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Facing Trump’s America

Douglas H. White

Recently, in an executive order, President Trump directed the removal of “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution. That order was, in essence, an attempt to rewrite history on race and gender. One-hundred-and-one-year-old Colonel James H. Harvey, one of the last of the famed Tuskegee airmen of World War II, blamed Trump, saying, “I’ll tell him to his face. No problem. I’ll tell him, you’re a racist.” In addition, government websites began scrubbing African-American history, including in the case of the National Park Service eliminating a photo of the famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman and descriptions of the brutal realities of slavery.

Black people in America have often led change in this society because our humanity and our liberties were so long suppressed and denied.

Black people in my family and community were, of course, descendants of the enslaved. In their presence (as I well remember), you could feel their closeness to that terrible time in our history. When that Smithsonian news came out, I thought about the killings, rapes, lynchings, breeding, and selling of Black people that was, for several hundred years, so much a part of life in the United States of America and that was, if Donald Trump had anything to say about it, no longer to be part of the true history of the United States. I didn’t have to be reminded of who I was or my status as a Black American that day, or of the history he’d like to wipe out, because I lived in the South in the 1950s and 1960s and racism and Jim Crow were then in my face every day of my existence.

So, let me tell Donald Trump a thing or two.

Long, long ago, in the course of my time in high school and college, I realized that Black people in the South were still dealing with a form of American fascism not so dissimilar from Apartheid in South Africa. At the time, Black southern activists were deeply engaged in transforming the structure of this society.

Such activism, I believed then and I believe now, began in 1619, the moment enslaved Africans were deposited in chains on American shores. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass became two spokespeople for those who had lived as slaves. Both tried to change the attitudes of the wider public. Later, many others, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey, would continue the work to end the legacies of slavery and eliminate all aspects of racism. During my youth, the North similarly had strong spokespeople for racial equality in Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. In the West, Cesar Chavez was organizing the United Farm Workers to improve the conditions of Latinos working in the fields of California and the Southwest. At the same time, the emerging American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Asian American movement were growing in a collective struggle against discrimination and racism.

Those organizations energized student movements nationwide through sit-ins and demonstrations and by getting arrested as they fought for civil rights. The Black Panther Party, the movement against the war in Vietnam, and the growing Feminist movement added thousands more actions to that struggle. Years later, such movements would also influence the development of the Black Lives Matter, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer movements and the National Domestic Worker Alliance.

My father always told me as a boy and later a young man: “Don’t go down to Alabama and Mississippi — those White-ass crackers down there don’t like Black folks.” But in 2019, I found myself in Montgomery, Alabama, the first capital of the Confederacy. All those years later, I could still hear my father’s voice ringing in my ears and had trepidations about being in that state with its racist history. I remembered the Montgomery Bus Boycott, demonstrations against White supremacy led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and young people in 1963, the water cannons and dogs used against Black children and adults, and racist Governor George Wallace’s attempt to block integration at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963, saying: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” I remember the horror of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, where four little girls were murdered by White racists.

In February of 2019, I traveled to Montgomery with other board members of my son Khary’s social justice organization, The Brotherhood Sister Sol, to visit the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice created by Bryan Stevenson, the activist, lawyer, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. At the Legacy Museum, visitors experience 400 years of American history that includes enslavement, racial terrorism, and mass incarceration. The National Memorial is the first institution of its kind dedicated to the legacy of the Black Americans who were the victims of the racial terror of lynching. (Four thousand four hundred of those lynchings have been documented in the post-Reconstruction era from 1877 to 1950 by the Equal Justice Initiative.)

That memorial includes 805 hanging steel rectangles representing each of the counties in the United States where lynchings took place. As I walked through them, I immediately went to those representing Lenoir County and Jones County, North Carolina, where most of my family was born and raised. One victim was listed in Lenoir County, Lazarus Rouse on August 1, 1916, and one, Jerome Whitefield, on August 14, 1921, in Jones County. I was informed by the Equal Justice Initiative that, during the Reconstruction period (1865 to 1876), nine other Black victims were lynched in those two counties. Four of them were killed in 1866 (their names unknown); the other five were Cater Grady, Daniel Smith, John Miller, and Robert Grady on January 24, 1869, and Amos Jones on May 28, 1869.

