This month is black history month, but most students will never hear of a dramatic incident that illuminated the late-19th-century debate among blacks concerning the best way to make progress.

The incident occurred at Boston's Faneuil Hall, when Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave recognized in the press as the paramount black leader until his death in 1895, cried out during a speech, "The Negro has no hope of justice from the whites, no possible hope save in his own right arm. It must come to blood. The Negroes must fight for themselves."

Racial reconciliation, as promise keepers and others have noted, should be high on the agenda for American Christians. But the drive for reconciliation, like many other things, can be based on God's wisdom or modern man's.

With this column i break a two-year silence. Since January, 1995, when Newt Gingrich started talking about a book I had written, The Tragedy of American Compassion, I have not written a word about him in WORLD. For a while I even imposed a no-photos-of-Newt rule for the magazine generally, much to the amusement and occasional frustration of our super-talented art director David Freeland.

Few among us enjoy recapping the crimes of our own groups. The American political left rarely mentions its general support for &quotUncle Joe" Stalin's purge trials in the 1930s and its attempt to blacklist dissenters in this country. The American political right skips by its unfair counter-attempt to tar some liberals during the 1950s.

Each December a few journalistic members of the rebel alliance, including myself, choose winners of the "Year's Worst Reporting" awards handed out by the Media Research Center. This year, once again, the cauldron of liberal bias runneth over, and I'll just mention here a few of the main currents.

Publisher Joel Belz has been asking me for a long time to write about my conversion to Christianity, which occurred from 1973 to 1976. This is the time of the year to do so, because great carols like "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel"--From depths of hell thy people save--might by now be impressing on our brains what should be there all year 'round: Salvation comes from Christ alone.

Most of the WORLD columns I've written this year have also been published by my local daily newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman. Since East Coast reporters, when they find out I hail from Austin, almost invariably say, "that's a great town," you might suspect that we live in Texas's one very liberal city.