to pay for housing and attend school).
What struck McMahon about Randolph was a credo that the educator’s mother used to repeat to her: “Do the next right thing.”
It might seem easy now for some Americans to check out and give into despair because problems such as random gun violence and climate change seem insurmountable. But Randolph confronted problems like White supremacy and Jim Crow segregation that also seemed unsolvable.
She never felt, though, that she had to fix everything — and neither should we, McMahon says.
“A more helpful posture is to do the next needed thing before us,” she says. “I need to educate the boys and girls in front of me. I need to make soup for a sick relative.”
Doing the next needed thing avoids the type of inaction that results from the belief that must rely on charismatic leaders to change America, McMahon says.
“We create the kind of progress we want to see far more quickly than waiting for the right leader to be elected, “McMahon says. “Because if we’re waiting, we could be waiting for eight to 12 years. But the power to do the next needed thing is available to each one of us today.”
In her day, Randolph fought against racial segregation. Today, the country is also confronting another type of segregation: ideological.
Racial segregation still exists in schools and communities across America. But Americans also are self-sorting into political enclaves. We live in blue and red states. Some people refuse to date someone of another political party. Even social media is undergoing a schism. Progressives are fleeing Elon Musk’s X, which is increasingly MAGA-friendly, and joining Bluesky, which is seen as more receptive to their views.
If that all seems abstract, consider this question: When is the last time you sat down and had a calm, reflective conversation with someone who holds radically different political beliefs?
It’s easy to cancel some Americans when you don’t agree with them, but Septima Clark, one of the characters in McMahon’s book, illustrates the folly of such an approach. Clark, a civil rights activist, was surrounded by enemies. Even her civil rights allies couldn’t see her worth at times because of her gender. She has been largely lost to history because most historians focus on men like her famous colleague, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Clark, dubbed the “Mother of the Movement,” played a crucial role in securing voting rights for Black people during the Jim Crow era of the mid-20th century. She established citizenship schools and literacy classes throughout the South, teaching Black residents how to fill out voting registration forms. Rosa Parks participated in one of Clark’s workshops just months before she sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Clark didn’t write off her enemies. She took a magnanimous approach and was willing to engage with White segregationist and civil rights activists who discounted her. Clark explained her philosophy in one passage in McMahon’s book:
“Some people slow down their growth after they become adults,” Clark said. “But you never know when a person’s going to leap forward or change around completely—I’ve seen growth like most people don’t think is possible. I can even work with my enemies because I know from experience that they might have a change of heart any minute.”
You can’t change the minds of people you refuse to have contact with. It sounds so simple, but it’s often forgotten by today’s political leaders who believe the best way to win is to turn out your base and ignore or demonize your opposition.
Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Obama, alluded to this attitude in a recent essay. He noted Obama was the last Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt to twice win the majority of the popular vote — in part because of his background as a community organizer in Chicago.
Community organizers spend their time talking to people who aren’t like them and don’t think like them, Favreau wrote. Obama tried hard to empathize with people even if they weren’t for him, “he made it clear that he was for them,” Favreau wrote.
“That’s because organizers aren’t looking to perform for the people who already agree with them,” Favreau wrote. “They’re looking to persuade the people who don’t. They don’t just want to be right. They want to win.”
The victories of the small and mighty aren’t always immediately apparent. Some of these historical figures weren’t just overlooked; they were reviled when they were alive. But their impact on America endures, McMahon says.
“I love the fact that somebody at her (Milholland’s) funeral said no work for liberty is lost,” McMahon says. “It became part of the fabric of the nation. The country changes for the better because of the work of Inez Milholland.”
And because of others like her as well. McMahon says Americans can do the same today — if they remember one final lesson from the small and mighty.
It’s about hope.
“They weren’t waiting for hope to be a feeling that descends upon us from the heavens like a beam of light,” McMahon says. “They knew that hope was a choice that they made. It was a choice to believe that things could be better.
“It was a choice to believe that what they did mattered.”
John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”
