The Administration’s Contempt for the Rule of Law Has Roots in the Pre-Civil Rights Era

Defenders of liberal democracy cannot succumb to Donald Trump's attempts to scare them into inaction

Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1955

America is supposed to be the land of the brave, but under the second administration of Donald Trump, it’s fallen under a climate of fear.

Universities and law firms have been punished for their perceived disloyalty. Foreigners have been abducted by masked agents and shipped to foreign gulags without due process. News organizations have been bullied for performing honest journalism. Federal employees have been cashiered by the thousands. Corporations harmed by his trade policies have been vilified for telling the truth about tariffs. Judges find themselves threatened for faithfully following the law.

Trump and his allies are doing their best to rule through systematic intimidation. It’s a new approach to the presidency. But it has deep roots in American history.

Recently, I visited Alabama to tour several sites that recount the horrifying realities of life under authoritarian subjugation and the struggles of African Americans who lived in constant fear of incurring the wrath of their rulers as well as ordinary white citizens. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, a massive outdoor structure, recalls the era of racial terrorism, documenting more than 4,400 lynchings of Black Americans between 1877 and 1950. The Legacy Museum provides a thorough account of the enslavement and oppression of an entire race of people. The Rosa Parks Museum and the National Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham recall the efforts that demolished segregation and won Black people legal and social equality.

To visit these places is to be shocked anew by the savagery that was the defining trait of the Jim Crow South—and the astonishing courage of the people who took part in the struggle for freedom and justice.

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The Evils of Jim Crow Don’t Belong in a Memory Hole

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The procession of images sears the mind: mobs of police clubbing peaceful demonstrators. A white mob torching a bus carrying Freedom Riders. The mutilated body of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old murdered for allegedly failing to show proper deference to a white woman. The rubble of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham after the 1963 bombing that killed four Black girls. Rosa Parks, jailed for declining to give up her bus seat to a white passenger.

Today, we see the Civil Rights Movement as the stirring triumph of America’s noblest ideals. And it’s easy to assume the outcome was inevitable. But one central fact about those Americans who challenged their oppressors is this: They didn’t know they would win.

Parks, John Lewis, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and others took enormous risks. Lewis had his skull fractured in a terrible beating by police. King had his house bombed and died from an assassin’s bullet. Parks knew she might not leave jail alive. Those who marched or even showed sympathy for the movement put their lives and livelihoods in grave jeopardy. Black people who tried to register to vote lost their jobs or were evicted from homes and farms. Those who demonstrated often went to jail or prison. Some paid the ultimate price, tortured and killed by Klansmen and their allies.

A memorial plaque for Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Carole Robertson, the four girls killed in a bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. in 1963.

It could have all been for nothing. White supremacy had been the unbreakable norm in the South for centuries. Even the Civil War and Reconstruction failed to destroy it.

Those who suffered under this regime had no plausible grounds to think they could escape it—and every reason to expect that stepping out of line would make their lives much worse. Yet they acted anyway.

Americans are proud of living in a 250-year-old democracy. But, despite the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the rights enshrined in the Constitution, this country didn’t come close to being fully free and democratic until the 1960s, when Black people finally gained the right to vote throughout the land.

Trump’s administration is hardly equivalent to what prevailed in the old South. But what it is doing raises ominous parallels: the contempt for the rule of law, the pardoning of violent insurrectionists, the attacks on civil rights protections, the celebration of cruelty and, of course, the relentless effort to scare people into submission. It’s no coincidence that many of the states where Trump is most popular are the states that enforced white supremacy with the greatest ferocity.

Civil rights activist and future Congressman John Lewis is one of many peaceful marchers for Black equality savagely beaten by Alabama state police in Selma, Ala. in 1965.

These Alabama sites are focused on history, not the outrage of the week from the White House. But they serve as an eloquent rebuke to what Trump represents. And it’s probably only a matter of time before they become a target of his ire.

They’re a reminder that American freedom and democracy are not guaranteed. Whether we will be able to preserve our liberal democracy from the MAGA onslaught is not at all certain. But as those in the Civil Rights Movement could have told us, there is only one way to find out.

An earlier version of this article was originally published in The Chicago Tribune. It is reprinted here with permission.

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