Jonathan P. Baird

I admit to a fascination with the holes in American history. That is, the time periods outside our blockbuster events like the Revolution, the Civil War and the 20th century world wars. There are periods where historical memory has failed and our collective past is lost.

One such period is the time after the betrayal of Reconstruction in the 1890’s. What is remembered, if at all, might be the name of a President or a Supreme Court decision. President-elect Trump cited President William McKinley who served from 1897 to 1901 to promote his tariff ideas. Lawyers remember Plessy v Ferguson, the separate but equal decision. The narrative thread about the 1890’s is non-existent. It is a black hole.

I was reading an article by Sherillyn Ifill, the civil rights activist, who quoted a historian who had called the period after the end of Reconstruction “the nadir”. She mentions lynching, convict leasing and sharecropping as aspects of that era. It was a period of racial fascism in the South and it was a time when white supremacy ruled the country as a whole. Protest against racism, certainly as reflected in the two major political parties, was at a low ebb.

However, contrary to the shreds of history we have inherited, there was more opposition to the prevailing order than Is now remembered. When I was down South in September, I learned about the 1895 anti-racist struggle in South Carolina. The story has been sidelined but it is important to remember because it contradicts the misleading impression that people didn’t fight back.

After the Civil War and during Reconstruction in 1868, South Carolina passed a new progressive state constitution that gave rights to all. For over 30 years, blacks ran for and were elected to high political office in South Carolina. Under the 1868 constitution, South Carolina removed discrimination and allowed voting rights for black men. An effort to extend suffrage for women was defeated.

The Reconstruction government in South Carolina created a public school system. Nothing like that existed before. It was the first law passed in the South to desegregate public schools. For the first time, black and white students attended public school together.

It would be hard to overstate the racist reaction engendered by the desegregation effort. Following the example of Mississippi, South Carolina’s Governor, “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, organized a constitutional convention designed to strip black citizens of the right to vote even though the Fifteenth Amendment of the U.S.Constitution had been passed to prevent exactly efforts like this.

Tillman had a long history stirring up racial hatred. He was part of a mob that massacred blacks in 1876 at Hamburg, South Carolina and he bragged about murdering black South Carolinians during Reconstruction. Later as a U.S. Senator, he defended lynching on the floor of the Senate. He ran on a goal of eliminating black political power.

In the 1890’s, civil rights, particularly voting rights, had deteriorated so much that on August 29, 1892, this notice appeared in the Charleston News and Courier:

“A separate list of all Negro voters must be kept and returned with the poll list. Every Negro applying to vote must produce a written statement by ten white men who will swear that they know of their own knowledge that such voters voted for [Governor Wade] Hampton in 1876 and have voted the Democratic ticket continuously ever since. This statement must be placed in the ballot box by the managers.”

On July 10, 1895, several months before Tillman’s convention was to take place, 60 black leaders convened in Columbia. Six black delegates were elected to attend the constitutional convention. These included Robert Smalls, a Civil War hero and later a Congressman and William J. Whipper, a lawyer. Both had played a role in drafting the progressive 1868 state constitution. Smalls had been the architect of the amendment creating public schools in South Carolina.

Both Smalls and Whipper had distinguished records. Smalls smuggled his family out of slavery when he commandeered a Confederate transport ship in Charleston Harbor in 1862. He piloted the ship to a Union-controlled area. He became famous for that and his example helped to persuade President Lincoln to accept black soldiers into the Union army. Smalls went on to a political career serving in the Louisiana State House and Senate and then Congress.

Whipper was an abolitionist, a state legislator, a circuit court judge and an outstanding trial lawyer. He was one of the first black lawyers practicing before a legal tribunal in South Carolina. In the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention Whipper made a motion, ultimately unsuccessful, to extend the right to vote to women.

In the face of racist insults and ridicule, the six black leaders eloquently made the case for universal suffrage. They contended with white delegates voicing racist slurs and with a vicious press campaign accusing blacks of incompetence, criminality and corruption.
A number of the most powerful speeches are quoted in a book by Damon L. Fordham, The 1895 Segregation Fight in South Carolina. Fordham cites Whipper’s speech in response to Tillman’s allegations of black corruption:

“The car of Negro progress is coming, and instead of allowing it to come on, you wish to stop it. You may just as well make up your minds that the Negro will rise. He will not be crushed. The Negro will rise, sooner or later, crush us as you may.”

The final vote on the Convention was 116-7 in favor of Tillman’s constitution. The black delegates refused to sign the completed constitution. Smalls said he would rather “walk home” to Beaufort before signing such a document. Not only were black voting rights curtailed but under the new constitution schools and public facilities were segregated again.

Tillman’s constitution didn’t explicitly say blacks couldn’t vote to avoid a Fifteenth Amendment violation but it included a requirement of owning $300 in property and a literacy requirement targeted at blacks. The requirements effectively precluded black voting. Fordham writes that the literacy test allowed registrars to allow illiterate white voters while denying most literate black voters. Tillman and his allies stacked the deck.

