Trump's DEI Purge Is Erasing Civil Rights History Across the South

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4 days ago

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At the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, there's a suspended iron tomb labeled 'Clarke County, Mississippi.' On this tomb, sandwiched between eight others, is the name Alma House. Alma, an African American girl who grew up in early 20th-century Mississippi, was just 16 years old — and nine months pregnant — when she was lynched by a white mob.
President Donald Trump wants us to forget about girls like Alma. His administration's attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion are fundamentally about rewriting US history and covering up the scars of racism and brutality that are an inescapable part of our nation's past. Trump's actions — including banning words like 'inequality' and 'injustice' from government websites and documents; rewriting websites about the Underground Railroad; sanitizing school curricula; defunding museums; removing explicit segregation bans from federal contracts; targeting disparate-impact liability, one of the primary legal mechanisms used to enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act — represent a wholesale attack on Black Americans, not to mention a clearly white supremacist agenda. What makes this agenda particularly dangerous, in my eyes, is that so many Americans seem to welcome it.
The harmful results of Trump's project became clear to me when my high school took its entire junior class of 60 girls to the Deep South for a five-day Civil Rights trip. We visited some of the major landmarks of the Civil Rights era, such as the Little Rock Central High School, where an angry mob confronted the school's first Black students; the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where peaceful marchers advocating for voting rights walked from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery and were assaulted by police; the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four little girls were killed in a Ku Klux Klan bombing; and the home of MLK.
All the while, the actions of the Trump administration hung over us like smog. At the museums we visited, the people we spoke to were deeply worried about revoked funds, their first-amendment rights, and the history they tell.
At one National Park Service-run Civil Rights site, I asked a park ranger — whose identity I'm keeping confidential to protect his job — if the government's recent moves had affected his work. (The federal government has laid off thousands of national park workers in recent weeks.) Though we were outside, with no one in earshot, the park ranger dropped his voice to a near whisper: 'We can't talk about that,' he said. 'I can't give you a positive or negative response. But…' He briefly scanned the area, a furtive glance from side to side, before gesturing for me to look at his face. Slowly, he nodded twice. 'Keep asking the questions you're asking,' he told me.
At the National Civil Rights Museum — built inside the Lorraine Motel, where MLK was shot and killed just 57 years ago — I asked my class's tour guide, whose name I'm also keeping confidential, a similar question. He told me that the museum — with its future imperiled by an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) that has been newly decimated by the Trump administration — had issued a statement calling for community support of IMLS and pleading for the federal government to turn its chainsaw away from museums. 'Recently, we've changed the name of our DEI program,' he said. 'It's still there, but we can't call it that because of how much we're being targeted. It is something that we're immensely worried about, and it's very concerning what we're seeing nationally.'
But, he added, 'until they haul us away in handcuffs, we're not softening anything.'
The next day I spoke to a former Children's Crusader and survivor of the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing — who also chose to remain anonymous for fear of government interference with her work — and asked if Trump's assault on DEI and Black history scares her. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, for example, which she has worked with to tell her story, is currently at risk of being wholly cut off from governmental funding. 'It does,' she said. 'Nobody can stop me from talking, but if it's banned…'
She paused before continuing: 'If you're watching the news, they're shipping [immigrants] out of here. It could be you; it could be me. We have to look out for each other. My hope is that, when you see these negative things happening, you'll remember the things I've said. I'll march as long as I can, and I'll tell these stories as long as I can, but I'm counting on you guys,' she shared, referring to young people.
'I've lived long enough to see us at our very worst, and I've seen us rise and do things I could have never imagined,' she said further. 'And I see us faltering again.'
Throughout this trip, I was struck deeply by the experience of standing at the sites where such great evils occurred — and by what the silencing of this history could mean for our country's future. It is a common adage that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, but it was only while standing outside the Montgomery Capitol, where Confederate and Civil Rights monuments stand side by side, watching an anti-Trump 'Hands Off!' protest develop, that I truly grasped the danger of this moment.
Too many of us have fallen for the pernicious fallacy that America has moved past these awful events. But our nation has yet to recover from Jim Crow. Alabama only legalized interracial marriage in 2000. In parts of the Deep South, white parents kept high school proms effectively segregated through the early 2000s by hosting private dances for their children. Mississippi did not officially ratify the Constitution's 13th amendment — which abolished slavery — until 2013.
As I returned home from the airport to the supposedly political safe haven of New York City, I couldn't stop thinking about a fact I learned on this trip: that Wall Street is named after a wall built by enslaved people. Then I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that many people may never know such history.
As MLK's son Martin Luther King III said when he spoke to my class, remembering history 'is not about collective guilt, but about collective responsibility. You have to ask yourself what kind of America you want to create.'
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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