The Museum and Memorial proved a deeply overwhelming experience for me, a sudden rush of long-ago race history being imprinted in the deep recesses of my mind. For many of those on the visit that day, it was emotional, but as the only Black person in our group to have lived through segregation and Jim Crow, I found it a genuinely wrenching physical experience. And yet while I felt distinctly ill at ease, shaken by what I had seen at the museum and memorial, within hours I began to feel powerful for the part I had played once upon a time as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. That activism, I suddenly realized, had made me a better, stronger person, and I was reminded that the 400 years of Black struggles for equal rights in this country had not only inspired the nation, but the world.

Authoritarianism and Racism

Today, racism in this country is still a central force that progressives are working to change. We are, after all, living in a period when authoritarianism, racism, and incipient fascism are all on the rise again and, of course, Donald Trump is giving all-too-vivid voice to the hate that goes with them.

In a New Yorker article in 2016, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison wrote of the existential place of race for Whites in America this way:

“All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of ‘Americanness’ is color.”

At another point in that year of Trump’s first presidential victory, she added:

“On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters — both poorly educated and the well-educated — embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

“William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In ‘Absalom, Absalom,’ incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its ‘whiteness’ (once again), the family chooses murder.”

And the great James Baldwin in his classic 1955 analysis of race in America, Notes of a Native Son, wrote:

“No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”

Many in this diverse nation have compelling stories to tell, generating energy to battle the reactionary right-wing efforts to roll back any progress that has been made in past decades. In my life, I have endured the hardships of racism, as have so many others. However, my family, community, and various forms of activism enabled me to survive.

Walking in the Shoes of Black People in History

It is critical, even in Donald Trump’s America, that our activism remain nonviolent, tactical, and practical. We can reflect on a momentous decision by Martin Luther King, Jr., James Bevel, Wyatt Walker, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, and other civil rights leaders in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963. Out of desperation, they decided to use high school students in demonstrations there in what became known as “the Children’s Crusade,” recognizing that Eugene Bull Connor, the notorious segregationist commissioner of public safety in that city, would employ violence against them. And, of course, he did. He ordered dogs and water cannons turned on those demonstrations, saying, “I want to see the dogs work. Look at those niggers run.”

The very brutality of Bull Connor, seen across the country and the world on the TV news, generated tremendous support for the civil rights movement.

I suspect that King, Bevel, Walker, Shuttlesworth, Abernathy and the other civil rights leaders in Birmingham knew that using high school students involved enormous risk, but those students already lived under segregation and racism and were walking in the shoes of others who had been similarly courageous in the past and this, of course, would be their contribution to civil rights.

Wyatt Walker explained what he did by indicating that he made no apology for using such a tactic to reveal the racist brutality of the grim system of segregation to the whole nation. He said, “I had to do what had to be done.”

His words in their simplicity are how we must confront what is now happening in our country, too. We all must take risks to make this a more democratic land that respects all people. The action of those civil rights leaders in Birmingham is one example of Black history that must never be erased because it still inspires others to act.

At the time, of course, the actions of those young people confronting Bull Connor in Birmingham inspired many throughout the country. Two weeks later, on May 19, 1963, along with 15 other protesters, I demonstrated in front of the then-segregated Holiday Inn in Durham, North Carolina. We were confronted with a dangerous situation. The leader of our group was 19-year-old Joycelyn McKissick, a fellow student of mine and the daughter of Floyd McKissick, a local civil rights leader and lawyer hated by many Whites in the area. We could see into that Holiday Inn through its plate glass windows and observe cops walking around its lobby with billy clubs, keeping a watchful eye on us. If that wasn’t ominous enough, 15 feet from us were 10 White men with broom handles and baseball bats shouting, “Fuck the niggers! Fuck the niggers!”

Despite the obvious danger, we continued picketing and singing. Fortunately for us, the White thugs didn’t get a chance to go after us because of the courage of McKissick. Without any warning, she broke from the picket line, ran to the door of the lobby, pushed it open, and flopped down on the floor inside. The cops shouted, “Get that McKissick bitch!” They then began to beat her with batons.

After a few seconds, I pushed open that same lobby door intending to flop on the floor, too, but was met by police officers who started beating me with their batons and billy clubs as I backed up against a plate glass window. I was still standing, trying to block those clubs being swung at my head, when a 260-pound Black football player named Roy burst through the lobby doors shouting, “Stop it! Stop it!” and moved aggressively toward the police. The officers appeared startled and possibly even scared by his size. All of a sudden, miraculously enough, they stopped beating Joycelyn and me. All of the demonstrators were, however, arrested and marched off to jail along with 1,000 people from the sites of other demonstrations in Durham. The city jail couldn’t cope with more than 1,000 arrested demonstrators. So, though we were held overnight, we were released the following morning.