The bravery of the black leaders in the context of that nadir exposed the barbarism of South Carolina’s power structure. They resisted nobly and inspired those who learned about their speeches and actions. We are now in a new nadir. We can learn about the imperative of courage and resistance from those who faced a far more difficult situation than what we face today.

Outside New Orleans, there is a historical site, the Whitney Plantation, dedicated to showing the history of slavery. It is an indoor and outdoor museum. For many years, the place operated as a sugar, indigo and rice plantation. There are a series of exhibits on the property showing slave trade maritime routes, a memorial honoring the over 350 enslaved people who worked the plantation between 1752-1865 and markers describing local historical events.

One striking exhibit on the walk path outside was a garden full of sculpted heads on poles commemorating leaders of the 1811 German Coast Uprising. Although it is little known, the German Coast Uprising in an area near New Orleans was the largest slave revolt in the history of the United States. The story is well told in American Uprising, a book by Daniel Rasmussen.

The uprising began on January 8, 1811 on the plantation of Colonel Manuel Andry, who was a commander of the local militia. Over a period of months prior to the uprising, enslaved people secretly organized cells at a number of plantations over a 40 mile range. They planned an audacious scheme to capture New Orleans, free all the people enslaved there and emancipate themselves. They knew failure meant death.

On the evening of January 8, 25 insurgents broke into the Andry mansion, killed Andry’s son and they took muskets and ammunition from the armory. From that plantation it was a 41 mile march to New Orleans. On the march, the insurgents burned several plantation houses, killed two planters and picked up many recruits. The number of enslaved who joined the rebellion swelled to between 200 and 500.

A number of “maroons” (enslaved people who had escaped slavery and lived in the woods) joined the march along the way. The white planters, finding out about the revolt and being massively outnumbered, deserted their plantations and fled with their families to New Orleans.

The leader of the revolt was Charles Deslondes, a Creole mulatto, who had been a plantation overseer. That position allowed him more freedom to move and surreptitiously organize. It was a position of trust from the planters but Deslondes had his own agenda. He, along with a small group of co-conspirators, meticulously planned the uprising.

Contrary to any mythology about contented slaves and benevolent masters, the chattel slavery system in Louisiana was known for brutal conditions. A sugar plantation was run like a military camp and Deslondes had operated like a general. He inflicted punishments like whipping for any infraction of the behavioral code.

Death and inhuman torture were endemic to slavery. 40% of those captured in Africa died before boarding slave ships. 10% died in the Middle Passage or shortly after arrival. Only 30% of slaves captured in Africa survived past the third or fourth year of laboring as slaves. The plantation work was grueling and the hours were long. Once harvest began, slaves worked 16 hours or more a day, 7 days a week.

One significant problem in the German Coast Uprising was the enslaveds’ inability to obtain enough weapons and ammunition. Only one half of the slave army were armed with bullets and fusils. Many had to rely on sabers, machetes, axes, and cane knives.

On January 10 and 11, the planters’ militia counter-attacked. They had a great military advantage with their weaponry. They drove the insurgents into the woods. Many enslaved people were killed in battle and others fled into the swamps.

Charles Deslondes was among the slaves driven into the woods. The slaveholders used bloodhounds to track the rebels and Deslondes was caught. The militia men chopped off Deslondes’ hands, broke his thighs and shot him. They then roasted his remains on a pile of straw.

The reprisals against the insurgents were savage and unrelenting. The militia cut off heads of the slave corpses and put them on display. By the end of January, around 100 dismembered bodies appeared on pikes in the center of New Orleans. The garden at Whitney Plantation is intended to remember this atrocity.

A special tribunal presided over by prominent planters ordered summary executions. The insurgents were referred to as “brigands”. Beheadings were the prime method for injecting fear and terror in the oppressed and for putting down slave revolts. Rasmussen writes:

“The public destruction of the rebels was, in slaveholders’ minds, a necessary precondition for the safety of the plantation regime and the prevention of a ferocious revolt along the lines of Haiti.”

There can be little doubt the Haitian revolution, the first successful slave insurrection led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and fought between 1791-1804, had a profound effect on enslaved people living in the American South. The story got around and it offered inspiration that slavery could be overcome and defeated. Haiti declared its independence in 1804 after defeating three European armies, including Napoleon’s powerful military. Haiti was the first nation to permanently ban slavery.

The slaveholders did not respond to the uprising with any reconsideration of slavery. They doubled down. The Louisiana legislature compensated the slaveholders $300 (a very significant sum in those days) for each and every slave killed in the insurrection. Money was also appropriated by the state to pay the slaveholders’ damages for the mansions burnt by the enslaved.

You have to ask: why has this story been disappeared? It was the largest slave revolt in American history. I see it as a cover-up, part of the effort to minimize slavery’s history and pretend racism was not central to America’s story. The German Coast Uprising shows both the evil of slavery and the ferocious opposition it engendered. Conditions were so intolerable that the enslaved opted for violent revolution rather than the living death of slavery.

The slaveholders saw their slaves as no better than cattle. Heads on pikes was their response.

