The Undoing: How Trumpism Reverses a Century of Civil Rights

What Trumpism Wants to Erase — And Why We Fight Back

Author’s Note: This op-ed is rooted in memory—my own, and those of the people whose stories I read during my first year of graduate school at Fisk University. It is dedicated to them, and to every Black child who ever walked into a school knowing they were a threat to white supremacy simply by learning.

Opinion by: Aisha K. Staggers

The Archive of Violence

During my first year at Fisk, I spent countless hours in Special Collections reading old newspaper clippings from every corner of the country. They documented the efforts—no, the battles—to integrate American schools. What I found wasn’t just history; it was a ledger of trauma and violence.

Parents fired from their jobs. Children beaten, spat on, and in some cases—had acid thrown in their faces. Adults—white adults—taunting six-year-old girls with ape noises and signs screaming, “Go Back to Africa,” while the n-word flowed abundantly from contorted faces. And the death threats. So. Many. Death. Threats. All of it done in defense of an idea: that white children should not be "tainted" by proximity to Blackness. Integration wasn’t just a legal issue—it was an existential threat to white supremacy, to the myth of racial innocence that America had built itself upon.

These were not isolated events; they were chapters in a familiar story—one where erasure masquerades as patriotism, and power pretends to be fairness.