Reflections on Black History: Looking back to now – This moment in Black history
For this Black History Month, the Banner reached out to members of our community and asked them to share their thoughts and feelings about our Black history and culture. We think you will find their responses as inspirational as we did. — Ronald Mitchell, Publisher and Editor, Bay State Banner
Looking back to now: This moment in Black history
by Brian Wright O’Connor
What will historians say a century from now about this moment in Black history?
Looking back, will they see the first quarter of the 21st century as a pivotal moment of retrenchment, comparable to the imposition of Jim Crow after the promises of the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction? Will Donald Trump be viewed as the Roger Taney of our time — using the executive branch the way the 1850s Supreme Court justice used the courts in the Dred Scott decision to halt challenges to slavery by abolitionists?
Or will history judge this moment as a just another step in the continuing struggle for social, political and economic advancement for African Americans?
Boston-area historians, sociologists and professors differ on whether we’re truly living through a “hinge moment” of racial regression but agree that the profound challenges unleashed by a White House intent on rolling back Black progress requires heightened vigilance and action.
Karilyn Crockett, an author and professor of urban history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looks at the blizzard of White House executive orders negatively impacting education, health care, diversity initiatives, foreign aid, environmental justice, Black federal employment, fair housing, voting rights and civil rights and wonders how far it will go.
“We don’t even know all of what we’re in for,” she says, “and we’re less than a month into it. All the signs are that we’re in an unprecedented moment in the modern age.”
The agenda laid out in Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” a Heritage Foundation manifesto produced by Trump allies, is the acknowledged blueprint for the administration’s efforts to weaken antidiscrimination laws, gut enforcement of civil rights and voting rights, undermine Black political power and restore the racist death penalty.
Rallying against the Trump machine, says Crockett, requires the kind of courage shown by crusading teacher and journalist Ida B. Wells in her campaigns against lynching and in support of women’s rights in the late 19th and early 20th century. Her work in Memphis was sparked by the murders of a local Black grocer and two of his employees by a white mob after an incident involving a competing white merchant.
“When they were lynched, it was a wake-up call and undid the lie that lynching was about Black men who had ogled white women. It was about Black men owning property and competing with whites,” says the MIT professor.
Burnett, hounded by death threats, relocated to Chicago where she continued her advocacy into the 1930s. Her probes into the economic resentment underlying white mob violence were borne out by the widespread violence against Blacks in the years shortly after World War I, when returning Black vets helped bolster the Black economy. The complete destruction in 1921 of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” by a mob inflamed by reports of indecent contact between a young Black man and a white woman left hundreds dead and the Greenwood neighborhood burned to the ground.
“Whether it’s through the written word or other means, truthtellers must document the stories and spread the powerful message of liberation. We need to bring that to the public square and to schools and universities,” says Crockett.
To former state Rep. Byron Rushing, a historian who soldiered on the front lines of civil rights demonstrations and voting rights battles in the South, the fact that so many of President Trump’s initiatives disproportionately affect people of color comes as no surprise.
“I don’t think we would have Trump if Barack Obama didn’t win twice,” says Rushing. “It set up a backlash.” The former legislator routinely tells those seeking his perspective to look at the 1850s, when abolitionist pressure to limit the growth of human bondage in new states prompted slaveholders and their northern sympathizers to pass regressive laws like the Fugitive Slave Act.
The Dred Scott decision, which denied rights of citizenship to a slave who had accompanied his owner to slavery-free U.S. states and territories, was written by Taney, who came from a Catholic slaveholding family in Maryland.
His argument that Blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” was invalidated by post-Civil War amendments to ban slavery and establish birthright citizenship. In the Jim Crow era, echoes of Taney were heard in the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision that sanctioned the apartheid notion of “separate but equal.”
Everything can be undone
Backsliding on racial progress is nothing new, says Rushing, who counts himself among those who unpleasantly learned that lesson. “I made the same mistake that a lot of Black radicals made who fought for change in the sixties. When we won something, we believed it would be forever. We didn’t think the slaveholders would come back. But, of course, they did. They hadn’t gone anywhere. I think it’s really important that people understand that everything could be undone.”
