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jim crow
The Last Generation to Live Under Jim Crow Have Lived Long Enough to Witness Trump
The xenophobic, bigoted, and cruel policies of the Trump administration are bringing back traumatic memories of American racism and all the nightmares that went with it.
Mar 01, 2025
Today, racism remains a poisonous force in America. Fascism and authoritarianism are on the rise and President Donald Trump is giving voice to such hate, making it state policy and central to his presidential agenda. Recently, he tried to ban birthright citizenship by executive order to limit the number of babies of color born in the United States, though such an act is clearly unconstitutional. Currently, at least two federal judges have blocked Trump’s executive orders to redefine birthright citizenship. He has also issued executive orders seeking to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion. He clearly does not want Black, Brown, and Asian people to be on an equal footing with Whites.
All his most recent efforts are consistent with his longstanding attempts to limit voting rights for people of color. Trump has voiced the most vicious comments over the years: he says that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”; he slammed Haitian migrants for trying to enter the United States by claiming hundreds of thousands of them flowing into the country “probably have AIDS”; Haiti, El Salvador, and African lands are “shithole countries”; migrants are “animals“; and, as he also put it, there has to be “some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. Finally, Trump has repeatedly stated his admiration for dictators and strong abusive rulers.
Trump’s Protection of Afrikaners
Trump, his enablers in the Republican Party, and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters should really be called Make America White Again (MAWA). He and those groups have generated a blueprint for increasing authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia. It’s crystal clear that this enmity toward Black and Brown people is driven in part by demographic changes in the United States that threaten to place Whites in the minority. On the subject of race, Trump is sensitive only when it comes to discrimination against White people. Recently, he signed an executive order that would protect White South Africans from discrimination and allow them to resettle in the United States.
As I witness the rise of White supremacy in America (again) and the president’s ever-growing list of unconstitutional and illegitimate acts, I remember the segregation and Jim Crow of my youth in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. And yet, being a member of the last generation of Black Americans to live under Jim Crow and the culture of racism that accompanied it left me, then, with a certain hope and belief in the future. The history of my generation’s efforts to make change lent credence to the idea that all of us have the power to eliminate racism. It’s just a question of doing the necessary work.
On any day of my youth, sitting in our living room in a housing project in Kinston, North Carolina, I could pick up a copy of Jet magazine, Amsterdam News, the Pittsburgh Courier, or Ebony Magazine, and the headline would scream something like: “Another Colored Person Dies on the Highway.” The reason: a “White-only” hospital wouldn’t treat them. This happened with alarming frequency and left me with many visions of Black people bleeding to death on the black tarmac of highways in Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and elsewhere in the South. I imagined loved ones or even myself having an accident and not being able to get treatment because no Black doctors could be located. Mostly, though, I worried about my father because as a professional gambler — his cardplaying was the total source of economic support for our family — he sometimes found himself in remote areas of the deep South, far from medical facilities that would treat Blacks.
The most notorious such case occurred in North Carolina when I was eight years old. On April 1, 1950, Doctor Charles Drew, a Black man who was the internationally famous inventor of the blood bank, was in an auto accident near city of Burlington. The rumor was that Doctor Drew had bled to death because a “White-only” hospital wouldn’t treat him (though, in fact, he had received a transfusion at an all-White hospital). Black people believed such rumors then because they knew of segregated hospitals that would indeed not treat them. I can still feel the heat of the rage of many Black friends who came to our home and could talk of little else. The fact that segregation was state-sponsored only made such a disregard for human life worse.
Segregation and Jim Crow laws were designed to take from Black people our ability to function as anything but mere appendages of the ruling White society. There were significant attempts to change such laws and locally enforced customs through demonstrations, direct action, litigation, and legislation in the 1950s and 1960s, but they didn’t succeed in fully correcting the damage of racism in our society, which, as the Trumpian moment indicates, remains pervasive and unyielding.
But within the Black community, my family, friends, and many others taught me about life and survival, offering me attention and love.Mr. Peter G. Fuller (and yes, we did use “mister” then), a favorite of mine and an older friend of my parents, worked as a farm agent, teaching Black farmers how to grow corn, beets, peas, tobacco, and other produce. He was six feet tall and 66 years old, with a brown complexion, an open, bright-eyed face, bushy eyebrows speckled with grey, and slightly protruding teeth. He walked with a loping gait, always chewing a twig as he worked. When I was with him, he was direct and to the point, talking to me as if I were a grownup and listening to what I had to say.
