Carolyn McKinstry knows about the dangers of extremism in America. She lived it.
McKinstry was the Sunday school secretary at the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, when the church was bombed by white supremacists on 16 September 1963, killing four Black girls – Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Roberts, all 14, and 11-year-old Cynthia Wesley.
McKinstry, who was 14 at the time, remembers it was Youth Day at the church and the lesson of the day was “A Love That Forgives”. She spent that Sunday morning collecting attendance and financial records from classes. McKinstry answered the church phone just seconds before the bomb went off in the church basement.
“I did not immediately think of it as a bomb. I didn’t know what it was,” McKinstry said. “I heard a few people scream and then I heard somebody say, ‘Hit the floor’ – and I crawled under that very first pew where I was standing.”
McKinstry remembered: “I waited a few minutes and I could hear feet. I then heard shoes against the floor and I knew people were running out. So that’s when I stood up to leave. I didn’t know until I got outside that a bomb had exploded.”
The death of the four girls devastated the nation. But it was not the last bombing in Birmingham. The lack of compassion was evident and signaled that those determined to keep the system of Jim Crow were not moved by the death of children.
In the city and throughout the deep south, as civil rights activists worked to take down segregation, there were more deaths, more funerals, more marches and more protests. For McKinstry, 77, and other civil rights foot soldiers who fought on the frontlines for justice and equality during the civil rights movement, the re-election of Donald Trump is an undoing of the sacrifices and policy changes they toiled for.
In the first weeks of Trump’s second term, he signed an executive order eliminating federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs – including initiatives for diversity in federal contracting or grants that help farmers and minority communities – and instructed that DEI staff be laid off. Shortly after, corporations such as Target, Walmart, Lowe’s and Meta followed suit in eliminating their DEI programs.
Even the NFL capitulated to Trump’s DEI demands, ending its end zone slogan “end racism” at this year’s Super Bowl and replacing it with “choose love”. The “end racism” slogan had been stenciled in the end zone at Super Bowl games since 2021.
But those who participated in the 1960s civil rights movement are not surprised by Trump’s executive orders or divisive policies. They have seen this before. As they fought against Jim Crow laws, these activists faced staunch segregationists who battled integration, including Eugene “Bull” Connor, Jim Clark and George Wallace in Alabama; Orval Faubus in Arkansas; Lester Maddox in Georgia; and Ross Barnett and other segregationists in Mississippi.
David Dennis Sr grew up on a plantation in Louisiana and later attended Dillard University, a historically Black college in New Orleans, on a scholarship. Dennis faced violent segregationists as a Freedom Rider and in Mississippi as a co-director of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. After civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were killed at the beginning of Freedom Summer, Dennis’s fiery eulogy of Chaney expressed the exhaustion of fighting injustice.
America is experiencing a “surge backwards” in terms of race, after decades of progress, Dennis said. An example of a “surge forward” was the Reconstruction era after the civil war, Dennis, 84, said. Then there was a “surge backwards” during the presidency of Rutherford B Hayes, in which troops that had protected the formerly enslaved were moved out and a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan followed. Dennis noted that Jim Crow laws were enacted and there was a conservative supreme court.
“If you look at that period of time, what happened then, and what’s happening now, this surge back, there’s quite a similarity of what happened politically and what the issues were then as it is right now,” Dennis said.
There was another surge forward during the Eisenhower administration and with the civil rights movement, which saw the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Dennis said.
That surge forward came with pain and tragedy during the height of the fight for racial equality and justice in America.
Carlotta Walls LaNier experienced that pain. She still remembers the vitriol she and her classmates faced as they tried to integrate Central high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, on 23 September 1957.
“I knew there would be people who did not agree with the idea that we were integrating or going to Little Rock Central high school. I knew there would be people not happy about us wanting to go to that school. I expected some upset and name-calling,” said Walls LaNier, who, at 14, was the youngest of the Little Rock Nine. “I did not expect what took place to happen.”
Mayhem erupted as an angry white mob yelled racial epithets and threatened violence as the nine Black students attempted to enter the school. It was three years after the US supreme court declared that “separate but equal” schools were unconstitutional in the historic 1954 Brown v Board of Education case. But the angry mob that Walls LaNier and her classmates faced clung to the Jim Crow segregationist system in Little Rock.
Walls LaNier said President Dwight Eisenhower sent in the 101st airborne to protect the students. The Arkansas national guard remained with the students at the school for the rest of the school year. So when she saw the violence that occurred at the US Capitol on January 6, it reminded her of her experience in Little Rock more than six decades ago.
“I think that if anyone who never lived through what we lived through and need to understand what it was like, they can look at January 6,” said Walls Lanier, 82. “I see the two being equal, 23 September 1957 and 6 January 2021.”
For Dennis, the answer to the current chaotic political climate lies in the past. He remembers spending Sunday dinners listening to and learning from “elders”, those who were already working on civil rights.
“I think that we need to go back to our roots,” Dennis said. “The movement really wasn’t about thousands of people in the streets. The thousands of people came in the street after somebody did something. We took an issue and we zeroed in on that particular issue, as a people, as a group moving,” Dennis said.
“We didn’t try to solve everything at the same time. A few people would get together and they did something. People always ask me, ‘How do you get a movement started?’ I always go back to: you have to do something.”
There is a current movement under way focused on boycotting companies abandoning their DEI commitments, including Target. Civil rights activists say that company made a commitment to invest $2bn in the Black community within five years following the 2020 death of George Floyd, who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. A video by a bystander showed the officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly 10 minutes while he moaned in pain and called for his mother. Boycott leaders have taken a page from the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, in which Black residents didn’t ride the public bus for 385 days. The result was the dismantling of the segregated public transit system in the city.
During his church service earlier this month, the Rev Jamal Bryant, senior pastor of the New Birth Missionary Baptist church, outside Atlanta, asked the “conscientious Christian community” to not shop at Target for 40 days, starting on 3 March.
“What we learned from the Montgomery bus boycott is that racist America doesn’t respond to speeches. They respond to dollars,” said Bryant. “We are operating in decency and order. Do you know what it’s going to be for America when we start shifting our own economic ecosystem and start investing in ourselves? We are calling all stockholders to be held accountable to the commitment that you made to Black people.”
Walls LaNier of the Little Rock Nine, who faced violent white mobs and racist taunts, said: “We’re going to have to relive this all over again.” She said that a new generation of leaders will need to strategize in a different way against what this new administration plans to do.
It will take women to make the biggest change, Walls LaNier said. During the civil rights movement, the most active and vocal foot soldiers in the fight for equality and justice were women including Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Dorothy Height, Constance Baker Motley and Fannie Lou Hamer. The Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett has become one of the strongest critics of President Trump and his administration. Republicans will have to stand up to the Trump regime, too, Walls LaNier added.
“Unfortunately, there was a huge group of people of color who voted for [Trump], not understanding their history. They did not understand what their forefathers had given to this country and how things were being taken away from them. They will realize it very soon,” Walls LaNier said.