That confrontation with the police in that Durham Holiday Inn empowered me for the rest of my life. Those billy clubs striking my body strengthened my mind and convinced me that, sooner or later, we could indeed overcome segregation and Jim Crow. They caused me to be less afraid and more confident in mass demonstrations to come.

To me, that experience was a powerful tool for change and, looking back, I believe the size of those demonstrations and their public nature caused the police to be somewhat more restrained as time went on, although I was aware that there would be times in other settings when nothing would prevent serious injury or even death at their hands.

Today, the many compelling stories of those suffering in this increasingly diverse nation of ours — from immigrants to domestic workers to all the discriminated-against people I’ve mentioned in this essay — must be told. As we experience Donald Trump’s twenty-first-century version of White nationalism, how we dealt with that difficult past should help us remember that we lived through terrible times by confronting them and that we can do so again, even in the terrible Trump era.

(Douglas H. White is a civil rights activist, lawyer, and government official whose career has centered on human and civil rights and labor law. He was Human Rights Commissioner for the State of New York, City Personnel Director/Commissioner of the City of New York, and Deputy Fire Commissioner for New York City. He recently completed a memoir entitled Unbroken: The Last Generation of Black Americans Under Jim Crow and the Culture of Racism in America. The memoir is represented by Marie Brown Associates. Courtesy: TomDispatch, a web-based publication, founded and edited by Tom Engelhardt, aimed at providing “a regular antidote to the mainstream media”.)

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Trump’s War on the Poor

Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back

The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the 10 richest people in the world — including nine Americans — expanded their wealth by nearly $64 billion, the greatest single-day increase in recorded history. Since then, an unholy marriage of billionaire investors, tech bros, Christian nationalists, and, of course, Donald Trump has staged an oligarchic assault on our democracy. If the nation’s corporate elite once leveraged their relationships within government to enrich themselves, they’ve now cut out the middleman. We’re living in a new Gilded Age, with a proto-fascistic and religiously regressive administration of, by, and for the billionaires.

With the wind at their backs, leading elements in the Republican Party have rapidly eschewed euphemisms and political correctness altogether, airing their anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-poor prejudices in unapologetically broad and brazen terms. The effect of this, especially for the most vulnerable among us, is seismic. During the first two months of the second Trump administration, we’ve witnessed nothing less than an escalatory war on the poor.

The attacks are many-pronged. Rural development grants, food banks, and environmental protection measures have all been slashed in the name of “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs.” Planned Parenthood and other life-saving healthcare services for poor and marginalized communities have been defunded. Homelessness has been ever more intensely criminalized and Housing First policies vilified. The Department of Education, which has historically provided critical resources for low-income and disabled students, has been gutted, while the barbaric conditions in overcrowded immigrant detention centers have only worsened. Billions of dollars in funding for mental health and addiction services have been revoked. Worse yet, these and other mercenary actions may prove to be just the tip of the spear. Tariff wars and potential cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and SNAP could leave both the lives of the poor and the global economy in shambles.

This volatile moment may represent an unprecedented, even existential, threat to the health of our democracy, but it is building on decades of neoliberal plunder and economic austerity, authored by both conservative and liberal politicians. Before the 2024 elections, there were more than 140 million people living in poverty or one crisis away — one job loss, eviction, medical issue, or debt collection — from economic ruin. In this rich land, 45 million people regularly experience hunger and food insecurity, while more than 80 million people are uninsured or underinsured, ten million people live without housing or experience chronic housing insecurity, and the American education system has regularly scored below average compared to those of other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Amid tremendous social and economic dislocation, traditional American institutions and political alignments have steadily lost their meaning for tens of millions of people. The majority of us know things aren’t well in this country. We can feel it, thanks not just to the violent and vitriolic political environment in which we live, but to our bank statements and debt sheets, our rising rent and utility bills. As the hull of our democracy splinters and floods, the question remains: How do we chart a more just and humane path forward? There are no easy answers, but there are profound lessons to be learned from the past, especially from movements of poor and dispossessed people that have inspired many of this country’s most important moments of democratic awakening.

