Making Segregation Legal Again
This latest decision is a scream to federal contractors to go ahead and rip the mask off and replace it with a Klan hood.
Remember learning about the Civil Rights Movement in school?
We learned how Rosa Parks refused to move to a seat at the back of a segregated bus when the white driver demanded she do so, leading to the Montgomery bus boycott.
We learned, of course, about Dr. Martin Luther King and his famous “I Have a Dream Speech” at the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom.
Most of us have seen pictures like these:
While we could do a lot better, going beyond this in teaching children other important Civil Rights leaders like John Lewis, Bayard Rustin, Fannie Lou Hamer, C.T. Vivian, and others, the main takeaway schoolchildren all over America understand is that racial segregation of schools, restaurants, theaters, waiting rooms, is wrong. We addressed it in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that Dr. King et al. worked tirelessly and non-violently to push through Congress and President Lyndon Johnson’s administration.
This does not mean we do not still practice de facto and de jure segregation, though. No legislation is perfect, and there are always loopholes local, state, and federal lawmakers wiggle through to push political agendas. Schools are still very much segregated due to the fact that we fund them through property taxes, leaving poorer zip codes with perpetually poorer schools. Economic segregation is very much alive and well in America, as is medical segregation, and, now with the current regime’s anti- DEI policies, employment segregation is about to come roaring back in a big way.
Well, now segregated facilities are no longer banned--again.
The convicted felon’s administration is racing to roll back the clock sixty years with a public memo the General Services Administration (GSA) announced last month, demanding all civil federal agencies to cease prohibiting contractors from establishing segregated restaurants, waiting rooms, and drinking fountains.
The memo explains that it is making changes prompted by President Trump’s executive order on diversity, equity and inclusion, which repealed an executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 regarding federal contractors and nondiscrimination. The memo also addresses Trump’s executive order on gender identity.
Revising the language that has guided federal contractors for six decades, the GSA memo states, “When issuing new solicitations or contracts,” civil agencies should no longer include the provision and clause about the “Prohibition of Segregated Facilities.”
New York University constitutional law professor, Melissa Murray, explained:
It’s symbolic, but it’s incredibly meaningful in its symbolism. These provisions that required federal contractors to adhere to and comply with federal civil rights laws and to maintain integrated rather than segregated workplaces were all part of the federal government’s efforts to facilitate the settlement that led to integration in the 1950s and 1960s. The fact that they are now excluding those provisions from the requirements for federal contractors, I think, speaks volumes.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump added, “While segregation is still illegal, this change sends a CLEAR message.”
Attorney and founder of civil rights and employment law firm DeGolia Law P.C., told Newsweek:
In practice, numerous federal laws still prohibit government contractors from maintaining segregated facilities. And the Trump Administration does not have the power to rescind those laws.
However, as Joshua Klugman, an attorney specializing in discrimination law, added:
The public’s views of the world, of race, of segregation, of interactions, and so on and so forth, with other groups, that has changed culturally. There’s been a cultural shift, regardless of what the law says.
True, the former host of Celebrity Apprentice does not have the power to rescind laws by executive order. But, as we are seeing play out with his ignoring of federal judges’ rulings, claiming the president “can’t do this” is naive and not much of a consolation.
When the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal soldiers enforcing reconstruction in the South after the Civil War, it opened the flood gates to wave upon wave of a century of Jim Crow laws. Yes, there remained insidious forms of discrimination, like the prison industrial complex disguised as “the war on crime” that morphed into a “drug war”, and pernicious voter-suppression laws that remain codified in mostly Southern states today. Former Reagan advisor Lee Atwater laid it all out in 1981 (see below). But the federal government played a vital role in keeping it from creeping back to 1960s level. Nothing is perfect, but we were better, and tightening things up all the time.
This latest decision, though, is a scream to federal contractors to go ahead and rip the mask off and replace it with a Klan hood.
We’re already segregating in sports.
With the dismantling of the Education Department, we are going to see more discrimination against disabled students, students requiring special education services, LGBTQ students, and immigrants.
Is segregation technically still illegal?
Yes.
But that all depends on what the current administration — from the Oval Office on down — defines as “illegal”.
Let’s not forget, there is a convicted felon sitting right now in the Oval Office.