Teaching American history honestly means ending unforgivable silences around events like the German Coast Uprising. It is not a divisive concept to tell this story. It Is not about making white people feel uncomfortable. Intellectual integrity demands we know about it.

On US Highway 80, in the middle of a 54 mile stretch between Selma and Montgomery, there is a small unmarked memorial on the hillside near the road. It is a rectangular, fenced-in space dedicated to the memory of civil rights activist, Viola Liuzzo. The location is near the spot Liuzzo died.

I have now seen it twice and there is an aura of loneliness about this very deserted stop. No Alabama highway signs announce the destination. Driving by, it can be easily missed.

Viola Liuzzo was the only white woman killed down South during the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. Her story has largely been forgotten but she was a true hero who demonstrated courage and dedication to social justice. Both times I have viewed the marker, I left feeling the gravity of her actions. She stepped up bravely in a most dangerous situation. It is wrong that she has not been recognized and honored by Alabama and the nation.

Like millions of others, Liuzzo watched the events of Bloody Sunday unfold on TV. It was March 7, 1965. The nation was transfixed watching 600 civil rights marchers led by 25 year old John Lewis get brutally beaten by Alabama state troopers.

For months, efforts in Selma to register black voters had been stalled. Just 156 of Selma’s 15,000 blacks of voting age were on the voting rolls. Tensions had increased dramatically after Alabama state troopers murdered Jimmy Lee Jackson in the nearby town of Marion in February.

After the police violence prevented the Bloody Sunday march, Dr. King asked people who believe in justice to come to Selma. 25,000 people responded, including Liuzzo, who was inspired to make the trek. She had cried watching Bloody Sunday. She tried to get others to accompany her without success. She drove alone from her home in Detroit to Selma.

Liuzzo’s husband, Jim Liuzzo, was not happy his wife was going to Alabama but he could not dissuade her. The Liuzzos had five children. They both knew it was dangerous. Viola knew the South well. As a younger person she had lived in Jim Crow Georgia and in Tennessee but she was determined to go.

After that first attempted march on Bloody Sunday, activists obtained a court order that permitted a new protest and march. It occurred March 21-25, 1965. During her time in Selma, Liuzzo marched the first day. Then she worked at a hospitality desk welcoming and registering volunteers. Later she worked at a first aid station. She allowed her car to be used to ferry marchers to locations they needed to go.

After the march, she was planning to go home the next day. She spent her last day driving people back and forth between Selma and Montgomery. She and a 19 year old black man, Leroy Moton, were on their last run back to Montgomery when they were followed by a car full of Klansmen.

It is possible the Klansmen noticed her Michigan plates and it is also possible they saw a black man and a white woman in the car together. Southern whites of that era hated outside agitators (especially from the North) and race-mixing. Whether what happened was spontaneous or planned remains a subject of controversy.

To this day, the details of the attack are disputed but the prevailing story was that after a high speed chase, Liuzzo, who was the driver, was shot and murdered by one of the Klan members who shot from a car racing alongside. Liuzzo’s car went off the road, crashing into a fence. Moton survived but Liuzzo died instantly from the gunshots to her head.

The case was quickly solved because among the four Klansmen in the car was an undercover FBI informant, Gary Tommy Rowe. Rowe reported to the FBI about the events of the evening. He had a reputation for violence both because he boasted about it and also because he had previously beaten Freedom Riders. The other Klansmen in the car fingered Rowe as the trigger man. Many questions arose about Rowe’s conduct and why he had not acted to save Liuzzo.

The FBI and its Director, J. Edgar Hoover, played a despicable role in these events. Hoover opposed the civil rights movement as a threat to civil order. In an effort to deflect attention from the FBI’s negligence, Hoover conducted a smear campaign against Liuzzo. I believe it was this smear campaign, similar to what they conducted against Dr. King, that erased Liuzzo from our history.

The smear campaign was vicious. Hoover leaked rumors to the press that Liuzzo was a drug addict, that she was having an affair with Leroy Moton, that she was emotionally unstable and that she had abandoned her children. Hoover scapegoated Liuzzo to hide the FBI’s disgraceful role, especially the fact a key FBI informant was in the car with the Klansmen.

The Liuzzo family suffered greatly. Local Detroit racists burnt a cross on their lawn, fired bullets into their home.and dumped garbage on their lawn. The Liuzzo children were called “n—er lovers” and actually had rocks thrown at them on their way to school. Hate mail and obscene phone calls were relentless. It got so bad Jim Liuzzo had to hire an armed security guard to protect his home. The emotional stress on the family was enormous.

After a hung jury in the first state court murder trial, the Klansmen charged in Liuzzo’s murder were acquitted by an all-white male jury. The racism in those proceedings was off-the-charts. In open court, Matt Murphy, lead defense counsel for the Klansmen, called Liuzzo “ a white n—er who turned her car over to a black n—er for the purpose of hauling n——ers and communists back and forth”. That vignette captures the flavor of the trial.

The Klansmen in the car, with the exception of Rowe were later convicted in federal court on the charge of conspiracy to violate Liuzzo’s civil rights. They received 10 year sentences. Rowe was also subsequently indicted for murder but that case failed. The court said Rowe had immunity from prosecution because of a deal he made for testifying against the other Klansmen.

