From Rosa Parks to National Parks: Trump’s Racism and Bigotry Demand Resistance

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan This month marks the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. Her courageous act triggered the historic Montgomery bus boycott, launched the career of a young preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr., and changed the world. Remarkable events like the boycott have long been celebrated in this country as seminal moments achieved through struggle, woven into the fabric of our collective civic life. President Donald Trump and his MAGA enablers are on a campaign to erase this history, tearing down monuments to hard-won progress and whitewashing American history to conform to their white Christian nationalist agenda. Take the recent changes to the National Park Service’s fee-free days, when the park admission fees are waived. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday and Juneteenth have been stripped from the list of fee-free days, and Donald Trump’s birthday has been added. Gone are the only two days that celebrate Black history, which is in fact American history. Other examples are Trump’s restoration of Confederate monuments, torn down in the wake of the 2020 police murder of George Floyd and the racial justice protests that followed, and his reversal of the renaming of military bases formerly named after Confederate officers. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared, “No more woke bullshit.” Trump’s discrimination and erasure aren’t limited to race; within weeks of taking office, the National Park Service removed the “T” from “LGBT” on its Stonewall National Monument website. The pivotal Stonewall uprising, credited with launching the modern gay rights movement, was prominently led by transgender activists. It occurred in New York City’s Greenwich Village around the Stonewall Inn, an LGBTQ+ bar attacked by New York City police on June 28, 1969. In recent years, Trump has been inciting virulent transphobia in his campaign to harness hate for political power. Juneteenth, June 19th, commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. On that day in 1865, Major General Gordon Granger of the Union Army ordered the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas. Juneteenth is considered the longest continually celebrated African American holiday, and it is the newest federal holiday. The effort to make Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a holiday was itself won only after a decades-long struggle. It was first celebrated as a federal holiday in 1986, while many states resisted. South Carolina was the last to adopt it, in 2020. To this day, Alabama and Mississippi officially mark the holiday as the joint birthday of both King and Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Purging MLK Day and Juneteenth from the National Park Service’s fee-free days is not trivial. It signals official, government-sactioned and enforced racism and bigotry, originating in the Oval Office and radiating throughout the government, the media, and our society at large. As Professor Jeanne Theoharis writes in her book, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” she did not sit down on that bus because she was a tired seamstress. Rosa Parks was secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP. She had received training in nonviolent resistance at the renowned Highlander Center in Tennessee, where people like King and folk singer and activist Pete Seeger spent time, working to build movements for racial and economic justice. Rosa Parks wasn’t the first, either. Earlier that year, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was also arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat. Decades later, she recalled her decision, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, “I could not move, because history had me glued to the seat…because it felt like Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on another shoulder, and I could not move.” History matters. History motivates. Donald Trump knows this, and is attempting to purge the history of progressive struggle, waged by communities of color and other marginalized groups. Meanwhile, key advances that took decades, even centuries to achieve, are being rapidly undone. The US Supreme Court is unabashedly advancing the MAGA agenda, most recently approving a racially-gerrymandered Congressional map for Texas that clearly violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Neither the Constitution nor legal precedent will stand in the way of the Court’s rightwing majority as they rubber stamp one noxious Trump priority after another. “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King, Jr. often said. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King criticized not merely “the hateful words and actions of the bad people but…the appalling silence of the good people.” Authoritarianism is on the rise, here at home and abroad, fueled by demagogues like Trump. There is no option but to resist.