Ola Larsmo: Trump erases the history of the Civil Rights Movement

At the end of Ava Duvernay’s feature film « Selma », which tells about the march of the civil rights movement for voting rights in 1965, the film switches to black and white documentary. For a few minutes we can accompany the 25,000 protesters when they go the last bit to Montgomery, Alabama, where they require capitoline that all obstacles for blacks to vote are made illegal. It is an incredibly beautiful sequence where people in a big and joyful calm go towards the future. The same autumn, President Johnson clubs through the Voting Rights Act, the greatest success of the civil rights movement.

In the black and white sequence you also see something else: how the protesters are protected by military and how racists threaten them behind the soldiers’ backs. Three voting rights activists were murdered during the campaign. President Johnson called in the National Guard to defend the marching-against Alabama Governor Walce’s resistance. It was, as the New York Times pointed out on June 8 this year, the first and so far only time it happened – until now.

President Trump acts in an identical way with regard to the demonstrations against ICE’s hard -handed progress against suspected paperless in Los Angeles – calls in the National Guard and runs over Governor Newsom. The same thing – though the opposite. In 1965, Wallace did not want military support as he did not want to benefit – or protect – the voting rights activists. In 2025, Newsom has made it clear that demonstrations and riots are something the local order can handle.

One has to stop and ask if the similarity in the action is a coincidence. Or if the mirror use of 1965 is part of a strategy. Trump – or those in his vicinity who know his history book – want to create a moment of the same historical importance, 60 years later. But with the opposite meaning. And thus show that the story has now turned direction.

It almost feels As a school book example of how authoritarian politicians everywhere dams of historical events to fill them with their own meaning, from Serbian Milosevic with its thrush in 1989, which began the civil war, to Putin’s interpretations of how Russia arose in Kiev, which must thus be Russian. History writing is again a battlefield.

The Voting Rights Act was given the number of black Americans who voted to rise dramatically. Yet it is now dismantled bit by bit and in full daylight

The success of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s was seen by many, also in Sweden, as the very evidence of how democracy was an unhooly force. The Voting Rights Act was given the number of black Americans who voted to rise dramatically. Still, it is now dismantled bit by bit and in full daylight. Few probably noted which limit was exceeded when the conservative majority in the US Supreme Court 2013 and 2021 annulled parts of Johnson’s voting law. It became possible again to redraw constituencies. In 2021, the state of Georgia’s Republican majority introduced a new law that made it criminal to give water or food to people waiting in line to vote. That kind of new « Jim Crow » laws creep out of the corners.

The day before he sent out the National Guard, Trump passed another such rewrite of the story when he reintroduced the names of the military bases once named after the southern state generals that were struck for slavery’s continuation: Lee, Bragg, Pickett – name that was removed as recently as a few years ago.

You don’t have to be a black American to understand which ear file it is intended to be: of the same kind as when Trump and Congress in March this year threatened Washington DC with withdrawn resources unless you immediately demolished the Black Lives Matter Plaza square. You can tear up a square but not write about the story, then black activists said.

That is what is the question itself.

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