How Black leaders are taking on Trump
“Resistance to the president should include lawsuits, boycotts, marches — and not forgetting history.
President Donald Trump’s second term began less than two weeks before the start of Black History Month. That has resulted in a strange duality.
Many U.S. institutions spent the past month valorizing African Americans. But the new administration has been rolling back policies designed to address past and current discrimination against Black people, including gutting civil rights offices across the government.
African Americans have long overwhelmingly backed Democratic candidates and held prominent roles in liberal organizations, creating an inevitable conflict whenever a Republican is president. But it’s new to have an administration so fixated on labeling as reverse discrimination, and then banning, almost any policy that considers race. So Black historians, organizers, activists and other African American political figures have both a huge stake in stopping the administration and some unique insights, given that they are well versed in the civil rights policies Trump and his aides are trying to overturn.
Here are three important ways they are thinking about resisting Trump:
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1. Liberals can’t duck race, gender identity and other fraught issues.
Some Democratic Party strategists concluded that Kamala Harris lost in November because she and the broader party are perceived by voters as too left-leaning on issues such as immigration and transgender rights. (I would argue that the more important factors were President Joe Biden’s age and unpopularity, Harris’s late entrance into the race, and worldwide frustration with incumbent parties because of post-pandemic inflation.) So before Trump took office, the party’s 2025 plan was to move to the right on those issues or at least not talk about them as often.
Black experts rightly argue this strategy was doomed to fail. Trump and other Republicans are fixated on rolling back immigration, transgender rights, and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, so those issues weren’t going to disappear from politics simply because Democrats weren’t talking about them. Instead, with Democratic politicians being silent, voters only hear the caricatures of liberal positions from Fox News and other conservative outlets.
“If you are constantly on your back foot and reacting to Republicans, who have no qualms talking about this stuff, you’re just going to lose,” Victor Ray, a professor of sociology, criminology and African American studies at the University of Iowa, told me. “If you’re in a fight and you don’t punch back, you’re going to get hurt.”
Black leaders say liberals and Democrats should instead directly rebut Republican arguments. For example, when Trump and his aides suggested a recent airplane crash was caused by diversity programs, Democrats could easily have pointed to the very low percentages of people of color working in the aviation industry.
Liberals should emphasize the broader benefits of policies that would, at first glance, seem to disproportionately help minorities.
“The way you guarantee that you have the very best people working for you … is to have an open process that doesn’t target any particular group, that doesn’t exclude any group, but makes it an open process where we are affirmatively and intentionally trying to be as inclusive as possible,” Todd Cox, an associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told me, laying out the importance of diversity and equity programs.
Finally, Black experts say people on the left should emphasize how Trump’s agenda benefits Elon Musk and the rich while hurting the working and middle classes. The goal, they say, is to build a broad, multiracial coalition that emphasizes economic issues but also defends those within the larger collective who are being targeted by this administration, such as transgender people.
“Most trans people are working-class, most Black people are working-class, most White folks are working-class. There is no racial justice about economic justice,” Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, told me.
2. Anti-Trump activists need to use a variety of tactics.
Black leaders argue that the 1960s are misunderstood. The common narrative is that a movement with a clear leader (the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.) and tactics (boycotts and marches) quickly won public support and got its agenda passed (the voting and civil rights acts).
The real story is that the 20th-century civil rights movement started decades before King was born, had fits and starts, and involved many divergent strategies and leaders.
Black activists argue that today requires a similar all-of-the-above approach: lawsuits, boycotts, marches, votes in Congress and any other tactic that might affect the political system. And no one should be confident about what, if anything, will work. So the Legal Defense Fund and other groups are filing numerous lawsuits to get Trump’s policies struck down by courts. The Working Families Party is encouraging liberals to attend town halls of Republican members of Congress and demand that they rein in Trump and Musk.
A group of Black pastors is calling for Americans to boycott Target and other companies that have acceded to Trump’s demands to roll back their diversity initiatives.
“People don’t actually know ‘what will have an effect.’ They simply do not. Do what you believe must be done within your capacity and do it with others,” organizer Mariame Kaba wrote in a post on Bluesky. “Be an agent rather than a pundit.”
In a recent speech, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) said: “We are going to litigate, legislate, agitate and resist. … So we will see you in Congress, in the courts and in the streets.”
3. Trump critics should connect this administration to the darkest parts of American history.
Black experts say the administration’s anti-trans policies, such as trying to ban transgender people from the military and sports, are direct echoes of past policies against Black people and Native Americans. And they argue that Trump’s agenda threatens many of the advances made by the civil rights movement.
Liberals and Democrats, they insist, must bluntly tell that story.
“I hate to sound alarmist, but I do not think we’ve seen a rollback of civil rights on this scale since the end of Reconstruction and … Jim Crow society in the South,” Austin McCoy, a historian at West Virginia University, told me.
Mitchell, who was among the early leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, argued that the recent dip in Trump’s poll numbers and the growing anxiety among even Republican members of Congress over actions taken by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service show that anti-Trump activism is already having an impact. And, he predicted, Black leaders and ultimately Black voters will have a key role in the burgeoning new resistance.
“Historically, we’ve been the conscience of the country,” said Mitchell. “From the Civil War era to the civil rights era to the Black Power movement era to the recent movement for Black lives era and the George Floyd moment — whenever things have hit a chord for us as Black people, we’ve been able to mobilize and organize the conscience of the entire country.”
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