In 1983, 18 years after her murder, in a civil case in federal court, the Liuzzo family sued the FBI for its responsibility in Viola’s death. The Court rejected the Liuzzos’ suit, unbelievably saying that the plaintiffs failed to show the FBI had been negligent in directing their agent. To add insult to injury, the Court ordered the Liuzzos to pay the government’s court costs of $80,000. After the TV show 20/20 aired a segment, the Justice Department dropped the court cost claim.

The Liuzzo marker on US Highway 80 has been repeatedly desecrated and defaced. In 1997, vandals painted a large Confederate flag across the face of the stone. This seems symbolic of the ugly effort to slander and discredit Viola Liuzzo. She deserves so much better. She died at age 39. She stands in the best tradition of Americans who selflessly fought white supremacy, racism, and segregation.

Her death added much impetus to President Johnson’s effort to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Maybe someday America will have a different take on who its real heroes are.

Almost nine years ago, I started writing about Donald Trump and fascism. Then I raised the question whether Trump and his MAGA movement were fascist. My Jewish, anti-fascist antenna were buzzing.

At that time, many political observers dismissed the idea. They typically pointed out the differences between classical German and Italian fascism and what was going on in the United States. They didn’t engage the possibility that fascism might take new forms in different historical periods.

In 2024, the verdict is in. Trump and his MAGA movement can be accurately classified as fascist. Of course, the American variant of fascism is not a duplicate of past models but the word still fits. Because the word remains a political football used by both sides, I will make the case for why the label is appropriate for Trump.

Fascism requires an us and a them. In Germany it was the Nazi Aryans and the Jews. In America, Trump is demonizing immigrants (who are largely people of color) and he is setting them against white Christians. Back in 2015, it started with him talking about Mexico sending rapists. He later objected to immigrants from “shithole countries”. Now he falsely claims Haitians are eating pets. He refers to immigrants as “vermin”.

Trump has strung together a horrifying pack of lies designed to dehumanize and create a hated other. He makes unsupported wild assertions about foreign insane asylums and prisons being emptied with those inhabitants coming to America. He says immigrants commit horrendous crimes because “it’s in their genes” and “they are poisoning the blood of our country”. This is straight-up Hitler-talk out of Mein Kampf.

Trump has been talking about “the enemy within”, invoking the idea that the military should be used against protesting Americans. He says America is “an occupied country” awaiting its liberation from migrant criminals who are “the most violent people on earth”. The talk has no relationship to what is actually going on in America. Trump’s hellscape does not exist. As Ashley Parker wrote in the Washington Post:

“In Donald Trump’s imaginary world, Americans can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped.”

Fascists sell fear of the other and as the election gets closer, the rhetoric has ramped up. Aaron Rupar writes:

“Trump’s closing message is a full-blown hate campaign against black and brown people. Historians will look back in astonishment that this terrifying reality wasn’t the subject of wall to wall coverage and commentary in weeks leading up to the election. He’s not hiding anything.”

During the Republican National Convention we all saw the signs “Mass Deportation Now”. Trump and his advisors plan a vast 21st century version of concentration camps designed for mass detention prior to mass expulsions. They plan to begin in January 2025.

Such drastic action requires a more compliant press that will not get in the way. Contrary to the First Amendment, Trump has called for the broadcast licenses of CBS and ABC to be revoked because he believes they have been unfair to him. He has said MSNBC should be investigated for “treason”. He has called for revising libel laws so it would be easier to sue reporters and media outlets for critical coverage.

Part of the road to authoritarianism is the emasculation of a free press. Government action against journalists is highly chilling. Trump wants a cowed media afraid to criticize him because of possible consequences. A weak press devoted to propaganda praising the Great Leader is the fascist norm.

Timothy Snyder has said fascism is about a cult of the will. MAGA is a cult of personality and reason takes a back seat to emotion. Fascists have no use for the rule of law or constitutions. Violence and lies are central to the fascist project.

Trump is an embodiment of the Big Lie. He pushes conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and he clings to the utterly discredited mythology he won. All who care about democracy must be vigilant about the Trump team’s efforts after the 2024 election and before the new president is inaugurated. They were bumbling in the aftermath of the 2020 election. They have had four years to plan for this upcoming moment.

Fascists want power at all costs. If Trump is successful, do not be surprised to see him fire the entire senior staff of the DOJ, FBI, and top military staff in all branches. Loyalty to Trump will be the overriding job qualification. If Trump loses, expect many state-level election challenges and expect him to float the narrative of widespread non-citizen voting. He has raised the spectre of hordes of illegals crossing the border to somehow mysteriously vote. This fits in neatly with the far right’s Great Replacement Theory.

It should not be surprising that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Army Gen. Mark Milley , has called Trump “a total fascist”. He saw enough.

The historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat says that since 2015 Trump has been taking Americans and his followers on a journey conditioning them step by step instilling hatred in a group, then escalating. Trump has gotten way too much of a pass on his absurd verbiage. I worry that as a society we have become dulled and anesthetized to the danger.

