Last month, I was traveling in Alabama. 

I had some spare time, so I visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. The memorial consists of a pavilion roof under which hang massive granite slabs. Each slab represents a county within which there were lynchings. Every person lynched has their name chiseled into the granite. 

Over 4,400 Black people have been lynched in our country.

Lynchings were a terror campaign to keep Black people from exercising their rights, especially to vote.  No one ever knew when masked Klansmen would show up, apprehend people without any due process, then proceed to torture and kill them.

Today we have a different terror campaign.  Masked men suddenly show up, presumed to be federal agents, and proceed to apprehend people without any due process. The detainees are then shipped secretly to detention centers that are literally human cages, awaiting deportation to a country our president once called a “s###hole country.”

Mistaken identities and false legal charges are rampant or often unresearched prior to arrests. The net effect is a terror campaign targeting not just undocumented people, but all brown people in the U.S.

Later on in my trip, I visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. It provides a sobering history of the Civil Rights Movement, which started when Black Americans returned from serving their country in World War II only to find the same racial prejudices they left.

President Eisenhower signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which protected Black American voting rights and allowed federal prosecution of state officials who suppressed another person’s right to vote. Former Confederate states continued to invent registration hurdles depriving people of their right to vote.

President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, preventing the use of literacy tests as a voting requirement. It also allowed federal examiners to review state voting qualifications and to monitor polling places.

With federal oversight, our country made tremendous progress toward ensuring voting rights.  Qualifications were simplified for registering to vote and providing a signature, which could be compared to a voter’s signature the day of an election. The process also worked well with remote voting. The result was much greater voter participation with virtually no fraud.

Emboldened by a president who incited an insurrection and continues to promote a lie about fraudulent voting, states dominated by Republicans are inventing new hurdles to vote. The bureaucratic hurdles they are creating are justified as a solution toward a problem that actually doesn’t exist – voting fraud. The result most certainly will be to disenfranchise those voters least capable of navigating new bureaucratic hurdles or providing documentation, when their most pressing concern is when they will next eat.

President Johnson also signed civil rights legislation to prevent housing and employment discrimination. These laws did not prevent such discrimination – they pushed it underground, covered by carefully worded policy descriptions.  Businesses and institutions of good conscience started Affirmative Action programs to counter-balance the ingrained racism they recognized in their own business practices.

Today, we have a president, Supreme Court and Justice Department attacking and punishing organizations that adopted Affirmative Action programs through their own free will and self interest to compete in a diverse world.

Meanwhile, racial discrimination persists.

In 1954, the Supreme Court determined that racially segregated schools could never be equal, and that such segregation deprived Black students of an equal education. Southern states ignored the decision.  State by state, federal marshals had to protect Black students as they started to attend previously White-only schools.  

Thurgood Marshall was the attorney who won the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that legally ended segregated schools. In 1967, he was appointed to the Supreme Court and persisted as a champion for civil rights for all.  When he retired, he was replaced by Clarence Thomas. Justice Thomas is a Black judge who has consistently joined majority votes against Affirmative Action and diversity programs. Yet, he also acknowledges he benefited from such programs throughout his education and legal career.

Our country has done many noble things – including reversing sometimes violent discrimination that has persisted throughout our history. These actions are what makes America great. 

There actually is no “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” There are only proud Americans who are appalled at actions of our current government that are echoes of our most sordid and ugly past.