Looking back, I still admire Mr. Fuller for his patience. My mother would later tell me that, when I was six, some adults avoided me because I asked too many questions, but not Mr. Fuller. His wife Loise called him “Peter G” and he was usually in his garden in the early morning hours just off the road that led to our project. I always knew I could find him there. On the day I have in mind, Mr. Fuller was hitched to a mule that was pulling a plow, the reins on his broad shoulders, his hands on that plow. As he turned over the soil in his large garden, I walked behind him in the space between the plowed rows and asked him questions. He was such a favorite of mine because he had time for children. He never rushed you, listened very closely to your questions, and gave you detailed answers, as in the first talk I remember us having:
“Mr. Fuller, are you afraid of the mule?”
“No,” he answered smiling, “this mule is better behaved than most people.”
“Mr. Fuller, why don’t you say horse?”
“Well, Douglas, I believe you call a thing or animal by its rightful name. But that is a good question — a mule is a mule, and a horse is a horse. A mule is part donkey and part horse.”
“Really!!” I exclaimed, this being news to me.
“That’s right, Douglas.”
“Mr. Fuller, do you plow with a horse?”
“I don’t — mules are better work animals than horses.”
“Why are you plowing?”
“Well, if you want to eat well, it’s a good idea.”
“You plow to eat?”
“Well, you plow so you can turn over the rich soil and plant corn seeds. When the corn grows you eat the corn.”
“How did you learn to plow?”
“My daddy taught me when I was a boy like you.” Then he added after a pause, “It’s important to plow to grow stuff, just like school is important to learn things.”
“Mr. Fuller, would you teach me how to plow?”
“Yes, of course,” he answered, pulled back on the reins, and shouted, “Whoa mule! Whoa mule!” The mule stopped. He then instructed me to stand right behind the plow while he stood behind me. He held the reins in his right hand, lifted me up under his left arm, and placed my hands on the handle of the plow. He made a clicking sound toward the mule and off we went. After a few minutes, the mule slowed down, lifted its tail, and grunted, making a bowel movement. The foul smell hit us in the face. Mr. Fuller and I laughed. He didn’t seem to mind the smell of the manure, and when we saw that he was also stepping in it, we stopped to laugh some more.
“Will it hurt the garden plants?”
“No, it will help the plants,” he answered. “It’s what’s called fertilizer. The fertilizer and the nutrients in the soil help the plants to grow. Sometimes we think something is a waste, but it helps us live.” Mr. Fuller put me down as we talked.
“How did you learn all this stuff, Mr. Fuller?” I asked, intrigued and curious.
“I went to college, but I learned a lot of it from my daddy. College is the place you go to learn things and it is important for colored people.”
A few years later Mr. Fuller told me he had attended the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, a school established by White people in 1868 to train Native Americans and Blacks to become teachers and learn trades in agriculture, cabinetmaking, printing, and tailoring. He graduated in agriculture.
On every visit, after that first talk, Mr. Fuller would make a clicking sound and off we would go to continue plowing until I got tired. Then we’d stop under a shady tree overlooking the garden and discuss what seemed to me like everything in the world. Mr. Fuller always had a lunchbox with a mason jar of water, grapes, an apple, a sandwich, and cake. He always seemed to have food for me, too, and when I asked how come, he responded, “I just do,” then adding, “I thought you might come by to see me.”
When I became more knowledgeable about my place in the world during my teen years, I began to ask Mr. Fuller about his past. Did he remember slavery? “No,” he responded with a laugh, “I am not that old, but my parents were slaves as children — I learned a lot from them, yes, I did.” He gazed at me intently.
Born in 1881, in Kinston, North Carolina, he was in his mid-sixties when, at five and six years old, I visited him in his garden plot. So, although he spoke to me of many things, he did not disclose parts of his story which I imagine he thought might frighten me. He left out, in fact, certain fearful, seminal events of his youth that I now know occurred in the nearby city of Wilmington, North Carolina, before he reached the age of 20.
The Wilmington Massacre of 1898
Wilmington is a mere 87 miles from Kinston. On November 10, 1898, a mob of 1,500 White supremacists marched into the Black section of town, burned down the Black newspaper office building, and killed up to 100 Black people.
White-supremacist-directed violence was increasing there for two significant reasons then: growing Black political power and editorials written by Alex Manly for the local Black newspaper, The Daily Record, condemning miscegenation laws. Manly was on the list of Blacks to be killed that day. However, he had been warned and so escaped a few days prior to the mob violence. Manly had written that it was no worse for a Black man to be intimate with a White woman than for a White man to be intimate with a Black woman. In reaction, the White racist community distributed his editorial widely and used it as a pretext for the mass killing of Blacks that followed.
Mr. Fuller was 17 at the time of those murders. Living in Kinston, he couldn’t have escaped the fear and tension. If you were Black and so close to atrocities committed by Whites, fear traveled and spread fast.
Reconstruction — Violence Against Black People After the Civil War
Mr. Fuller was born a few years after Reconstruction (1865-1877), the period following the Civil War during which the United States sought to reintegrate the southern states into the union and deal with the status of Black people. It was also a time when White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils used extreme violence against Black people to keep them from becoming full citizens, a time when an estimated more than 2,000 Blacks were lynched, the ultimate form of terror.