An earlier generation of Americans had a noble history of opposing fascism in World War 2. Now it is our turn.

We have just witnessed two, back-to-back monster hurricanes, Helene and Milton. The storms were supercharged by climate change. The storms passed over ultra-warm temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. The heated waters acted like a fuel, intensifying the hurricanes and making them far more powerful than they might otherwise have been.

A new study by researchers with the World Weather Attribution, an international network of scientists who conduct rapid studies to assess the impact of climate change in major weather events found climate change made Hurricane Helene stronger and wetter. Ben Clarke, an author of the report called climate change “a total game changer” for hurricanes like Helene and he said:

“We found that essentially all aspects of [Hurricane Helene] were amplified by climate change to different degrees, and we’ll see more of the same as the world continues to warm.”

Clarke explained that it is not the frequency of hurricanes which has changed. It is the intensification of storms. The study found that rainfall from Hurricane Helene was about 10% heavier due to human-caused climate change and winds were intensified 11%. There is no mystery about what is behind the climate change. There is a scientific consensus: burning fossil fuels adds heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere which causes both air and water temperatures to rise.

The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record and this year is likely to be the warmest ever measured. Up until this year, 2023 was the warmest year on record. The warming trend is beyond dispute. In his book, The Heat Will Kill You First, Jeff Goodell writes:

“Right now we are more than halfway to 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) from preindustrial temperatures, which scientists have long warned is the threshold for dangerous climate change. The reports of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are full of harrowing details of what might happen to our world with 3.6 degrees of warming, from collapsing ice sheets to crop-killing drought.”

I have been struck by how in spite of increasing and repeated climate disasters, politicians on both sides fail to put the superstorms in context and sideline the subject of climate change. They minimize the gravity of the amplified heat. There is a tendency to see each storm in isolation like they are unrelated and to miss the pattern in how our world has changed.

This has been reflected in the failure of both parties to situate climate change as a central issue in the presidential campaign. Undeniably though, the position of the Republicans has been far worse. Trump calls the science of climate change a ”scam” and a “hoax”. He mindlessly promises to “drill, baby, drill”. He wants to do away with new pollution standards for vehicles and power plants. And it is hard to think he is kidding: in his first term, he rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations.

Republican climate denialism is so extreme that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law requiring that climate change will not be considered when crafting energy policy. His legislation literally removed the words “climate change” from many state laws. This is turning science denial into state policy. Considering its recent hurricane history, Florida should make the ostrich the state bird.

As for the Democrats, at least Vice-President Harris calls climate change “an existential threat” and says the United States needs to act urgently to address it. She is not a climate change denier. She wants to expand the government’s role fighting climate change by regulating fossil fuels and by incentivizing the use of renewable energy.

At the same time, Harris has not made climate change policy a central pillar of her campaign. She doesn’t talk about it much. She has backed away from Green New Deal rhetoric and has cast herself as a pro-business pragmatist. She has bragged about America’s level of oil production during her tenure as Vice-President and she reversed her position on fracking.

So we have one entirely retrograde party that will do the bidding of fossil fuel executives and the other party taking an ambiguous pro-environment position. At least the Biden-Harris administration set a goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030.

What is missing is any sense of urgency around climate. Extreme heat is remaking our planet and the clock is ticking. How much time do we have before the climate becomes unbearable or uninhabitable for life? Greta Thunberg has written:

“The climate crisis is about time. If you leave out the aspect of time, then it is just one topic among other topics. If you take away the countdown, then a collapsing glacier, a forest fire or a record heatwave is nothing more than three independent news events – a series of isolated natural disasters. If you fail to include the aspect of time, the climate crisis is not a crisis.”

The human response to climate change matters tremendously. An effective response could lessen the collective harm of unregulated greenhouse gas emissions. We can effect the speed and extent of the rising heat. That alone could save millions of lives and allow for the survival of more biodiversity.

Part of the climate denialism we are seeing now is the retreat into conspiracy theories and misinformation. Twitter/X is full of absurd postings about globalist cabals geoengineering the weather.

Climate denialism endangers all humanity and all life on earth. As humans, we have an amazing ability to be diverted by distractions. I am reminded of that book title Amusing Ourselves to Death. In this election we must vote like climate matters because it does.

There is a quote from the writer, Edward Abbey, that I have always liked:

“…there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They are not famous people. They are generally obscure and modest people doing useful work, keeping their families together and taking an active part in the health of their communities, opposing what is evil (in one way or another) and defending what is good.”

Those words could describe the Alabama lawyer, Fred Gray. On my recent trip South organized by the Nation Magazine, our group had an opportunity to meet with Attorney Gray in Tuskegee. He is now 93. He became a lawyer back in the 1950’s when there were hardly any African Americans able to be in that role. Back then it was very dangerous to be a Black lawyer in the South, especially one devoted to civil rights.

Gray has had a remarkable career. He grew up in segregation, opened his law office in 1954 and his early goal was “to destroy everything segregated I could find”.

