Donald Trump's Executive Order Restores White Supremacy
The whitest executive order of all time is a perfect example of how fascism starts.
On Thursday evening, I was attending a symposium at the University of South Carolina when I received the news about Donald Trump’s executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
I couldn’t have been more excited.
My parents, grandparents and every generation of my American ancestors have spent years trying to restore truth and sanity to American history — especially in South Carolina.
My paternal grandmother’s ancestors were enslaved in Colleton County, S.C., until they were freed by Harriet Tubman during the Combahee River Raid. Her husband was registered to vote in 1946 and their twin children — my aunt Rebecca and Uncle Isaac — were the youngest of 187 students arrested at the demonstration that gave every American the right to protest. My maternal grandparents forced Sonoco Products, the largest business in the state, to integrate in 1943. (My grandfather was the first Black employee; my maternal grandmother was the company’s first female employee — Black or white). Their oldest daughter, Jannie Harriot, single-handedly forced the governor to create a government department to preserve African-American history. She has single-handedly saved more than 40 landmarks to Black history and revived the nationwide interest in the Green Book. Despite centuries of service, my family’s legacy is dwarfed by their financial contributions to one of South Carolina’s most extensive civil rights programs:
The greatest state-sponsored fascism museum in the modern world.
While there are museums, landmarks and buildings documenting Italy’s fascist history and Germany’s Hitler’s Third Reich, they don’t honor Hitler and Mussolini. The few rinky-dink Klan museums scattered across the country are not built with public funds. Even states like Alabama, which uses taxpayer funds to preserve the state’s Confederate heritage, don’t have a central location to celebrate the state’s history of racism.
My ancestors — and every person who has ever paid taxes in the Palmetto State — have contributed millions of dollars to build, maintain and expand the South Carolina Capitol Complex. Aside from serving as the headquarters of the state government, the State House Grounds houses America’s largest collection of government-funded monuments celebrating terrorism, race-based servitude and legalized apartheid. It contains every conceivable variation of monument to white supremacy, including:
A banner to white supremacy that never flew in the state until 1938.
A monument to insurrectionist traitors who took up arms against their country.
A monument to the white women who supported the insurrection.
Four buildings named after segregationists (Edgar A. Brown, L. Marion Gressette, Rembert C. Dennis and Solomon Blatt).
A building and a statue to two-time coup leader and terrorist Wade Hampton III.
Marble reliefs of human traffickers.
A statue of segregation movement leader Strom Thurmond that had to be amended to include his Black children.
Perhaps the greatest of all these is a monument to a homegrown Hitler, Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman.
Unveiled in 1940, the 10-foot memorial celebrates a mass murderer, a domestic terrorist, a human trafficker, a traitor and an insurrectionist who also served as governor and senator of the state. Tilman murdered South Carolinians while they prayed more than a century before Dylann Roof. Long before Donald Trump’s anti-democracy movement, Tillman famously said: “We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”
During Tillman’s quarter-century political reign (1890-1914), white South Carolinians were the minority. The state was 56% Black when Tillman was born and 51% Black when he died. Yet, the inscription on Tillman’s statue is not a “whitewashed” version of history, nor is it a perspective. To enter the headquarters of South Carolina’s government, every citizen, including my family, must walk past what is perhaps the greatest state-sponsored lie ever inscribed in stone:
“Loving them, he was the friend and leader of the common people. He taught them their political power and made possible for the education of their sons and daughters.”
Donald Trump has certified this lie.
Trump’s order singles out the Smithsonian Institution for alleging that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism.” To be fair, it’s possible that Trump doesn’t know about the statue of Marion Simms, the eugenicist who experimented on enslaved women. The decree doesn’t just negate facts, it literally sides with scientific racism. While the vast majority of the scientific community agrees that there is no biological foundation for race, Trump wants to defund the Smithsonian because of an exhibit that “promotes the idea that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”
Truth and sanity be damned.
Trump’s edict also targets the National Museum of African American History and Culture, stating that the Blacksonian “has proclaimed that ‘hard work,’ ‘individualism,’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘White culture.’”
This is the part that made my head explode.
There isn’t a sane, truthful historian on the face of the planet that can refute the fact that America created a race-based, constitutionally enforced system that used violence and the threat of violence to extract labor from enslaved Africans. The foundational document of this country allowed slave owners to sell children, husbands and wives. The United States Constitution formally declared that enslaved people were not counted as individuals. Marriages between enslaved people were not legally recognized so, according to the law, the only “nuclear families” were white.
While it may feel uncomfortable, or “divisive,” it is also a fact.
More importantly, this is how fascism works.
Ben Tillman's Redeemers, Strom’s segregationists and South Carolina's Confederate flag flyers didn’t just want to whitewash history; they wanted to restore white supremacy. They were trying to save fascism. My ancestors didn’t just live under fascist rule; they remember how it began.
My grandfather James Harriot Sr. was born on June 19, 1919 (Yep. He was literally born on Juneteenth during the Red Summer). He was 18 when the Confederate flag began flying in the South Carolina House Chambers and 21 years old when South Carolina unveiled its taxpayer-funded statue to fascism. My mother, father and all 18 of my aunts and uncles were enrolled in S.C. schools when lawmakers raised the white supremacist banner in the Senate to oppose the integrated school my grandparents funded.
My grandmother Inez Brown Williams was born in 1913. She was literally alive when Ben Tillman served in the U.S. Senate. She raised a generation of children who brought down a tyrannical government. She was alive when her son spoke about the effort to protect a monument that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).” In fact, her son, longtime NAACP field Director Ike Williams, said this:
Donald Trump’s executive order is unconstitutional.
According to the 1963 Supreme Court case Edwards v. S.C., the government cannot just restrict a person or an organization’s speech because it is unpopular or disagreeable. I had almost forgotten about this case until I was having dinner with Dr. Bobby Donaldson, a historian at the University of South Carolina. Donaldson pulled out a phone to show me one of his favorite historical photos — a black and white photograph of a group of students marching at the protest that led to the infamous SCOTUS case. Donaldson explained that he commissioned a life-size version of the photo for the University of South Carolina’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research, which he leads. For years, he had been trying to identify the people in the photo. Donaldson even searched South Carolina colleges for the names of the students who were enrolled at the time of the demonstration, to no avail.
But I knew why his mission had failed. The cool-looking woman wearing white in the foreground of the photo was not a college student. Because she was only 15 years old at the time she was arrested, she technically does not have a criminal record. I immediately identified the woman in the photo as the youngest protester arrested at the historic event — not because I am a scholar or a historian.
It’s my aunt (and Ike’s twin sister) Rebecca Small.
What a stunning family legacy! It explains a lot about you and your lifetime of work.
Powerful. Thank you.