Like my grandparents during their young adult years, Mr. Fuller, inspired by the lives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and others, began to see glimmers of hope in the views of W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Carter G. Woodson, the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and the exhortations of Ida B. Wells and Mary McLeod Bethune. Activists of that era were developing ideas about community, education, organizing, survival, and being responsible for others that would bode well for future Black generations. The accomplishments of Blacks of that era fed the development of much that was to come in politics, education, and the arts, and remain part of a centuries-long struggle to move this country toward the sort of authentic democracy that Donald Trump stands strongly against.
As I grew in years and understanding, my memories of talking with Mr. Fuller enabled me to feel far more deeply my closeness to my ancestors and the horrors of slavery that they endured. Donald Trump’s most recent acts and his unending attacks on “diversity” have only brought such conversations back ever more strongly.
Martin Luther King Defining the Civil Rights Movement
I was born in 1942, only 77 years after the 13th Amendment formally abolished slavery. The recentness of slavery, my unbroken connection to enslaved people through my heritage, being a member of the last generation of Blacks to live and grow to adulthood under segregation and Jim Crow all created in me a feeling of responsibility to the past and to the future. Along with my family, Mr. Fuller was the central person who sparked my dedication to my ancestors and to learning about our collective past.
Now, the xenophobic, bigoted, and cruel policies of the Trump administration are bringing back traumatic memories of American racism and all the nightmares that went with it. Yet the words of Reverend Martin Luther King — “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” — continue to inspire me during such dangerous, increasingly dismal times.
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How Years of GOP Voter Suppression Helped Trump Win in 2024
Numerous efforts over the years, at numerous governmental levels, have worked to play games with the electoral process and interfere with—and outright eliminate—certain voters’ right to vote.
Feb 01, 2025
As the Trump presidency digs its claws into the country—winner take all!—I look on in terrified amazement as he begins arrogantly instituting what can only be called his plan to devolve America back to the good old days: back to the era of Jim Crow certainty and whatever that might mean.
We’re white, we’re Christian, and we’re the best! Just ask Pete Hegseth.
This is the “Gulf of America”! It’s not President Donald Trump’s smugly renamed Gulf of Mexico; it’s the hole in the country’s collective consciousness, which Mr. President is hellbent on expanding. His plan is to make America safe for what it used to be and allow our old, beloved prejudices to return. Deport the illegals! Kill wokeness! Kill understanding and awareness!
All of which leaves a few glaring questions hovering over the daily news: How the hell did this guy win a majority of votes? Is he really aligned with the nation’s primary beliefs? And if he isn’t... uh, what happened last November? Was the election rigged? Was it stolen? And if so, how? Do we live in a publicly proclaimed—yet fake—democracy?
This is a fascinatingly awkward question to ask, considering what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. A portion of the MAGA base—spurred on by their leader, who instantly proclaimed “fraud!”—stormed the capital, busted its windows, tasered the police, clomped through the halls, left a gift of excrement on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and politely asked that then-Vice President Mike Pence be hanged.
This time around, the Democrats had tea with the guy who beat them. They respected the transfer of power. They upheld our alleged democracy. But let’s be clear: There are questions that must be asked. Our system of government has serious flaws—it always has! And let’s be clear: When you’re in power–and want to stay in power—democracy, “the will of he people,” can be an enormous inconvenience.
All of which leads me to the amazing work of Greg Palast, who has been investigating the electoral process—tracking its flaws and lies–ever since the George W. Bush era. This time around, the essence of his analysis is this:
Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the presidency with 286 electoral votes.
And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.
This wasn’t done with the simple snap of a powerful finger. Palast outlines numerous efforts over the years, at numerous governmental levels (in particular, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia), to play games with the electoral process and interfere with—and outright eliminate—certain voters’ right to vote. These efforts include such tactics as rejecting mail-in ballots without valid reason, failing to enter newly registered voters in the voting rolls in time for them to vote in the presidential election, failing to count “provisional” ballots, and allowing registered voters to be challenged by ordinary citizens for extremely spurious reasons (e.g., their names match other names, such as a name in an obituary).
And who are these “certain voters” who are targeted? In essence, they’re voters of color: Black, Hispanic, Muslim or whatever, often identifiable as such by their names. And powerful Republicans target them because they’re statistically likely to vote Democratic.
And this brings up Palast’s recently released documentary: Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, which is available for view online. The term “vigilante,” with all its violent, KKK-esque implications, refers to those ordinary (white) citizens who have volunteered to be Republican name-checkers, looking for any and all possible reasons to challenge... oh, let us say, people with names such as Jose Garcia or James Brown. Challenge them bureaucratically, so their legitimacy as voters may be rescinded.
