America is America even because it shows, as never before, the power of the common, ordinary, unlovely man. This is real democracy and not that vain and external striving to regard the world as the abiding place of exceptional genius with great black wastes of hereditary idiots. 

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk (1924)

In appeals to Black voters, Donald Trump and his surrogates often claim that his presidency was the best administration for Black folks in the history of the nation. Black audiences, however, are tuned in to the rhetoric of the former president and remember the policies of his administration. For them, Trump’s presidency was marked by the historic rollback of legislation that had been in place for over sixty-plus years to ensure inclusivity in the American experiment.

Trump began by erecting barriers to voting within black communities. But this was just the tip of the iceberg. His anti-Black policies included an attack by his Department of Housing and Urban Development on the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Act. This rule had been designed to produce open housing, reducing segregated living patterns by ensuring that families, regardless of race, could live where they wished as long as they could afford to purchase the home.

In its place, the Trump administration established the “Preserving Community and Neighborhood Choice” program to secure support from white suburban America. The 45^th president tweeted shortly after the policy’s revision, “people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream … will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low-income housing” built in their neighborhoods. Even the likes of Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, acknowledged that Trump’s housing policies were “implicitly racist.”

Notwithstanding these anti-black policy measures, Trump, the consummate master-brander, often highlights the 5.9 % unemployment rate for black folks during his tenure; his backing of Opportunity Zones, which was included in the so-called Trump tax cuts; and his support for the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). In a telling move, though, Trump moved the White House Initiative on HBCUs to the Department of Education (DOE). This point is essential because, as late as June 2024, the former president argued that the DOE should be disbanded, and that education policy should move “back to the states where it belongs.”

Without a doubt, this proposed policy change would remove any federal oversight of HBCUs. It would grant sole authority to the states to fund and govern those institutions, even though, as the DOE recently discovered, these same states have underfunded HBCUs over the past thirty years, depriving them of some $13 billion pledged by historic land grants.

But the Trump legacy that causes the greatest trepidation within the Black community was his response to the public murders of young Black folk. Middle-class Black folks remember Trump’s last year in office painfully well—and have quietly vowed not to allow the nation to return to what will perhaps be remembered as the darkest moment in the twenty-first century for minority communities.

The spring and summer of 2020 were the catalysts that sparked a political movement within the black middle class—an awakening of sorts. Ignited by the lynching deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Brianna Taylor, George Floyd—and a host of other names that are still unsaid, Black folk and their allies grew stubbornly sick and tired of being casualties of a new form of Negrophobia that was now on display.

After the world watched the horrific murder of George Floyd on Memorial Day, many reconsidered the words of President Trump—and how they encouraged the ideals of white supremacy throughout his time in the White House. They recalled his response to the white-supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, his threats to have Black football players fired for not standing for national anthem in a silent yet peaceful protest of the injustices Black folks faced, his comments regarding immigrants coming from “shithole countries,” and his ban on Muslims entering the US from Muslim-majority countries.

Many Americans of all races began to view Trump and his policies as those, not of a political disruptor, but of an authoritarian dictator who desired to remake the nation in his and his followers’ image and likeness. Moreover, tension between the new silent majority and Trump’s America came to a head in the spring of 2020. Ushered in by Covid-19 and the Trump administration’s gross mishandling of this public health crisis, scores of Americans began to reconsider their previous vote for Trump.

This awakening in support of the defense of democracy is built upon generations of Black activism. Since the American Revolution, Black folks have been front and center in the fight to secure and preserve the idea of a liberal democracy. From freedom fighters such as the Revolutionary War heroes Salem Poor (1747-1802) and Crispus Attucks (1723-1770) to the poet Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), Black folks at the very foundation of this nation struggled to keep the light of freedom alive for all American citizens.

During the Civil War, free Black men in the North and freedmen in the South fought to secure the freedom of millions of enslaved Black folk. But, they did not stop there. During Reconstruction, newly elected Black officials partnered with like-minded whites to amend the United States Constitution. Their efforts ensured that Black folk were included in the American ideals via the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. But they did not stop there: Black churches, white philanthropists, and government officials established Black colleges to ensure Black folk had the opportunity to gain access to the middle class via higher education.

