We must holdfast to Rights & Freedoms
Being Ripped from the Book of Laws
I have a reverence and appreciation for the progress made for civil rights in my lifetime due to the persistence and perseverance of many who made it possible. They were the young radicals of my childhood who dared to stand up and take bold actions that were often met with physical harm and financial hardship, yet they persisted.
The active assault to remove that history from museums, curriculums, and textbooks, will not erase the work. Many men and women put their lives and livelihoods on the line so that I could be one of the first black kids in my hometown to integrate the all-white school. There were no protest marches in my small rural hometown. There were no stories written in the paper of record about the civil rights movement. We learned about it from our black community griots and the Jet and Ebony magazines found in our black households.
The inaccessibility of our history does not erase it or its achievements. The white overlords hope to minimize it until they can successfully spin their typical “Lost Cause” narrative around it. Once they have reframed the narrative, they gain support and assistance from the mis/uninformed masses providing justification and cover to repeal those gains. Such is the predictable cycle of white supremacy in America.
After the Civil War Black Americans still faced widespread segregation, discrimination, and violence because The Hayes Compromise of 1877 was basically a permission slip for southern states to enforce their racist Jim Crow laws with impunity. The Civil Rights Movement arose from these ongoing injustices. Organizations like the NAACP were established to pursue equality and social justice for African Americans.
It would take almost another century for those rights to actually be enjoyed. President Johnson urged members of Congress to honor Kennedy’s memory by passing a civil rights bill to end racial discrimination and segregation in public accommodations, public education, and federally assisted programs. In his address, Johnson declared,
“we have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”
Last week the Tennessee GOP House legislature passed a Nuevo Jim Crow style bill. This “Dismantle DEI Act” is the latest blatant attempt to dismantle the Civil Rights Act and its protections. The act would remove legal requirements for public entities to consider race, religion, or gender in hiring practices, effectively dismantling formal DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs within Tennessee’s public sector. Here’s “The Lost Cause” reframing being pushed to their base and other non-critical thinking people:
Republican leaders held a press conference backing the bill, saying that “DEI itself is racist.” They said, “if DEI stood for Diversity, Excellence, and Inclusion, it wouldn’t be racist,” but the “Equity” in DEI makes it racist.
The fact is, it wouldn’t matter what it was called, they wouldn’t support it. DEI programs ensure that all qualified individuals – regardless of background – have a fair chance in the process. DEI initiatives don’t “promote” exclusion; they work to remove historical barriers that have unfairly limited opportunities for many. Mind you, they already passed laws to prevent Tennessee schools from teaching DEI principles and forbidding historical truths to be taught and understood.
The lack of historical truths makes space for the southern supremacy narrative to be strengthened. This claim that DEI forces hiring based on identity and is somehow racist is an inverse blasphemous affront to the sacrifices and struggle of those who helped secure these rights. It’s a misleading narrative designed to justify the rollback of all the hard fought and won progress and to further maintain inequities that have long existed.
No better example of this than the recent letter from the Department of Education to institutions of learning across the nation.
“Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices,” read the letter from Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the education department.
“Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them—particularly during the last four years—under the banner of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’” read the letter.
To further add insult to injury this week, Tennessee House Republicans voted to transfer responsibilities for investigating discrimination complaints to the office of the Tennessee Attorney General, effectively dissolving the Tennessee Human Rights Commission. A Memphis Democrat said,
“I can think of no reason to move (investigative capacity) except to make it susceptible to the politics of the [Republican] AG’s office.”
The 60-year-old Tenneessee commission is a nonpartisan, independent agency responsible for enforcing civil rights laws in employment, housing and public accommodation as well as discrimination claims against the state of Tennessee. Title VI refers to federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities that receive federal funding, including state government.
Republicans have been relentless in their efforts to dismantle or disregard the rights that were secured as a result of the Civil Rights Movement. In the past decade and half, Republicans have held a trifecta control of the legislature and Governor’s office in Tennessee. During this time, they’ve passed many laws to criminalize already marginalized populations and further disenfranchise Black Americans and other marginalized populations.
The rate for disenfranchisement due to felony charges for Black adults in Tennessee is almost four times the national average, according to the Sentencing Project. Before the Civil Rights Act, denial of full citizenship rights resulted in economic hardship for many Black Americans, particularly in the South, with many being forced into sharecropping arrangements like one of my grandfather’s endured. This was not very different from slavery.
Here again, Tennessee leads the way, my hometown was a major hub for interstate slave trade, with slaves being transported through the county to markets in Mississippi and Louisiana because it was home to the largest slave trader in the US, Issac Franklin. Franklin co-founded the largest slave trading firm in the US, Franklin and Armfield. He often used his home, Fairview, as a stopping point for slave coffles being transported from the Upper South to the Deep South. Fairview is now a gated community for the ultra-wealthy complete with golf course, restaurant and lake access that has proudly “preserved” some of the original slave quarters which they built their new mansions around.
This has been the long enduring struggle of African Americans in this state and in the country. Many have gotten accustomed to these rights and maybe assumed they would be as hard to strip away as they were to gain. Not so. They are slowly over time being chipped away little by little –death by a thousand cuts: like a slow boiling frog.
American Democracy is an idea born of a Revolution 250 years ago to break free from tyranny. At its inception black people were there and fought for this country’s independence, motivated by a desire to fight for the ideals of liberty and freedom, including emancipation from the bondage of slavery that bought us here. Black Americans have had to continue to fight to realize those freedoms.
Every century we made a few more gains to bring us closer to enjoying those original ideals of liberty and freedom this country was founded on. The Civil Rights Movements bought us closer than we’d ever been but there has always been a white lash that found ways to ignore or repeal those rights and take us back to a time when white men ruled the land. Black folks are keenly aware of this recurring cycle.
It’s why we stay woke, sound the alarm, mobilize and continue to fight, as John Lewis said, “It’s the struggle of a lifetime.” This is a warning to ALL AMERICANS that it’s not just minorities and marginalized people whose rights are at risk. It’s every American.
We have a guy in the White House enamored with dictators, enabled by billionaires who created a 900-page action plan (Project 2025) to restructure America into a White Christian Nationalist nation. Since he took office, he has threatened the institutions that underpin our democratic principles, from those that inform and educate us to those that uphold the rules of law. He continues to threaten and alienate long standing allies while cozying up with our adversaries.
Now he is defying the courts charged with upholding the law. When the rule of law is gone, no one is safe, and we cease to be a democracy. That democracy is based on The Constitution. That book of laws holds our rights and freedoms. Don’t let them rip them out.
