Republicans are strongly signaling they will back an immigration plan along the outlines of what President Barack Obama proposed Tuesday, creating the potential for an almost unprecedented occurrence: Obama signing a major bill without an extended fight with the GOP.

As we kick-off Black History Month, we begin a 28 day sojourn to explore the depths of African-American struggle, achievement and contribution to the American narrative. While we search for the uniquely Black experience of our nation’s democratic experience, we would be doing a disservice to the history of our nation if we did not acknowledge and decipher the complex relationship of white America to our own historical accounting. One of the complexities of Black history is that its evidence is often undeniably tied to the behavior and actions of whites.

On a windy afternoon a few days ago I went to a depressed section of North Memphis to visit an old clapboard house that was once owned by a German immigrant named Jacob Burkle. Oral history—and oral history is all anyone has in this case since no written documents survive—holds that Burkle used his house as a stop on the underground railroad for escaped slaves in the decade before the Civil War. The house is now a small museum called Slave Haven. It has artifacts such as leg irons, iron collars and broadsheets advertising the sale of men, women and children. In the gray floor of the porch there is a trapdoor that leads to a long crawl space and a jagged hole in a brick cellar wall where fugitives could have pushed themselves down into the basement. Escaped slaves were purportedly guided by Burkle at night down a tunnel or trench toward the nearby Mississippi River and turned over to sympathetic river traders who took them north to Cairo, Ill., and on to freedom in Canada.

On October 10, 2012, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a lawsuit about the constitutionality of the affirmative action programs in which colleges and universities consider the race of applicants in an effort to maintain diversity.