Moreover, throughout the twentieth century, Black folk organized to fight for human rights—a fight that reemerged in the twenty-first century via the George Floyd Policing Act—an act that Republican members of Congress blocked. But they did not stop there. In the mid-twentieth century, Black folk fought for and secured Civil and Voting Rights for all Americans.

From the Civil War through Reconstruction to the modern Civil Rights Movement and the election of Barack Obama, Black folk served in many ways as the moral conscience of America. Often reminding the nation’s leaders of the promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — promises that were not and are still not fully inclusive of the nation’s population. Thus, the legacy of Black folks in America was—and remains—to continue to push this nation daily to evolve into a more perfect Union.

Despite those gains, the headwinds opposing inclusion have always been strong in the American experiment. Nonetheless, Black folk have displayed a willingness to push the nation to align more closely with the original ideals of a government for and by the people. Consequently, it was no surprise that in the fall of 2020, black folk in general, and black women, in particular, in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Phoenix, voted en masse for the Democratic nominee for President, Joseph R. Biden, and his vice-presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, effectively saving democracy in the US—for at least four more years.

It is no accident that Trump’s attempted insurrection and coup d’etat at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, symbolically pitted his MAGA movement against the 1963 March on Washington led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Trump claimed that his “stop the steal” rally attracted the same size—or even larger–crowd as King’s march. Not only was this a gross misstatement from the former president, but as the NAACP pointed out, Trump’s address charged the attendees to march to the Capitol and disrupt the democratic process.

Nearly 58 years earlier, King and other leaders who shared the dais on the National Mall encouraged the nation to be true to words intentionally written in the United States Constitution. Those who attended the march in ’63 were not only fighting for inclusion in the American dream. They also demanded that the nation’s leaders live up to the words printed on its founding documents. Trump and his supporters, by contrast, specifically encouraged their followers to overtly defy democratic norms with the desire to have the results of the November 2020 election dismissed and Trump “appointed” president. What has taken nearly 250 years to create, scaffold, and develop was almost destroyed in hours.

Once order from the several-hour mayhem was restored, many Americans praised elected leaders for their response to the riot at the US Capitol, explicitly pointing to Vice President Mike Pence’s brief remarks once the Congress reconvened. Pence scolded the rioters, saying: “To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, you did not win. Violence never wins. Freedom wins. And this is still the people’s house.” Ironically, Pence’s courage to follow the constitution by simply overseeing Congress during the “peaceful transition of power” overshadowed the role of the Black vote in saving this liberal democracy and defending this republic. Notwithstanding, for a moment—a very brief moment, it appeared that with their vote and organization, Black folk had saved the US from slipping into an authoritarian regime.

Unfortunately, as the weeks, months, and years slowly faded, so did the memory of January 6th, the Trump presidency, and the overt marginalization of members of the underrepresented minority community. Yet Black folk understand clearly that the Trump administration’s reversal of civil rights era policies foreshadows what he would attempt to do in a second term.  Without the sixty-plus years of legislation providing feeble fortifications against anti-Black policy, a second Trump presidency might usher in a new form of Jim Crow in the United States.

Once again, Black folk have been called to save democracytime, by supporting a Black woman—a woman born to an Indian mother and Jamaican father—a person who graduated from Howard University and pledged the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Although the Black community may not agree with every policy decision Kamala Harris has made, or with everything in her background—what, for the most part, they all agree with is that, in Harris, they see their daughter, sister, auntie, wife, and mother. They hear the veiled racist, misogynist attacks that not only hit her, but the Black community at large. For the first time since 2008, black folk, both men and women, are motivated to vote. Not just for Kamala—but for us—and for the chance to continue to push America, in the words of Dr. King, “to be true to who it said it was on paper.”

Reginald K. Ellis, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Florida A&M University.