This is the focus of our new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty. Drawing on Liz’s 30 years of anti-poverty organizing, we poured over old pamphlets and documents, memories and mementos to gather evidence that social transformation at the hands of the poor remains an ever-present possibility and to summarize some of the most significant ideas that, even today, continue to animate their organized struggles.

Homeless, Not Helpless

In the late spring of 1990, hundreds of unhoused people across the country broke locks and chains off dozens of empty federally owned houses and moved in. Bedrooms and kitchens carpeted with layers of dust suddenly whirled with activity. Mattresses were carried in and bags of food unpacked. Within hours, the new occupants made calls to the city’s energy companies, requesting that the utilities be turned on. They were remarkably disciplined and efficient — single moms who had been living in their cars, veterans, students, and low-wage or recently laid-off workers, and people battling illness without healthcare. They were Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and White, and although they came from radically different slices of society, one simple fact bound them together: they were poor, in need of housing, and fed up.

That wave of takeovers was led by the National Union of the Homeless (NUH), one among many carried out by the group in those years. The NUH was not a charity, a service provider, or a professional advocacy group but a political organization led by and for unhoused people, with close to 30,000 members in 25 cities. Liz was introduced to it on her first day of college. Within a few months, she had joined the movement and never left.

NUH members included people who had recently lost their manufacturing jobs and could no longer find steady work, as well as low-wage workers who couldn’t keep up with the growing costs of housing and other daily necessities. In such dire times, the reality of the unhoused only foreshadowed the possible dislocation of millions more. The NUH emphasized this truth in one of its slogans: “You Are Only One Paycheck Away from Homelessness!” The name of the organization itself reflected a connection between homelessness and the new economy then being shaped. As industrial work floundered and labor unions suffered, there was a growing need for new unions of poor and dispossessed people.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NUH won a string of victories, including new policies guaranteeing 24-hour shelter intake, access to public showers, and the right of the unhoused to vote without a permanent address. They also won publicly funded housing programs run by the formerly unhoused in nearly a dozen cities. Such successes were a barometer of the incipient strength of the organized poor and a corrective to the belief that poor people could perhaps spark spontaneous outrage but never be a force capable of wielding effective political power.

At the heart of the NUH were three principles: first, poor people can be agents of change, not simply victims of a cruel history; second, the power of the poor depends on their ability to unite across their differences; and third, it is indeed possible to abolish poverty. Those guiding principles were crystallized in two more slogans: “Homeless, Not Helpless” and “No Housing, No Peace.” The first captured a too-often obscured truth about the poor: that one’s living conditions don’t define who we are or limit our capacity to change our lives and the world around us. The second caught the political and moral agency of the impoverished — that there will be no peace and quiet until the demand for essential human needs is met.

Another NUH slogan has also echoed through the years: “You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take.” It’s a favorite of ours because it expresses a crucial argument of our book: that poverty and economic inequality won’t end because of the goodwill of those who hold political power and wealth (as is abundantly clear today) or even through the charitable actions of sympathetic people.

Change on such a scale requires a protagonist with a more pressing agenda. Poverty will end when poor people and their allies refuse to allow society to remain complacent about the suffering and death caused by economic deprivation. It will end when the poor become an organized force capable of rallying a critical mass of society to reorder the political and economic priorities of our country.

Projects of Survival

In the mid-1990s, Liz was active in North Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Organization (KWRU). Kensington’s workforce had by then been decimated by deindustrialization and disinvestment. People without steady or reliable housing were moving into vacant buildings or cobbling together outdoor shelters, while tenants refused to leave homes from which they were being evicted. In its actions, KWRU reached deep into this well of experience, taking the spontaneous survival strategies that poor people were already using and adapting them into “projects of survival.”

The phrase “project of survival” was borrowed from the Black Panther Party, which, in the 1960s and 1970s, created successful “survival programs” like the Free Medical Clinic Program and the Free Breakfast Program. In 1969, the head of the national School Breakfast Program admitted that the Black Panthers were feeding more poor children than the state of California. The Panthers, however, were concerned with more than just meeting immediate needs. They were focused on structural transformation and, through their survival programs, they highlighted the government’s refusal to deal seriously with American poverty, even while then spending billions of dollars fighting distant wars on the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

KWRU learned from the Black Panthers. In the late fall of 1995, a cold front swept through a large KWRU encampment known as Tent City. In need of indoor shelter, the group set its sights on a vacant church a few blocks away. Earlier that year, the archdiocese of Philadelphia had shuttered St. Edward’s Catholic Church because its congregants were poor and the drafty building expensive to maintain. Still, some of those congregants continued to pray every Sunday in a small park outside the shuttered church. Eventually, dozens of residents from Tent City walked up the church steps, broke the locks on its front doors, and ignited a highly publicized occupation that lasted through that winter.

