This February we celebrate Black History Month and remember the long, tenacious Black struggle for freedom and equality. Despite the racism that has been nurtured in and persisted in the capitalist United States, Black people have fought for and won many gains over the last four centuries.
Not only did millions of Black people persevere for more than two hundred years of enslavement, they fought to kill off the institution of slavery, eventually doing so through their participation in the Civil War and the Reconstruction period of the 1860s and 1870s. With the Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, Blacks won the right to citizenship and the right to vote (for men). They then fought through another nearly one hundred years of racist oppression during the Jim Crow Era, when those legal rights were ignored in an orgy of racist violence and oppression.
Beginning in the 1940s, the Black freedom movement again surged forward in a mass movement that culminated in many gains during the 1960s. This huge movement forced politicians to legally protect the rights they already supposedly had. They won passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which protected the rights enshrined in the 14th and 15th Amendments. They battered down the walls of segregation, advancing their rights to education, housing, health care and more, forcing the federal government to support social services that benefited not only Black people, but millions of other working-class people. They protested and took over college buildings just to have their history recognized and taught.
But as we live Black History Month in 2025, reactionary forces within the U.S. are roaring back with a vengeance and threaten to take back the advances that have been won. The Trump administration represents a sickening backlash against the gains made by Black people over the decades, but also against the social advances of the 1960s as a whole. Under Trump, racist people and actions are no longer hidden, but are out in the open for all to see.
It’s become clear that at least some of the voter suppression tactics that Republicans built up and developed in recent years, particularly in southern and “red” states, have had some effect. Not only did controversial purges of voting rolls take place and numerous restrictive voting laws take effect, but redistricting in at least a handful of states led to loss of weight for the votes of Black and working people. One estimate argues that if all the votes lost due to these factors are taken into account, Trump would have lost the popular vote by more than three million votes and also lost the key swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, shifting the victory to Kamala Harris. We are seeing the return of Jim Crow tactics in the 21st Century.
During his Black History Month address, Trump mentioned none of the above accomplishments of Black people’s freedom struggles. Instead he only briefly mentioned Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, only to then insult their struggles by mentioning two of today’s Black conservatives, Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas, both of whom work to roll back the gains Black people have won and defend the privileges of the billionaires and their system.
During his campaign for President, Trump and his minions regularly used racist clichés to encourage racist sentiment among the population. By calling Black officials “DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) hires” they promoted the idea that almost any Black person in almost any job is undeserving and there not because they are qualified, but because supposedly more qualified white people were discriminated against. By claiming that Haitians eat household pets, they encouraged the view that Black people and immigrants are savage and almost inhuman.
In the first hours of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship for children of immigrant non-citizens, directly contradicting the right Black Americans won with the 14th Amendment!
The Department of Education has been handed over to a wrestling business billionaire for destruction, which will mean less support for education nationwide and will give a greenlight to more attacks on the honest teaching of Black history and history more generally. The very history that Black students fought just to be able to learn is now under attack as divisive and un-American.
Trump and Elon Musk are working overtime to cut billions of dollars in spending that is needed to provide education, health care, and other social services that working Black people and so many others need so desperately. This includes slashing the federal workforce, which will hurt hundreds of thousands of Black workers who work for the government. They are also attacking union rights, one of the primary vehicles for defense of Black working people.
Trump has appointed and hired high level officials who are openly racist. Pete Hegseth, the new Secretary of Defense, is a white nationalist who has reportedly chanted, “Kill all Muslims!” Darren Beattie, who Trump appointed as an undersecretary in the State Department, has tweeted that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.” Their hatred couldn’t be clearer.
These actions of the Trump administration are not only attacks on all of the progress made by the people of the United States over the past decades, they are direct attacks on the gains made by Black people and their centuries-long struggles for freedom. They remind us that the struggle isn’t over, and in fact a new phase of the struggle will be necessary just to defend what we have. We know the struggle will be difficult. But we can take inspiration from the tenacity and perseverance of the many examples handed down to us from Black history.
