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New York Times
5 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Trump's Attacks on Black History Betray America
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 It's set about purging Black historical content from government websites and social media accounts (only restoring a few items after being called out), removing Black history books from libraries,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.
Forbes
5 days ago
- General
- Forbes
Attitudes Toward The Police Five Years After George Floyd's Death
Lost in much of the news coverage of the 5th anniversary of George Floyd's death were reports on how Americans, especially black Americans, view their local police now. News reports focused on reforms of police practices and possible actions by the Trump administration. Yet the passage of time has affected opinions of both blacks and whites. Gallup has a large reservoir of polls that ask people about racial attitudes generally and about views of local police. In their averaging of four polls from 2024, Gallup found that blacks' confidence in their local police force now stands at 64%, nine points above the low of 55% in 2022. Black confidence was still significantly below white confidence, at 77%. In another question, slightly more than two-thirds of blacks, 67%, said local police treat people like them fairly. This response was also up nearly 10 points from 2022, when 58% gave that response. Polling organizations conducted a significant number of new polls after George Floyd's death in 2020. Americans generally saw his death at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin as murder, and the polls showed that large numbers of whites and nonwhites said his killing was not an isolated incident. After Chauvin's trial, a CBS News/YouGov poll in 2021 found that 75% of those surveyed thought that the jury had reached the right verdict in convicting him. In polls taken at the time, blacks reported they had had more negative interactions with police than their white counterparts. But one finding in the polling was especially intriguing. More blacks than whites (41% to 33%) in a June 2020 Monmouth University poll said they or a family member had had an experience where a police officer helped keep them safe in a potentially dangerous situation. Many reforms targeting police misconduct have enjoyed widespread public support. Large majorities have endorsed body camera requirements and a ban on chokeholds, for example. But whites and blacks did not endorse defunding the police, as the results of an Ipsos/USA Today poll showed. Support for reforming the police was 51%, while 19% opposed this, and nearly three in ten, (29%), neither supported nor opposed it. But support for defunding the police was 18% (14% among whites and 28% among blacks), while 11% supported abolishing the police (9% and 22%). Low levels of support for defunding the police may explain why support for the Black Lives Matter movement and its campaign to defund the police has been consistently lower than support for the police as a whole and local police. Over the years the Harris/Harvard Center for American Political Studies has asked about police and Black Lives Matter favorability. In their new mid-May poll, 66% of registered voters had a favorable opinion of the police (22% unfavorable), with the positive response trailing only that of the top-rated institution, the military, at 77%. But in seven polls taken in 2024, support for Black Lives Matter among registered voters was around 45%. It never reached a majority. (Harvard/Harris has not asked about Black Lives Matter in 2025). What makes the new Gallup finding and that of other polls of an uptick in police favorability among blacks important is that we have seen this pattern before. Pollsters do not regularly track reactions to individuals killed by police, but occasional polls frequently show opinion of the police returning to the level of polls taken immediately after such an instance. A 1997 Public Opinion Quarterly article 'Racial Differences in Attitudes toward the Police' by Stephen A. Tuch and Ronald Weitzer showed this pattern beginning with the killing of Eulia Love, a black woman killed by Los Angeles Police Department officers in 1979 through the beating of a black man Rodney King by the LAPD in 1991. A series of polls taken by Quinnipiac University in New York City after the deaths there of Amandou Diallo by New York City police officers in 1999 and Sean Bell in 2006 shows the same pattern of a steep drop but a gradual return to more positive attitudes. Between 2016 and 2020, the Pew Research Center showed a sharp drop in views that police were doing an excellent or good job on conduct such as using the right amount of force, but then recorded an uptick in 2023. Reforms of police misconduct are necessary, but most Americans and especially most black Americans tell pollsters they need and want police in their neighborhoods and communities, and a considerable number of them say the police have helped them.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
The Trump administration's toxic view of police reform
I was sworn in as the first-ever community safety commissioner for Minneapolis in August 2022. I began that role more than two years after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer in that city, murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck and back for more than nine minutes and more than a year after a jury convicted Chauvin of second- and third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. My mission was to oversee and integrate five departments: 911, the city fire department, emergency management, police, and neighborhood safety (formerly the Office of Violence Prevention). I set as my goal the development of 'a more effective, integrated approach to public safety,' to include a comprehensive 21st-century safety strategy. While I believe I laid a foundation for improvement and achieved marked crime reduction, my administration faced institutional resistance and generally inadequate resources. I retired in September 2023 not long after the Justice Department announced its findings that the Minneapolis Police Department and the city of Minneapolis had committed and were committing civil rights violations. DOJ found that the police department was using excessive force, including unjustified deadly force and unreasonable use of stun guns; unlawfully discriminating against Black people and Native American people; and violating the rights of people engaged in protected speech. The Justice Department also found that Minneapolis, when responding to calls for assistance, had discriminated against people with behavioral health disabilities. In January 2025, before President Joe Biden left office, Minneapolis and its police department cooperated with the DOJ in accepting a consent decree to guide the city's and the