'Remain Woke' – Revisiting the Past Reveals the Kind of Danger America Faces Under Trump
A trip to the cradle of the civil rights movement left a group of teens woke to danger, but also aware of how resistance can produce progress.
MONTGOMERY, Alabama – Students from the SEED School in Baltimore did not arrive here venting outrage against Donald Trump’s war on their futures. They’re teenagers.
But their four-day trip to the cradle of the civil rights movement hinted at what they and the country now face. Learning about the slave trade that once flourished along the Alabama River, the terror of lynch mobs, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the Birmingham church bombing frightened and angered them. They left woke to danger.
At the same time, the photos, videos, news accounts, and memorials the students saw showed that resistance can produce progress. Veterans of earlier struggles counseled equanimity.
“Where we are now is not all that different from where we’ve been,” said Ann Clemons, the students’ 74-year-old tour guide. “The good news is knowing we can survive and overcome.”
The Ugly Consequences – Then and Now
The SEED School of Maryland, like three sister institutions around the country, is a public boarding school for low-income students admitted by lottery. At its founding in 2008, just before Barack Obama became our first Black president, no one could have imagined a successor diametrically opposed to the school’s mission: seeking educational equity and diversity.
But Donald Trump, who first gained national attention a half-century ago for discriminating against Blacks in apartment rentals, aims to Make America Great Again by rolling back the clock. His frenzied campaign against “diversity, equity and inclusion” yearns for something more like the country that existed before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery city bus in 1955.
He seeks to eradicate DEI initiatives in the government and private sector alike, even (briefly) targeting public recognition for historical heroes such as Harriet Tubman and Jackie Robinson. While railing against Hispanics crossing our southern border, Trump welcomes white South Africans, many of whom loathe the post-apartheid government there.
His defiance of the judiciary recalls the “massive resistance” by white Southerners to court-ordered school desegregation in the 1950s. His vicious treatment of immigrant “terrorists” conjures images of Bull Connor, the infamous Birmingham public safety commissioner who used police dogs and fire hoses to break up civil rights protests, in the White House.
Trump so opposes constraints on police behavior that he canceled federal “consent decrees” with police departments, putting at risk reform agreements reached between the Biden administration and police departments in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Louisville, Kentucky, after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Trump highlights harsh methods to demonstrate “retribution” for supporters who associate dark skin with violence.
Whites have made that link since Africans sold into slavery began arriving in the US during the 17th century. As author Kevin Sack writes in his forthcoming book, Mother Emanuel, which traces the history of the Charleston church where Dylann Roof murdered nine Black worshippers in 2015, “Fear of insurrection lodged in the white psyche like a fencepost.”
The 16 SEED School youth who visited Alabama last week, some on their first-ever plane ride, immersed themselves in the ugly consequences. I joined school supporters accompanying them.