James Jennings, a sociologist who has taught at a number of universities in the Boston area, views the Trump agenda within the context of constant resistance to Black progress, particularly at moments of advancements in wealth, income and land control. He sees Trump as the latest manifestation — albeit in a highly visible and virulent form — of social forces committed to using divide-and-conquer tactics to limit the progress of low-income people across all racial lines.
Trump signaled his tactics, says Jennings, when he weighed in on the 1989 case of the Central Park Five, calling for the death penalty to be used on a group of Black teenagers falsely accused of a horrific sexual assault in Manhattan. At the time, Trump was a media-hungry real-estate developer yet to gain fame as a reality-show host or political candidate.
“He’s never atoned for that and was never held accountable for his statements,” says Jennings. “His rhetoric around DEI is just another way of telling his base he’s going after Black people.”
A more systematic way of organizing opposition, says Jennings, is needed to reach across racial and class lines to form a stronger front against Trump.
Is it just hope that an alliance might be struck between those who applauded Kendrick Lamar’s social critique of America in his halftime Super Bowl appearance with those who could appreciate it — if they understood it?
“Community organizing has to go beyond silos of race and issues and neighborhoods,” says Jennings. “At the same time, we have to reach out to the millions of people, many of them Black and Latino, who supported a candidate who doesn’t represent their economic interests.”
Joseph N. Cooper, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, doesn’t downplay the backlash by the alt-right and white supremacists to the election of Barack Obama and the Black Lives Matter movement supercharged by the murder of George Floyd.
“But you have to look at that in the context of a consistent pattern in American history to repress and even destroy movements to secure greater freedom, civil rights and economic rights,” he says.
In the 1960s alone, Cooper points out, the FBI wiretapped Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., ran infiltration and counterinsurgency operations against the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement. In the same decade, Malcolm X was assassinated and King died a year to the day after denouncing the Vietnam War and the diversion of funds by the military-industrial complex from the War on Poverty.
“We need to contextualize,” says Cooper. “For most of the last 250 years, even the last 400, it’s been pretty lethal for our entire experience on this continent. The intentions of people who seek to preserve power, monopolize resources and exacerbate social divisions have not changed. And if you’re saying that we’re now living in times that are worst, then you’re ignoring the atrocity of the trans-Atlantic trade.”
Cooper doesn’t doubt a heightened level of fearmongering is being used to target people, whether migrants or African Americans, but says “these are not new talking points.”
“What is needed is not a philosophy of scarcity — we have more than enough wealth in this country to address social needs – but a philosophy of abundance,” says Cooper.
To Karilyn Crockett, the assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021 represented an assault on democracy. But now the assault is coming from the president in the form of direct attacks on our constitutional order. “This feels like a full-blown scaling out of Jan. 6. It’s not just the ballot box under attack. It’s truly our citizens who are being targeted. This is a horrific moment of turning democracy against itself without consent.”
Rushing thinks back to the near-death of U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate in 1856 by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, who repeatedly struck the Massachusetts abolitionist with a cane. Brooks, enraged by Sumner’s insults to a slave-supporting kinsman serving in the Senate, walked calmly out of the chamber after the attack.
“People were so crazy you could beat up a senator on the floor of the Senate — and never get arrested,” says Rushing, noting that Brooks resigned from Congress only to be soon re-elected.
Has America regressed to that level of impunity? “Think about it,” says Rushing with more than a hint of foreboding. “Trump pardoned those Capitol rioters. Many were leaders of white supremacist groups. They waved Confederate flags and assaulted police. Did we ever imagine that happening or the pardons that followed?”
Brian Wright O’Connor is a writer and political consultant who has been publishing news stories, feature articles and commentaries in the Banner for over four decades. A veteran of local, state and national political contests, he has also run national media campaigns in a career spanning work in journalism, on Capitol Hill and in the non-profit sector.
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