【1996 Archives】

Following the death of Marvel comics' Stan Lee996 Archives people have begun recirculating a 1968 column Lee wrote denouncing racism (something a disturbing number of politicians refuse to do to this day).

As part of his storied comics career, Lee spent almost four decades writing regular installments of "Stan's Soapbox" on the backs of comics, in which he frequently fought for his heroes' values of tolerance and equality.

"Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today...It’s totally irrational, patently insane to condemn an entire race — to despise an entire nation — to vilify an entire religion," Lee wrote. "...Sooner or later, if man is ever to be worthy of his destiny, we must fill out hearts with tolerance."

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Lee himself resurfaced the column in 2017, after white supremacists marched on Charlottesville, resulting in the death of one woman.

In a no-longer-available tweet, he shared the image with the words "As true today as it was in 1968. Pax et Justitia -Stan." 1968, notably, was the year Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, among other events.

"Pax et Justitia" is Latin for "peace and justice," an ideology pervasive in Lee's comics and in multiple Soapbox columns.

Following the Charlottesville tweet, Inverse dug through the archives and found several more examples of Lee fighting prejudice over the decades. He defended Luke Cage's debut and pointed out the allegories of bigotry in X-Men, all as part of the heroic stories readers were hungry to consume.