Trump Cancels LBJ Civil Rights Measure

President Donald Trump seems throughout a information convention within the Roosevelt Room of the White Home on January 21, 2025, in Washington, D.C. | Supply: Andrew Harnik / Getty

It’s in all probability too early to inform how historical past will keep in mind the story of President Donald Trump, however Black Historical past — the story of America that the MAGA world would sooner propagandize into white-and-fragile oblivion than see it normalized in academic curricula — will probably be clear who Trump is and that his administration was considered one of white nationalism.

Black Historical past will do not forget that Trump’s ultimate act of his first time period in workplace was to unfold baseless and factless propaganda in regards to the 2020 presidential race being stolen from him and that he completely attacked voting districts with massive Black and Latino populations. Black Historical past will do not forget that, on the primary day of his second time period, Trump pardoned round 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants and commuted the sentences of the opposite 14 4 years after he impressed them to assault the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of these votes from Black and Latino voting districts. And historical past will do not forget that, on the identical day, Trump rolled again a bedrock Civil Rights period measure whereas making good on his promise to eradicate DEI practices from the federal authorities.

In keeping with Axios, when Trump “issued a sweeping govt order revoking many years of variety and affirmative motion practices in federal authorities,” he revoked a measure signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on Sept. 24, 1965, simply two years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — whose identify Trump predictably invoked throughout his inauguration speech — delivered his iconic “I Have A Dream” speech on the Lincoln Memorial.

From Axios:

LBJ’s order gave the Secretary of Labor the authority to make sure equal alternative for individuals of colour and girls in federal contractors’ recruitment, hiring, coaching and different employment practices

It required federal contractors to chorus from employment discrimination and take affirmative motion to make sure equal alternative “based mostly on race, colour, faith, and nationwide origin.”

The order got here greater than a yr after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and simply months after he signed the Voting Rights Act following violent assaults on voting rights advocates in Selma, Ala.

The reversal comes after 5 GOP presidents—together with Trump throughout his first time period—stored the Johnson govt order in place, whereas others expanded it by way of amendments.

Segregationists throughout Johnson’s time opposed the chief order.

Black Historical past will undoubtedly keep in mind variety, fairness and inclusion initiatives as what they had been: efforts to take away systematically positioned roadblocks that ensured white males had been the one People who might totally entry the American dream. Trump and the MAGA-fied GOP have mischaracterized DEI as anti-white discrimination simply as they’ve mischaracterized America’s historic hiring and better schooling practices as a meritocracy. It has by no means been about advantage, and that’s precisely why white males, no matter their {qualifications} or lack thereof, dominate just about each main trade and entity in America, together with its federal authorities.

The whole lot else is only a massive white lie.