On the walls of the church, Liz and her compatriots hung posters and banners, including one that asked, “Why do we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?” As winter engulfed the city, residents of St. Ed’s fed and cared for one another in a fugitive congregation whose youngest resident was less than a year old and whose oldest was in his nineties. That occupation ultimately pressured the archdiocese to refocus its ministry on poor communities, while electrifying the local media to report on the rampant poverty that had normally been swept under the rug.

Such projects of survival enabled KWRU to build trust in Kensington, while serving as bases for bigger and bolder organizing. As a young woman, Liz gained new insight into how bottom-up change often begins. While media narratives regularly depict poor people as lazy, dangerous, or too over-burdened with their own problems to think about others, there is an immense spirit of cooperation and generosity among the poorest people in our society. Indeed, that spirit of communal care is the generative ground from which powerful social movements emerge.

A Survival Revival for These Times

Today, amid the rising tide of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s billionaire-fueled authoritarianism, there’s an urgent need for defiant and militant organizing among a broad cross-section of society. As our democratic horizons continue to narrow, we find ourselves operating within a critical window of time. In our work, we call this a “kairos moment.” In the days of antiquity, the Greeks taught that there were two ways to understand time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is quantitative time, while kairos is the qualitative time during which old and often oppressive ways are dying while new understandings struggle to be born.

In kairos moments such as this sinister Trumpian one, it is often the people whose backs are up against the wall who are willing to take decisive action. In every popular, pro-democracy movement, there is a leading social force that, by virtue of its place in the economic pecking order, is compelled to act first, because for them it’s a matter of life-or-death. And by moving into action, that force can awaken the indignation and imagination of others.

Right now, there are tens of thousands of Americans already in motion trying to defend their communities from the growing ravages of economic, environmental, and political disaster. Their efforts include food banks and neighborhood associations; churches and other houses of worship providing sanctuary for the unhoused and immigrants; women, trans kids, and other LGBTQ+ people fighting to ensure that they and their loved ones get the healthcare they need; community schools stepping into the breach of our beleaguered public education system; mutual-aid groups responding to environmental disasters that are only increasing thanks to the climate crisis; and students protesting the genocide in Gaza and the militarization of our society. Such communities of care and resistance may still be small and scrappy, but within them lies a latent power that, if further politicized and organized, could ignite a new era of transformational movement-building at a time when our country is in increasing danger.

Indeed, just imagine what might be possible if so many communities were operating not in isolation but in coordination. Imagine the power of such a potentially vast network to shake things up and assert the moral, intellectual, and political agency of those under attack. Food pantries could become places not just to fill bellies but to launch protests, campaigns, and organizing drives. Ever more devastating superstorms, floods, and forest fires could become moments not just for acute disaster response but for sustained relationship-building and communal resilience, aimed at repairing the societal fissures that worsen extreme weather events.

Last month, the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, where we both work, published a new report on the theory and practice behind this approach to grassroots organizing, A Matter of Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of Crisis. Authored by our colleagues Shailly Gupta Barnes and Jarvis Benson, it describes how — beginning during the Covid-19 pandemic and continuing today — dozens of grassroots organizations, congregations, mutual-aid collectives, artists, and others have been building projects of survival and engaging in communal acts of care.

Over the coming months, the Kairos Center plans to draw inspiration from such stories as we launch a new and ambitious national organizing drive among the poor. The “Survival Revival,” as we call it, will connect with and link the often-siloed survival struggles of the poor into a more unified force. Together, we will study, strategize, sing, pray, and take the kind of action that, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once put it, can be “a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.” Together, we will lift from the bottom, so that everyone can rise.

(Liz Theoharis is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, she is the co-author of the new book You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty and author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor. Noam Sandweiss-Back, born in Jerusalem and raised in New Jersey, is an organizer and writer. He has spent a decade organizing among the poor and dispossessed, including with the Kairos Center and the Poor People’s Campaign. He is the co-author of You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty. Courtesy: TomDispatch, a web-based publication, founded and edited by Tom Engelhardt, aimed at providing “a regular antidote to the mainstream media”.)