Martin Luther King, Jr. Would Weep

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., I offer a 920-word history curriculum all American children should learn. 

On this national holiday our country has some serious reckoning to do.  The Trump presidency and the present turmoil are not partisan conflicts over liberal vs. conservative values.  This ugly time is just the latest chapter in the unsettling and unsettled story of race and racism in America. 

The domestic terrorists who attacked the Capitol weren’t motivated primarily by deep love for Trump.  The riot was not so much about the election being stolen as it was about their country being stolen.  It was about white nationalism, not Dominion voting machines and mail-in ballots.

Ours is a story of cycles of racial progress followed by violent reaction through three centuries.  The Trump presidency is one of those violent reactions -  nothing less and nothing more. 

The Civil War (an oxymoron of the highest order) was followed by decades of vicious backlash.  Reconstruction was reviled by Southern whites and they persistently fought, politically and literally, to roll back the rights of black citizens.  Backlash created the KKK and other violent vigilante groups.  The so-called Great Compromise of 1877 effectively ended Reconstruction and eliminated the rights gained through emancipation.  Thereafter, white supremacy ruled the South until the 1960s.   Jim Crow laws -  local and state statutes imposing segregation and suppressing black votes - were dominant throughout the South.

The 1964 presidential election was essentially a referendum on white supremacy.  Lyndon Johnson won and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 swung the pendulum toward racial justice. But it didn’t take Republicans long to swing it the other way.  

In the Nixon era, the GOP employed the Southern Strategy, appealing implicitly and explicitly to the largely unmitigated racism in southern states.   Despite the Voting Rights Act of 1965,  black voter suppression remained rampant throughout the South.

Ronald Reagan, aided by the amoral strategist Lee Atwater, turned the racist Southern Strategy into an art form, championing state’s rights in order to solidify the GOP’s white majority control through the South.  Reagan’s campaign appearance in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964, was as disgusting a dog whistle as any blown by Donald Trump.

The Southern Strategy was joined by an ancillary strategy throughout the 80s and 90s called “shrink government and drown it in the bathtub,” a motto coined by anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist.  This, along with Reagan’s insistence that government is “the problem not the solution,” eventually led to welfare reform, throwing millions of black Americans into abject poverty.  

Republican parsimony has never resulted in budget restraint, sacrifices by corporations or control of military spending.  The government Republicans want to shrink is the government that supports poor Americans, the government that addresses health, arts and education, and the government that funds mechanisms of justice. 

The Reagan years also accelerated the prison-industrial complex.  Locking up black men for minor offenses became highly profitable.  Profits of private prisons like Corrections Corporation of America quadrupled between 1980 and 1994.

In 1988 George H.W. Bush continued the Southern Strategy with the infamous Willie Horton ads, which served to demonize Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis and more generally arouse racists by portraying black men in menacing caricatures. 

The election of Barack Obama, a  seemingly momentous advance in racial justice, inspired the most violent backlash since Reconstruction.   Hate crimes, membership in white supremacist organizations and gun sales immediately surged.  Equally damaging was the post-racism mythology of “See, we elected a black man!” which resulted, among other things, in the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act through the Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder.  That 5-4 decision took the teeth out of the law and Southern states immediately reinstated black voter suppression tactics that remain today.

Trump’s election was not an anomaly.  His political ambitions were kickstarted by his ugly manufacture of birtherism, attempting to delegitimize Obama’s presidency.   His run for the presidency was all about racism and undoing the acts of a black man who didn’t belong in the white man’s White House.

In 2016 and 2020, the racist dogwhistles became more shrill.  Anyone claiming otherwise is willfully tone-deaf.  Voter suppression in these elections was rampant, unfettered from the strictures of the Voting Rights Act.

From slavery to the 2020 election, America’s political history is a story of one side fearfully  defending a system of white supremacy and the other side pressing for racial justice.   The   rise of white nationalism has become increasingly urgent as America has become more diverse through immigration  This additional threat to white hegemony became a constant Trump theme with allusion to Mexican rapists and ambitions to build his absurd wall.

The thugs at the center of the January 6th insurrection were aided and abetted by dishonest Republicans in Congress who fired them up by giving validation to false claims of election fraud.  Republican legislators may not have committed violence, but they had the same seditious goal:  To invalidate a fair and legal election, primarily by challenging the votes cast by citizens of color.

The Trump era is just the latest battle in a 160-year war about whose country this really is.   The election of Joe Biden won’t be the last word.  As seen so vividly in the last few weeks, white supremacists aren’t going down without a fight, whether they’re in the Proud Boys or the United States Congress.

This post is adapted from a column in the Valley News.