department's efforts toward reform and restorative justice. But last week, President Donald Trump's DOJ invalidated not only the consent decree in Minneapolis, but also one with the Louisville Metro Police Department (and Louisville/Jefferson County metro government) that was hammered out in 2024, more than four years after police there wrongly killed Breonna Taylor. The DOJ also announced that it's ending investigations into policing in Phoenix; Trenton, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City; and the Louisiana State Police. Astoundingly, Harmeet Dhillon, Trump's assistant attorney general in charge of civil rights, didn't dispute the findings underpinning either consent decree. She simply characterized them as 'overbroad' and said such agreements 'divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs, turning that power over to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, often with an anti-police agenda.' Dhillon continued: 'Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division's failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.' There's a synonym for such verbiage: garbage. To be more specific: toxic garbage. I have devoted the better part of my life to police work and public safety. I am a firm believer in community policing, the cooperation between local law enforcement and the people of the local community it serves. The argument that dismissing the consent decrees will improve law enforcement by 'returning' it to local control is mistaken. In fact, this action will reduce the effectiveness of local policing, which has enjoyed a fruitful partnership with federal law enforcement. Even worse, it will weaken the bonds between local police agencies and the communities because members of those communities will feel they have no place to seek justice when their local force violates their civil rights. Without mutual trust and respect, local police agencies are bound to fail. We can presume that Dhillon is articulating the Trump administration's view of justice. Such a view, however, is either the product of ignorance of the constitutional foundation of American law, or it is a willful denial of that foundation. Whatever the cause, the decision to invalidate the consent decrees is outrageous and terrifying. Pushing back on Dhillon's assertion that the consent decrees were unwarranted and a reflection of anti-police bias, Kristen Clarke, who led the Civil Rights Division before Dhillon did, said: 'To be clear, [the] investigations [on which the consent decrees were founded] were led by career attorneys, based on data, body camera footage and information provided by officers themselves, and the reforms set forth in consent decrees were carefully negotiated with the full support of law enforcement leaders and local officials.' Every community in the United States is subject to the rights and responsibilities set forth in the Constitution and in the laws that flow from the Constitution. A violation of civil rights is a crime whether it is committed in a blue, red or purple state, in Minneapolis or Louisville. It is a self-evident truth and the entire sum and substance of democracy. It cannot be twisted with fatuous words into something else. As an American and as a longtime American peace officer, I feel a combination of shame, disgust and disbelief that the Justice Department would abdicate its role in making law enforcement agencies follow the Constitution. We, as Americans, simply cannot consent to this. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Darnella Frazier 5 years after George Floyd's murder: ‘We did not forget'
The Brief Darnella Frazier was at the site of the encounter where Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, recording the video that later sparked worldwide protest and efforts for police reform. On the five-year anniversary of his death, she has taken to social media to say his legacy has not been forgotten. Minneapolis officials say they continue to work toward police reform in Minneapolis, despite uncertainty at the federal level. (FOX 9) - Five years after George Floyd was murdered by former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, the woman who filmed the video that showed the majority of the encounter – that led to subsequent protests throughout the city in the following days – says in a new social media post that she has not forgotten the encounter, and has no plans to stay silent. Darnella Frazier post On May 25, 2020, Darnella Frazier recorded a portion of the encounter between Floyd and Chauvin, during which Floyd is pinned under Chauvin's knee for a little more than 9 minutes - later determined to be a contributing factor in his death. Frazier later testified during Chauvin's trial. In a social media post, Frazier is recalling the legacy of Floyd since the fateful encounter. "Just imagine how he'd feel knowing he's still remembered and his name is still being honored, his story is still being told, his pictures are still being displayed, and his memorial is still a powerful memory," the post says in part. Describing the scene she saw while recording, Frazier went on to address the aftermath in the day and years that followed. "We did not forget about what happened to you. We crowded the streets behind you. We did not forget your cry's. We marched and demanded justice for you. We did not forget how your life was taken from you," the post says, before concluding that she will "never be silent." Several events were held leading up to the anniversary of Floyd's death, including a festival featuring food vendors and music at George Floyd Square, that ended with a vigil and prayer. What's next Created to institute systemic police reforms in the aftermath of Floyd's death, the Department of Justice filed a motion last week to dismiss the federal consent decree against the City of Minneapolis Mayor Frey said the city will move forward with policing reform regardless of what is decided at the federal level, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara has also expressed the department is committed to change. The city also has a separate consent decree agreement with the State of Minnesota.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Remembering George Floyd, Five Years After His Death
Commemorations were held across the U.S. to mark five years since George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, sparking global protests. In Houston, Floyd's hometown, his family gathered near his grave for a memorial service led by Rev Al Sharpton. Meanwhile, Minneapolis hosted a gospel concert and church service as part of its annual Rise and Remember Festival at George Floyd Square. Floyd's aunt, Angela Harrelson, urged the public to keep fighting for justice and reform, saying the movement must continue. Floyd was murdered in 2020 by Officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on his neck for over nine minutes during an arrest.
