Trump's Attacks on Black History Betray America

New York Times

7 days ago

The Trump administration is in a hurry to bury not only America's future but also its past. Burying futures usually involves burying the truths of history.
Right now the Trump administration has been systematically attacking Black history. It's set about purging Black historical content from government websites and social media accounts (only restoring a few items after being called out), removing Black history books from libraries, eliminating Black history observances, butchering the reputations of historians and starving libraries, museums, universities and historical institutions of funding. At this rate, many Americans could one day believe that George Floyd 'dies after medical incident during police interaction,' as the Minneapolis Police Department put it in its first public statement on the matter, and that the officer Derek Chauvin attempted to save his life.
There is a precedent for this, of course. Consider what happened in downtown Atlanta beginning on Sept. 22, 1906. Grotesque newspaper headlines detailing alleged assaults, later referred to as a 'carnival of rapes,' mobilized white Atlantans into a mob. The violence over the next few days snatched the lives of around 40 Black Atlantans and two white Atlantans. Black Atlantans were forced to organize a self-defense, with some community members arming themselves. The carnage largely ceased with the arrival of a state militia.
What became known as the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 had been several months in the making. It was an election year, and all year long, candidates for governor and their propagandists had enraged white Atlantans with tales of 'uppity' Black Atlantans refusing to stay 'in their place.'
'Uppity' Black Atlantans like J. Max Barber, the editor of The Voice of the Negro, perhaps the first Southern magazine to be edited by Black people. Barber had dedicated the magazine to rendering current events and 'history so accurately given and so vividly portrayed that it will become a kind of documentation for the coming generations.'
Born in South Carolina, Barber had come a long way from the place of his parents, who had been enslaved. After graduating from Virginia Union University in 1903, he moved to Atlanta to edit The Voice of the Negro. He secured contributors including the renowned educator Mary Church Terrell and the Atlanta University historian W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1905, Barber joined Du Bois and 27 others in forming the Niagara Movement, a predecessor of the N.A.A.C.P. One of the Niagara Movement's main initial outlets: Barber's Voice of the Negro, which touted 15,000 subscribers.
Barber refused to publish the lie about the causes of the Atlanta massacre in 1906. 'There has been no 'carnival of rapes' in and around Atlanta,' he wrote. 'There has been a frightful carnival of newspaper lies.' He figured 'this mob got its first psychological impulse from Tom Dixon's 'Clansman,'' which 'came to Atlanta last winter' as a play.
Thomas Dixon Jr. had published 'The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan' in 1905, depicting Klan attacks as heroic acts of justice. D.W. Griffith adapted the novel for his 1915 film 'The Birth of a Nation.' One of the film's intertitles had been written by the president of the United States, who screened the film in the White House. 'The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation,' Woodrow Wilson had written in 1902, 'until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South to protect the Southern country.'
The Trump administration's framing of Black history as 'D.E.I.' — and 'D.E.I.' as harming white Americans — recasts its attack on Black history as protecting white Americans. As administering justice. Which is the justification of nearly every Klan and racist mob attack in history. The justification of the Atlanta attack in 1906.
When Barber challenged the 'carnival of rapes' justification for the Atlanta Race Massacre in 1906, Gov. Joseph Terrell of Georgia and his Atlanta allies weaponized the criminal legal system. They threatened Barber with arrest. Police officers surveilled Barber's office. Sound familiar?
Barber 'did not care to be made a slave on a Georgia chain gang.' He ran away from Georgia slavery by another name (just as there are some Americans today who are fleeing red states — and even the nation itself — out of fear). Barber fled with The Voice of the Negro on financial life support. The magazine died in Chicago in 1907.
Barber's career documenting Black life and history died, too. The electrifying writer became a dentist in Philadelphia. He contributed to a few campaigns, such as erecting a statue for John Brown at the abolitionist's upstate New York gravesite in 1935 that still stands. But terror had largely silenced Barber's voice of the Negro.
Life is named story. Afterlife is named history. Racist Americans have murdered Black lives and tried to murder Black afterlives, Black stories and Black history, Black storytellers and Black historians. So when Black people die, what we created, what we contributed, what we changed, what we documented dies, too. No funeral. Just gone from memory.
President Trump's raid on the Black historical record is a raid on the opportunity for all Americans to know the endurance of racial inequity and injustice are consequences of the enduring history of anti-Black racist policy and violence, not what's wrong with Black people as a group. For Americans to know Black history is to know how Black ingenuity over the years has benefited them, how Black-led antiracist movements helped bring into being more equity and justice between Black people and white people, between Latino, Asian, and Native Americans and white Americans, between white men and women, between superrich white men and low- and middle-income white men. After all, the Ku Klux Klan didn't just terrorize Black Americans.
Klan attacks are most remembered for whom they murdered. They are less remembered for what they murdered: all the Black towns, businesses, homes, churches, libraries, publications and careers. The very things that preserved public memory of Black history.
In 1949 Barber died in Philadelphia. He was not murdered in public, like other victims of the Atlanta Race Massacre in 1906, but he was murdered from public memory. His ability to create public memory was murdered: the point of Mr. Trump's attack on Black history.