What I found utterly compelling about Vigilantes Inc. is the race-based—and historical—context in which the vigilantism is carried out. This documentary is about far more than the 2024 election. America’s present-moment racism is put under the harsh, glaring light of its own past—its post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow-era past, when efforts to “get around the 15th Amendment” included not only poll taxes (for Blacks only) and spurious questions (“how many jellybeans in the jar?”), but also outright intimidation and vicious violence.
In the documentary, Palast interviews Black voters who were “disappeared” from the voting rolls, intimidated, threatened, arrested—and enwraps such actions in the country’s past. For instance, the story is told of 10 Black women who were elected to the school board in Quitman, Georgia, in the early 2000s, shortly after Brian Kemp became Georgia’s secretary of state. He accused them of stuffing tampered ballots into mailboxes. The women faced multi-year prison sentences. They were ultimately acquitted, but one of the women had considered suicide and another, who suffered from lupus, died in the midst of the ordeal.
The hell the women endured brought up memories for people in the area of the horrific lynching of 13 Blacks in southern Georgia nearly a century earlier. One of them was a woman, Mary Turner, who happened to be in her eighth month of pregnancy. A mob surrounded her, hung her from a tree—upside down–by her ankles, then cut open her abdomen, while she was still alive. The unborn child fell to the ground, where the mobbed killed it.
This documentary opens our souls. Oh my God, the past is still alive, but the film’s primary vision is transcendent. This is not a film of us vs. them, but of love and extraordinary courage: the courage—of so many people—to create the democracy the country has not yet become,
As the film ends, the narrator says: “But spirits drowned will rise. America is a haunted house and our ruling dynasties have gone to war with our ghosts—the ghosts of our history. Until America hears those spirits, neither they, nor we, will be set free.”
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Voting Isn't Optional: Defend Our Democracy Against Project 2025’s Assault
If Trump wins and this far-right agenda is to put into motion, it will wreak havoc on Black communities in a way we haven’t seen since Jim Crow.
Nov 04, 2024
We are one day away from the election, and too much is at stake for Black people. The questioning around Vice President Kamala Harris' Blackness and misconceptions about her plans for Black people continue to distract voters from the far-right, destructive manifesto fueling Donald Trump’s agenda, Project 2025: a dangerous declaration of oppression that risks civil rights and the democratic fabric of our nation.
Project 2025 details a disturbing vision for the future of Black people in this country: One where we have no rights, no control of our bodies, none where we can’t afford groceries, we can’t afford housing, where our children can’t even learn their own history because it is erased and whitewashed, and where politicians can spread dangerous lies about Black people without recourse. This manifesto seeks to erode the authority of vital government agencies, giving unprecedented power to the executive branch, leaving so many Black communities devastated. By threatening discrimination laws and targeting initiatives promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, Project 2025 will unravel decades of hard-fought civil rights progress.And with little to no federal oversight historical patterns of discrimination against Black communities will also worsen.
Black communities know what it’s like to be at the hands of a government without checks and balances and no accountability.
One of the key civil rights standards Project 2025 seeks to eliminate critical safeguard that addresses unintentional discriminatory practices, is a backbone of civil rights protections. This is the disparate impact standard in discrimination cases. In 2013, in one of the largest fair lending cases in the DOJ’s history, Black customers in the Chicago area brought a large lawsuit against Wells Fargo after they paid $2,937 more in broker fees for their homes than similarly situated white customers. Without the disparate impact standard, the federal government would have been unable to demonstrate that Black communities had suffered disproportionate harm at the hands of Wells Fargo. At a time when the nation is grappling with a housing crisis, eliminating the disparate impact standard would exacerbate existing disparities and leave Black communities vulnerable to discriminatory housing and lending practices.
Project 2025 also seeks to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in our schools and businesses. In June, a U.S. federal court of appeals court deemed an Atlanta private equity fund unconstitutional for providing grants to women-owned and Black-owned companies, ignoring the systemic barriers that have historically excluded Black women from investment funding. And following the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, conservatives attacked critical programs designed to increase the number of Black medical doctors. In a world where Black mothers are dying more than anyone in childbirth, the need for Black doctors is needed more than ever. The Project 2025 manifesto seeks to take this further and delete all references to diversity, equity, and inclusion from in our federal regulations and legislation. But let’s be very clear about what this will mean: these efforts will sabotage contracts, harm Black-owned businesses, and perpetuate historical injustices within Black communities.
Project 2025's agenda will wreak havoc on Black communities in a way we haven’t seen since Jim Crow. Black communities know what it’s like to be at the hands of a government without checks and balances and no accountability. As we are one day out from the election, Black people must vote in mass. We must recognize the urgency of this threat to our democracy and lean on tangible solutions to defend our rights for many generations. It’s time to take back our power, and let our voices be heard. Vote like your life depends on it because it does. We need all hands on deck to protect our future.
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