Dr. King once called Gray “chief counsel of the protest movement”. For years, he was counsel to both Dr King and Rosa Parks whenever they needed legal help. Along with a university professor, Jo Ann Robinson, Gray planned the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He became a lawyer for 15 year old Claudette Colvin and for Rosa Parks. Both were arrested for refusing to obey a bus driver’s orders to relinquish their bus seat.

Gray had been looking for a chance to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery’s segregation ordinances and Alabama’s segregation statutes. In the case of Browder v Gayle, Gray challenged the laws that required segregation of the races on city buses in Montgomery.

Gray worked closely with a number of lawyers from the NAACP including Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter as well as a white lawyer, Clifford Durr. There was much personal retaliation directed against Gray by local racists and by the Alabama power structure. He received bomb threats, crank phone calls, hate mail and experienced an attempted stabbing.

After filing Browder v Gayle, he received a draft notice that he was re-classified 1-A. He had had 4-D draft status because he was also minister in a church. Gray was a preacher in the Church of Christ. The head of Selective Service, Lewis Hershey had to intervene the night before Gray was going to be made to ship out for military service. Hershey stopped it. Gray later found out that the Montgomery County and Alabama state bar association had wanted him re-classified and drafted into service.

In June 1956, the federal court in Alabama ruled in the Browder case that city ordinances and the state statute requiring segregation were unconstitutional. The case was appealed up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court upheld the Alabama decision and found city and state law violated both the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. This was the first case to establish such a precedent.

In the course of the Montgomery bus boycott, Gray developed a close working relationship with Dr. King. He and Jo Ann Robinson had picked King to be the public spokesman for the bus protest. Gray also became Ralph Abernathy’s lawyer. Abernathy told him, “Fred, you keep me out of jail and I will keep you out of hell”. Abernathy, in addition to being frequently arrested for civil rights activism, was also a Baptist minister.

As is the case now with voter suppression, back in 1957 the White Citizens Councils of Alabama devised a gerrymandering plan to nullify the potential African American vote in Tuskegee. They changed the city boundaries from a square to what Gray called a “25-sided sea dragon”. Lines were drawn to exclude substantially all African Americans while retaining all white votes.

In the case Gomillion v Lightfoot, Gray litigated against the racial gerrymandering being perpetrated by Alabama. The case also went up to the Supreme Court and Gray argued it. He had prevailed on the plaintiffs’ attorneys to argue that Alabama was violating the Fifteenth Amendment right to vote. Surprisingly, in a 9-0 opinion authored by Justice Felix Frankfurter, the Court wrote:

“When a legislature thus singles out a readily isolated segment of a racial minority for special discriminatory treatment, it violates the Fifteenth Amendment.”

Justice Frankfurter saw racial gerrymandering more clearly than the Supreme Court does today. Witness the 2024 South Carolina decision in Alexander v South Carolina that diminished the influence of Black voters through redistricting. In an interesting reversal after the Gomillion case was resolved, the city of Tuskegee asked Gray to become city counsel and he agreed. The Gomillion case was the first racial gerrymandering case that the Supreme Court ever considered.

I also need to mention the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the Pollard et al v United States case. Beginning in 1932 and continuing for 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service committed a massive fraud against 623 African American men. The men were misled into participating in a study of untreated syphilis sponsored by the government. The Public Health Service failed to disclose to the men both that they had syphilis and that treatment was available.

The Public Health Service led the men to think they were being properly treated for whatever diseases they had when they were not being treated at all. The Study was racially motivated and it discriminated against African Americans in that no whites were selected to participate in the Study. Only those who were poor, uneducated, rural and African American were recruited.

The Public Health Service failed to obtain the participants’ written consent to be part of the Study. There were no rules and regulations governing the Study.

Gray was counsel in the class action against the government. The U.S. government had to admit to wrongdoing and had to compensate the aggrieved parties.

In Gray’s varied and effective efforts to end segregation, it must be noted he was lawyer for the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers on Bloody Sunday in 1965. The publicity from that march led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Gray also successfully litigated the systematic exclusion of blacks from jury service and his cases ended up integrating all state institutions of higher learning in Alabama. On July 7, 2022, President Biden awarded Fred Gray the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

At a time when we are moving backwards on civil rights, it was inspiring to meet a man who has accomplished so much and who was still very much in the fight.

This October marks 15 years since my sister, Lisa Baird, died. The above photo is a favorite of mine. Lisa was spending the summer working at the Northern Cheyenne Indian reservation in Lame Deer , Montana. I wanted to offer a few quotes that evoke Lisa:

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul.” John Keats

“I like unhappy people. I understand them. Suffering creates character and human feeling. Cheerful, happy people seem like idiots to me. They seem to fly over the surface of life and never to know its meaning. They are not close to the heart of humanity but are remote and isolated. Perhaps that is why they can remain cheerful.” Nym Wales

“Unrelenting revolutionary activity coupled with boundless humanity – that alone is the real life-giving force of socialism. A world must be overturned, but every tear that has flowed and might have been wiped away is an indictment; and a man hurrying to perform a great deed who steps on even a worm out of unfeeling carelessness commits a crime.” Rosa Luxemburg

“The Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal will take care of themselves. Look after the courts of the poor, who stand most in need of justice. The security of the republic will be found in the treatment of the poor and the ignorant. In indifference to their misery and helplessness lies disaster.” Charles Evans Hughes

“Walk tall as the trees; live strong as the mountains; be gentle as the Spring winds; keep the warmth of Summer in your heart and the Great Spirit will always be with you.” Native American chant

During election campaigns, many wild and hyperbolic things get said. One comment that pushed my buttons was Donald Trump’s statement that Jews would bear much of the responsibility if he loses the election. The logic is twisted but Trump’s assertion unmistakably evokes Jewish history.

