By Lee A. Daniels

The words practically leapt out of the Sunday New York Times article on the suddenly growing opposition in some cities and towns to proposals by Muslim Americans to build or expand their mosques.

The article quoted a woman, a grandmother who had lost her job this year and had attended several Tea Party events and anti-immigration rallies and was opposed to her California town’s Muslim American residents building a new mosque.

“As a mother and a grandmother, I worry,” the woman said. “I learned that in 20 years with the rate of the birth population, we will be overtaken by Islam, and their goal is to get people in Congress and the Supreme Court to see that Shariah is implemented. My children and grandchildren will have to live under that.”

“I do believe everybody has a right to freedom of religion,” she continued to say, “But Islam is not about a religion. It’s a political government, and it’s 100 percent against our Constitution.”

As an expression of and rationalization for bigotry, that’s a classic. It’s right up there with, for example, the declarations of the “respectable” segregationists of the bygone era who first said they had nothing against black Americans – and then went on to condemn the idea of equal rights for blacks as a communist plot to take over the country.

Or, to choose another example, recall those American Protestants who in 1960 believed that John F. Kennedy, only the second Roman Catholic American to seek the presidency, would as President take orders from the Vatican. To re-read the transcript of JFK’s appearance before the Greater Houston (Texas) Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960 is to glimpse an America many in recent years have glibly declared we’ve long left behind.

But we haven’t. American society is now struggling through one of those periods that underscore how easily the virus of bigotry spreads – and how difficult it has been for the nation to actually live up to its humanitarian ideals. It’s one of those periods that proves the nation’s high-minded rhetoric and practice of including all sorts of people has always been challenged by a powerful counter-force: the tradition of exclusion.

In fact, the latter overwhelmingly ruled America until the passage of the civil rights laws of the mid-1960s – particularly, the Voting Rights Act — made the country a democracy in reality, not just rhetorically. It’s still little noted today, however, that two months after the August 1965 passage of the VRA, the Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act. That law, which re-opened America to large-scale immigration for the first time since the 1920s, is what enabled millions of immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and Latin America as well as Europe to come to the United States. As historian Ira Berlin notes in his new book, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations, the two laws have had “a profound impact on American life.”

The vibrant, multicultural, multiracial society those two laws helped produce has frightened some people – some of whom are descended from the European immigrants of the early 1900s who then were widely condemned by many white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as “inconceivable aliens.” To the contrary, their inclusion into the society proved to be a key ingredient in the making of twentieth-century America.

The modern immigrant wave has already proven it will repeat that pattern. And it’s proven something else. America is still caught up in the struggle of the two traditions: the tradition of exclusion versus the tradition of inclusion. America is still fighting for democracy.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal  Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of  TheDefendersOnline.