The Trump regime’s contempt for the rule of law has roots in America’s pre-civil rights era
America is supposed to be the land of the brave, but under the second administration of Donald Trump, it’s fallen under a climate of fear.
Universities and law firms have been punished for their perceived disloyalty. Foreigners have been abducted by masked agents and shipped to foreign gulags without due process. News organizations have been bullied for performing honest journalism. Federal employees have been cashiered by the thousands. Corporations harmed by his trade policies have been vilified for telling the truth about tariffs. Judges find themselves threatened for faithfully following the law.
Trump and his allies are doing their best to rule through systematic intimidation. It’s a new approach to the presidency. But it has deep roots in American history.
Recently, I visited Alabama to tour several sites that recount the horrifying realities of life under authoritarian subjugation and the struggles of African Americans who lived in constant fear of incurring the wrath of their rulers as well as ordinary white citizens. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, a massive outdoor structure, recalls the era of racial terrorism, documenting more than 4,400 lynchings of Black Americans between 1877 and 1950. The Legacy Museum provides a thorough account of the enslavement and oppression of an entire race of people. The Rosa Parks Museum and the National Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham recall the efforts that demolished segregation and won Black people legal and social equality.
To visit these places is to be shocked anew by the savagery that was the defining trait of the Jim Crow South—and the astonishing courage of the people who took part in the struggle for freedom and justice.
The procession of images sears the mind: mobs of police clubbing peaceful demonstrators. A white mob torching a bus carrying Freedom Riders. The mutilated body of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old murdered for allegedly failing to show proper deference to a white woman. The rubble of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham after the 1963 bombing that killed four Black girls. Rosa Parks, jailed for declining to give up her bus seat to a white passenger.
Today, we see the Civil Rights Movement as the stirring triumph of America’s noblest ideals. And it’s easy to assume the outcome was inevitable. But one central fact about those Americans who challenged their oppressors is this: They didn’t know they would win. [Continue reading…]