Trump has said Jews supporting Vice-President Kamala Harris “should have their head examined”. He said 40% of American Jews support him (actually the number is closer to 30%). He went on:

“That means you got 60% voting for somebody that hates Israel. It’s only because of the Democrat hold or curse on you. You can’t let that happen – 40% is not acceptable because we have an election to win.”

Previously Trump has said that Jewish voters who support Democrats “should be ashamed of themselves” over their lack of loyalty to him and he has said such voters “hate their religion”. He says he is Israel’s “best friend” and he points to relocating the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s control of the Golan Heights and brokering the Abraham Accords.

All these statements demand a response. Jews make up 2.4% of the American population. Of that 2.4%, 1.8% are voting age adults. Assuming 75% of those eligible vote, you are down to 1.3% of voters. About one-quarter of Jewish voters live in New York, a state Trump has no chance to win and another 20% live in California, another state where Trump is not contending.

Pennsylvania does have 300,000 Jewish voters (there are 8.8 million registered voters in the state). It is a state where Jews have a presence but how do you conclude that Jews bear much of the responsibility if Trump loses? The facts don’t support that. Jewish voting numbers are not that consequential in the other battleground states that will decide the Electoral College vote. You can just as easily and more persuasively argue the electoral importance of African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims or young people.

Trump is trying to scare Jewish voters into voting for him saying bad things will happen if he loses, including the total annihilation of Israel. Of course, this is consistent with his doom-and-gloom message about the state of everything if he loses. No doubt he has his own criminal cases in mind and the possibility of future jail time.

Blaming the Jews for his possible electoral loss is fundamentally about scapegoating. He is demonizing Jews who vote for Democrats. His words are putting American Jews into the crosshairs of his many conspiracy-minded supporters. MAGA extremists have shown impressive capability in harassment. Trump’s words can sic a mob.

Many on the far right fear a Great Replacement where minorities, allegedly manipulated by Jews, replace the white majority. From Tucker Carlson to Nick Fuentes, that is a mantra.That was the thinking of the shooter at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. There is a pattern of mass shooters posting manifestos online citing Great Replacement as justification.

Trump’s blaming words evoke Germany’s “stab in the back” history. German nationalists and Nazis argued Germany lost World War 1 because they had been stabbed in the back by an international Jewish conspiracy. This slander contributed to the growing antisemitism in Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Trump singling out Jews is dangerous since antisemitism has regained more of a foothold in America. Antisemitism can be increasingly found on the American right.

In discussing the reasons why Trump believes Jews should vote for him, Israel is central. He makes no appeal based on American political issues. He treats American Jews like they are Israelis and appeals to them based on his slavish support for Netanyahu’s government. In 2019 at a Republican Jewish Coalition meting, he called Netanyahu “your Prime Minister”.

Trump is calling out a second antisemitic trope that has plagued Jews over time.That is dual loyalty, the notion that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States. That trope has an ancient history and it has been employed against Jews in contexts like Dreyfuss’s France and in the former Soviet Union. The message is that Jews are foreign guests in their home country, not true citizens. That is the kind of thinking that inspires Jew hatred from people who fear the other.

The irony is that Netanyahu’s extremist and bellicose government is doing more to promote antisemitism through its actions than anything else. Israel has become a rogue state violating international law with impunity. Trump’s support for Netanyahu is actually endangering Jews in Israel and around the world. Netanyahu and his allies like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have fanned the flames of hatred and they have created a new generation of people who will hate Israel.

Only diplomacy, a ceasefire and return of the hostages can lead to a lessening of the chances of a regional war which is in the common interest of humanity. A ceasefire, not more war, will help reduce antisemitism.

Last week Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a resolution to force a vote in Congress to block billions of dollars in offensive American weapons sales to Israel. That may be the only leverage the United States has over Netanyahu. Blindly supporting Netanyahu and his racist government doesn’t fight antisemitism. It does the opposite.

We are in a new period where old thinking about how to fight antisemitism doesn’t apply. American Jews largely oppose MAGA because we recognize that movement is a fascist threat. It is a movement that supports self-professed Nazis like Mark Robinson. Maintaining our democracy offers the best protection against antisemitism.

Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to go on a newly designed civil rights tour of the South organized by the Nation Magazine, I had been on an earlier civil rights trip in 2023. This trip started in New Orleans and went to Selma, Tuskegee, Montgomery, Savannah and Charleston. The theme of the trip was “From Slavery to Civil Rights”. We had a chance to meet with some older civil rights heroes and some younger activists fighting environmental racism.

