Gen Robert E Lee is long dead, but the spirit of the Confederacy appears alive and well. Federal contractors will no longer be explicitly barred from racially segregating their restaurants, waiting rooms and water fountains, according to the Trump administration. A memorandum dated 15 February 2025, issued by the General Services Administration, the procurement arm of the federal government, explicitly dropped those strictures.
“Any open solicitations that contain any of the provisions or clauses listed above should be amended to remove the provisions and clauses,” the memo read. Forget about simply putting an end to race-based affirmative action and DEI. Team Trump appears determined to turn the clock back to the 1950s, if not earlier than that. The ghost of Jim Crow smiles.
The Confederate flag stood as a constant presence in and around the US Capitol on January 6 alongside makeshift gallows for Mike Pence and a sea of Trump flags. Since his 2016 campaign, Trump’s relationship with the Confederacy and white supremacy has been too close.
During his first run, he only reluctantly distanced himself from the endorsement of David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. After the infamous 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump defended the “very fine people” on both sides. He even heaped praise upon Lee, the leader of the losing army during the US civil war.
Angered by the removal of a statue of Lee from the Virginia state capitol in 2021, Trump rushed to his posthumous defense. “Robert E Lee is considered by many Generals to be the greatest strategist of them all,” Trump announced. “Except for Gettysburg”, Lee would have won the war, according to the 45th and 47th president. For good measure, Trump also labeled Lee as a national unifier.
Discomfort with civil rights laws has been stirring within the Republican party for more than a decade. In 2010, Rand Paul, then a Senate candidate, mused that it should have been legally permissible for a privately owned restaurant to deny service to a Black customer.
“Do you think that a private business has the right to say we don’t serve Black people?” Rachel Maddow asked him. Paul answered “Yes,” decrying racism and discrimination in the next breath.
But it didn’t end there. In 2013, Paul lost the services of Jack Hunter, his media aide and co-author, after it became known that Hunter was the “Southern Avenger”, a radio talkshow host who wore a Confederate mask and wrote articles praising John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin. For good measure, Hunter boasted that he had toasted Booth’s birthday.
Paul could only say that Hunter was “unfairly treated by the media and he was put up as target practice for people to say he was a racist, and none of that’s true.” Old embers still glowed.
Fast forward. In a post to a private Facebook group in April 2020, as Covid-19 broke out, Brian Westrate, the then treasurer of the Wisconsin Republican party, implored anti-stay-at-home protesters not to bring Confederate flags or semi-automatic weapons to a scheduled demonstration. He did not want to give the mainstream media “the opportunity to paint us as racists or extremists”.
Tellingly, Westrate also sought to disassociate the Confederacy from slavery, adding in the post: “I well understand that the Confederacy was more about states’ rights than slavery.”
With time, sympathy for yesteryear also gained traction among Republican elites. In Justice on Trial, their book published in 2019 about the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, Carrie Severino, a conservative judicial activist, and Mollie Hemingway, the editor-in-chief of the Federalist, appeared to rubbish the legal underpinnings of Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 supreme court ruling that made state-imposed school segregation unconstitutional.
Such decisions, they wrote, “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles”. Note their use of the word “may”.
It was a unique take, albeit too odious and too wrong for any of Trump’s three supreme court picks to embrace. Amy Coney Barrett has called Brown a “super-precedent … unthinkable” to overrule. Brett Kavanaugh said the same. Neil Gorsuch concedes it was properly decided.
Undeterred, in 2021 Hemingway took aim at the 1964 Civil Rights Act in Rigged, her attack on the outcome of the election of 2020. On the page, she resurrects the contention of the late Barry Goldwater, the failed 1964 Republican presidential candidate, that the Civil Rights Act evinced “an unconstitutional usurpation of power by the federal government”.
Hemingway also derided Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil rights as a blatant appeal to Black voters. Her memory is selective.
During the debate over the Civil Rights Act, congressional Republicans gave LBJ the votes he needed to overcome Dixiecrat opposition. Representative William Moore McCulloch, a conservative Republican whose ancestors had opposed slavery, was instrumental in gaining the bill’s passage. Illinois Republican senator Everett McKinley Dirksen backed Johnson’s efforts in the Senate to break the southern-led filibuster.
Goldwater lost to Johnson in a landslide months later. That was the last time a Democrat accomplished that feat – or won the “white vote”, for that matter.
In 1973, the Nixon justice department sued Trump, his father and their company for illegal housing discrimination. After fighting the government for two years, Trump settled. The past is back.
Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
