By April Ryan
Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief
BlackPressUSA
As this nation observes the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Ala., the words of the 47th president reverberate. “This country will be WOKE no longer,” an emboldened Trump offered during his speech to a joint session of Congress on March 4.
Credit: Unsplash / Liam Edwards
Since then, Alabama Congresswoman Terri Sewell posted on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that “Elon Musk and his DOGE bros have ordered GSA to sell off the site of the historic Freedom Riders Museum in Montgomery.” Her post of little words went on to say, “This is outrageous and we will not let it stand! I am demanding an immediate reversal. Our civil rights history is not for sale!”
Also, in the news today, The Associated Press is reporting they have a file of names and descriptions of more than 26,000 military images flagged for removal because of connections to women, minorities, culture, or DEI. In more attempts to downplay Blackness, a word that is interchanged with “woke,” Trump supporters have introduced another bill to take down the bright yellow letters of Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., in exchange for the name Liberty Plaza. D.C. Mayor Morial Bowser is allowing the name change to keep millions of federal dollars flowing there. Black Lives Matter Plaza was named in 2020 after a tense exchange between President Trump and George Floyd protesters in front of the White House.
There are more reports about cuts to equity initiatives that impact HBCU students. Programs that recruited top HBCU students into the military and the pipeline for Department of Defense contracts have been canceled.
Meanwhile, Democrats are pushing back against this second-term Trump administration’s anti-DEI and anti-woke message. In alignment with the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, several Congressional Black Caucus leaders are reintroducing the Voting Rights Act. South Carolina Democratic Rep. James Clyburn and Sewell are sponsoring H.R. 14, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Six decades ago, Lewis was hit with a billy club by police as he marched for the right to vote for African Americans. The right for Black people to vote became law with the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That has since been gutted, leaving the nation to vote without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.
But the words of the civil rights icon and Congressman John Lewis, uttered on March 1, 2020, a few months before his death, continue to inspire those dedicated to protecting “Blackness”: “We need more than ever in these times many more someones to make good trouble – to make their own dent in the wall of injustice.”
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