New Orleans has a reputation for Mardi Gras, jazz, gumbo and the Saints. Lost is the city’s history and its role in the slave trade. The trade of human beings from Africa to Louisiana began in 1718 with the first slave ships arriving in 1719. The trade continued through French, Spanish and American rule.

After Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, for the next 57 years New Orleans was a center of the slave trade in the United States. The city had more than fifty documented slave trade sites. Enslaved people were sold from slave pens, public squares, government buildings, church properties, city taverns, private residences, auction blocks and ballrooms of luxury hotels.

During the first half of the 19th century, the slave traders trafficked two million men, women and children inside the United States. Most of the enslaved were brought from the Upper South to the Lower South via overland and water routes. Before the trek, the slave traders ruthlessly separated families.

After the Civil War and the defeat of Reconstruction, segregation ruled in America. Lynchings, the Klan, and voter suppression particularly reinforced white supremacy in the South. From 1896 to 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court blessed racial segregation in the case of Plessy v Ferguson which dictated separate but supposedly equal.

Opponents of racism and segregation faced an almost frozen social order but that did not stop the NAACP and other activists from opposing the status quo. In 1952, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP filed a lawsuit on behalf of some Black parents challenging the constitutionality of racial segregation in New Orleans schools.

On our trip, our group met with Leona Tate who had been one of the children who integrated the New Orleans schools in 1960. She and the other two, Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne, were first graders then. Six years after the Brown v Board of Education case they entered McDonogh 19 Public School pursuant to a court order issued by Federal Judge J. Skelly Wright. Another little girl, Ruby Bridges, was also integrating a different New Orleans public school at the same time.

The Louisiana power structure left no stone unturned in their efforts to stop integration and to maintain white supremacy. Although Brown ordered desegregation with “all deliberate speed”, delaying forever was the game plan.

Because school officials did not want integration, they had designed an approval process that most children couldn’t pass. It included arbitrary and whitewashed standards of intelligence and behavior. The parents of 137 black first graders had applied to have their children transferred to all-white schools. Only five were selected. Tate, Prevost and Etienne, later dubbed the McDonogh 3, were selected. They had excelled.

Leona Tate described the absolutely toxic environment they faced. On November 14, 1960, the three girls were escorted to the school by federal marshals.because of racist mobs that protested outside the school. The federal marshals stayed for the whole school year. For 18 months white parents and younger people came to protest. Within a few days after the three girls entered school, all the white students left McDonogh 19.

The girls didn’t see much of the protest outside the school because classroom windows were covered with brown paper. They had to play inside during recess. They ate lunch under the protection of a stairwell. They were the first black children to enter previously all-white schools since 1877.

The families of the girls who were selected experienced harassment. They received death threats on the phone. People drove a funeral hearse up and down their street. Gail Etienne’s father received a package containing a dead bird. The local police sat in squad cars at night outside the girls’ homes.

For the entire first grade year, the three girls were the only students at McDonogh 19. In January 1961, a white family tried to send two sons to McDonogh but they ended up attending for only a few days. The family was harassed so badly they had to leave the city.

In second grade, the three girls remained the only students at McDonogh. After Christmas that year, things started changing. Twenty-five new students arrived, including two white students. Tensions lessened a bit. The U.S. Marshals left and the windows at school were uncovered.

In third grade, the school district sent the three girls to a different school, Thomas J. Semmes Elementary. Other black students were also sent to Semmes. There were no U.S. Marshals there and white students did not leave the school. Many of the white students remained hostile to the girls.

Tate now calls her experience at Semmes “a house of horror”. The black children were punched, shoved, kicked, tripped and spat on. The school authorities, even knowing what was going on, looked the other way and did nothing to protect the children but the three girls made it through.

Notably, two years after the integration of New Orleans schools, Tulane University also de-segregated. It was the most prestigious institution of higher learning in the area and it had been segregated for 129 years. The integration of the public schools paved the way for the integration of universities as well as buses, parks, sporting events and voting rolls.

Judge Wright made many enemies when he authored his desegregation opinion. He was ostracized and isolated from New Orleans society life. He was considered the most hated man in Louisiana and he was referred to as “Judas” Wright and Judge J. Scalawag Wright. He also required full-time protection by U.S. Marshals and New Orleans police. Judge Wright’s order in the New Orleans case was the first post-Brown desegregation order issued by a judge in the Deep South.

Looking back, it is no exaggeration to say Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne opened the door to school equality in the United States. Their heroism has been insufficiently appreciated and acknowledged. After generations of injustice, they stepped up at a pivotal moment.

Tate still lives in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. She acquired what had become the abandoned McDonogh 19 building, had it registered as a National Historic Landmark and she re-opened the school as the Tate Etienne Prevost (TEP) Interpretive Center. The Center’s mission is “to teach, exhibit and engage visitors in New Orleans civil rights history”. She continues to work in efforts to reconstruct and improve the community.