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I recently went to the protest in New York City -- one of more than 1,400 demonstrations in all 50 states across this country and elsewhere in the world -- against what increasingly should be known as the Trump regime. Tens of thousands of people marched in my city, including significant numbers of old people (like me), many carrying handmade signs and some chanting, among other things, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Elon Musk has got to go!" or "Hands off! Keep your tiny hands off our rights!" Here were what just a few of the protesters around me put on their signs (including one that showed the Statue of Liberty weeping and another that had a drawing of Vladimir Putin walking Donald Trump on a leash), as I marched down Fifth Avenue, jotting notes in a drizzle: "Felon X 2"; "Stop the Coup"; "Musk Is a Rat!!!" (with a drawing of a rat, of course); "We the people stand together, hands off our country"; "Free Kahlil! Now!"; "Not our King!!" (with an image of You Know Who); "Heil No! Trump Must Go!"; "Make America Good Again!"; "Make America America Again"; "All of my outrage can't fit on this sign"; "The only minority destroying America is the rich"; "Not our king!!"; "Wake up America! Trump could care less! He's What???? Golfing!"; "Silence = Death"; "Piss on Trump"; "Curb your Doge"; "Not my Dictator"; "No 3rd Term"; and then there was the baby in a carriage with a sign on a blanket that read "Toddlers against fascism."
This is hardly the first time that marching crowds carrying signs were on the streets of this country protesting all-American nightmares. I well remember the anti-Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s (in which I also marched) as well as those in this century to protest this country's wars from hell in Afghanistan and Iraq (in which I took part as well). And then, of course, there were the Civil Rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s against what TomDispatch regular Douglas White still remembers as an American form of apartheid, a leftover of slavery, in which he both took part and which he describes so vividly today, as he faces what he all too accurately calls Donald Trump's twenty-first-century version of White nationalism. Tom
Facing Trump's America
In the Spirit of African American History and the Black Civil Rights Movement
Recently, in an executive order, President Trump directed the removal of "improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology" from the Smithsonian Institution. That order was, in essence, an attempt to rewrite history on race and gender. One-hundred-and-one-year-old Colonel James H. Harvey, one of the last of the famed Tuskegee airmen of World War II, blamed Trump, saying, "I'll tell him to his face. No problem. I'll tell him, you're a racist." In addition, government websites began scrubbing African-American history, including in the case of the National Park Service eliminating a photo of the famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman and descriptions of the brutal realities of slavery.
Black people in America have often led change in this society because our humanity and our liberties were so long suppressed and denied.
Black people in my family and community were, of course, descendants of the enslaved. In their presence (as I well remember), you could feel their closeness to that terrible time in our history. When that Smithsonian news came out, I thought about the killings, rapes, lynchings, breeding, and selling of Black people that was, for several hundred years, so much a part of life in the United States of America and that was, if Donald Trump had anything to say about it, no longer to be part of the true history of the United States. I didn't have to be reminded of who I was or my status as a Black American that day, or of the history he'd like to wipe out, because I lived in the South in the 1950s and 1960s and racism and Jim Crow were then in my face every day of my existence.
So, let me tell Donald Trump a thing or two.
Long, long ago, in the course of my time in high school and college, I realized that Black people in the South were still dealing with a form of American fascism not so dissimilar from Apartheid in South Africa. At the time, Black southern activists were deeply engaged in transforming the structure of this society.
Such activism, I believed then and I believe now, began in 1619, the moment enslaved Africans were deposited in chains on American shores. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass became two spokespeople for those who had lived as slaves. Both tried to change the attitudes of the wider public. Later, many others, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey, would continue the work to end the legacies of slavery and eliminate all aspects of racism. During my youth, the North similarly had strong spokespeople for racial equality in Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. In the West, Cesar Chavez was organizing the United Farm Workers to improve the conditions of Latinos working in the fields of California and the Southwest. At the same time, the emerging American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Asian American movement were growing in a collective struggle against discrimination and racism.
Those organizations energized student movements nationwide through sit-ins and demonstrations and by getting arrested as they fought for civil rights. The Black Panther Party, the movement against the war in Vietnam, and the growing Feminist movement added thousands more actions to that struggle. Years later, such movements would also influence the development of the Black Lives Matter, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer movements and the National Domestic Worker Alliance.
My father always told me as a boy and later a young man: "Don't go down to Alabama and Mississippi -- those White-ass crackers down there don't like Black folks." But in 2019, I found myself in Montgomery, Alabama, the first capital of the Confederacy. All those years later, I could still hear my father's voice ringing in my ears and had trepidations about being in that state with its racist history. I remembered the Montgomery Bus Boycott, demonstrations against White supremacy led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and young people in 1963, the water cannons and dogs used against Black children and adults, and racist Governor George Wallace's attempt to block integration at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963, saying: "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." I remember the horror of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, where four little girls were murdered by White racists.
In February of 2019, I traveled to Montgomery with other board members of my son Khary's social justice organization, The Brotherhood Sister Sol, to visit the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice created by Bryan Stevenson, the activist, lawyer, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. At the Legacy Museum, visitors experience 400 years of American history that includes enslavement, racial terrorism, and mass incarceration. The National Memorial is the first institution of its kind dedicated to the legacy of the Black Americans who were the victims of the racial terror of lynching. (Four thousand four hundred of those lynchings have been documented in the post-Reconstruction era from 1877 to 1950 by the Equal Justice Initiative.)
That memorial includes 805 hanging steel rectangles representing each of the counties in the United States where lynchings took place. As I walked through them, I immediately went to those representing Lenoir County and Jones County, North Carolina, where most of my family was born and raised. One victim was listed in Lenoir County, Lazarus Rouse on August 1, 1916, and one, Jerome Whitefield, on August 14, 1921, in Jones County. I was informed by the Equal Justice Initiative that, during the Reconstruction period (1865 to 1876), nine other Black victims were lynched in those two counties. Four of them were killed in 1866 (their names unknown); the other five were Cater Grady, Daniel Smith, John Miller, and Robert Grady on January 24, 1869, and Amos Jones on May 28, 1869.
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