Trump’s Attacks on Black History Betray America

Opinion|Trump’s Attacks on Black History Betray America

The Trump administration is in a hurry to bury not only America’s future but also its past. Burying futures usually involves burying the truths of history.

Right now the Trump administration has been systematically attacking Black history. It’s set about purging Black historical content from government websites and social media accounts (only restoring a few items after being called out), removing Black history books from libraries, eliminating Black history observances, butchering the reputations of historians and starving libraries, museums, universities and historical institutions of funding. At this rate, many Americans could one day believe that George Floyd “dies after medical incident during police interaction,” as the Minneapolis Police Department put it in its first public statement on the matter, and that the officer Derek Chauvin attempted to save his life.

There is a precedent for this, of course. Consider what happened in downtown Atlanta beginning on Sept. 22, 1906. Grotesque newspaper headlines detailing alleged assaults, later referred to as a “carnival of rapes,” mobilized white Atlantans into a mob. The violence over the next few days snatched the lives of around 40 Black Atlantans and two white Atlantans. Black Atlantans were forced to organize a self-defense, with some community members arming themselves. The carnage largely ceased with the arrival of a state militia.

What became known as the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 had been several months in the making. It was an election year, and all year long, candidates for governor and their propagandists had enraged white Atlantans with tales of “uppity” Black Atlantans refusing to stay “in their place.”

“Uppity” Black Atlantans like J. Max Barber, the editor of The Voice of the Negro, perhaps the first Southern magazine to be edited by Black people. Barber had dedicated the magazine to rendering current events and “history so accurately given and so vividly portrayed that it will become a kind of documentation for the coming generations.”

Born in South Carolina, Barber had come a long way from the place of his parents, who had been enslaved. After graduating from Virginia Union University in 1903, he moved to Atlanta to edit The Voice of the Negro. He secured contributors including the renowned educator Mary Church Terrell and the Atlanta University historian W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1905, Barber joined Du Bois and 27 others in forming the Niagara Movement, a predecessor of the N.A.A.C.P. One of the Niagara Movement’s main initial outlets: Barber’s Voice of the Negro, which touted 15,000 subscribers.