“Think about a split screen,” historian Brian Clardy proposed.
“You have the governor in Selma marching on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the 60th anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday.’ Then you have the legislature in Frankfort wanting to take us back to pre-1966 with their assault on DEI. What does that tell you about the state of our politics?”
Fifty-nine years ago last January, the General Assembly passed the Civil Rights Act of 1966. Thus, Kentucky became “the first state south of the Mason-Dixon line with a civil rights law,” the media reported.
This year, the Republican supermajority House and Senate passed House Bill 4. While the 1966 law was designed to expand civil rights, HB 4 does the opposite by mandating the end of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at the state’s public universities and community colleges.
“White lawmakers, scared senseless over the possibility that providing underserved groups with a needed boost up the economic ladder might better their lives, have set about, successfully for the most part, eliminating DEI initiatives offered at schools and universities and within federal and state governments,” wrote Northern Kentucky Tribune columnist Bill Straub. “Proponents have further applied pressure to dowse all hope within the private sector.”
Added the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Famer: “The assault, led by President-cum-Dictator Donald J. Trump, is overwhelming. It is the revenge of the White people. It is despicable and overtly racist.”
Straub, never one to pull punches, zeroed in on the state legislature, “which never strays far behind in keeping minorities and women in their place.”
As expected, Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, vetoed HB 4, and the Republicans lost no time overriding him.
In his veto message, Beshear warned, “Acting like racism and discrimination no longer exist or that hundreds of years of inequality have been somehow overcome and there is a level playing field is disingenuous. History may look at this time and this bill as part of the anti-civil rights or pro-discrimination movement. Kentucky should not be a part of that movement.”
Sadly, lawmakers from the former party of “Lincoln and Liberty” have put Kentucky squarely in that movement.
“We say that we’re a diverse society, an inclusive society, a compassionate society, a great society, but we reject guarantees that we’re an inclusive, diverse, and multicultural society,” said Clardy, a professor of history at Murray State University. “I’m not just talking about racial differences – that’s obvious. I’m also talking about religious diversity, gender diversity and non-binary diversity.”
He suggested that GOP lawmakers and other DEI critics study some history. “Gay people didn’t just start showing up after Stonewall. Gay people have been around for thousands of years. Transgender people have been around for thousands of years. This is nothing new.”
HB 4 passed the Senate 32-6 and the House 79-17. Only two Democrats voted with the Republicans: Rep. Ashley Tackett Laferty of Martin and Sen. Robin Webb of Grayson.
HB 4 is part of a nationwide rightwing crusade against DEI led by Donald Trump and his Republican party. Whether in Washington or in state legislatures, opposition to DEI “relies on twisted logic,” wrote Trey Walk of Human Rights Watch. “Institutions began creating DEI and affirmative action programs after the fall of racial segregation in the US. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, outlawing school segregation, and 1964’s Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, are bedrock principles: they created protections that people in the US have relied upon for over 60 years.”
He warned, “When you hear about efforts to end DEI, know that it’s more than some organizations ending a few programs. The dams built to hold off discrimination are under attack. We must not let them fall.”
The Kentucky Civil Rights Act overwhelmingly passed the Democratic majority House and Senate with bipartisan support. When he signed the bill on Jan. 27, 1966, Gov. Edward T. Breathitt, a Hopkinsville Democrat, issued a warning, which Sy Ramsey of the Associated Press quoted: “Many will remember what we have done today. Let history record what we shall do in the long tomorrow.”
The long tomorrow is today.
Sen. Gerald Neal of Louisville was among Democrats who spoke against HB 4. The minority floor leader cited examples from American history to buttress his argument that racism has been systemic for centuries-from slavery and Jim Crow times to the present.
“Even today you hear the language that ‘there’s nothing systemic; there’s nothing structural’” but “everything we do is systemic … and we enforce it.”
He said “racism is wide and deep.” Thus, he denied a “level playing field” exists between whites and minorities. Opponents of DEI, according to Neal, “Say ... forget the past because the past is the past. But guess what? The past is what we are now … and yet as we profess to lift everyone, we won’t acknowledge that. We say ‘Just do your thing. You’ll catch up because the field is level.’”
The anti-DEI crusade is more evidence of white, conservative America’s long retreat from civil rights, sped up by the rise of Donald Trump and his nearly all-white MAGA movement. “Sadly, the backlash that started with the Southern Strategy under Nixon, the Wallace campaign and all that followed, has come full circle,” Clardy said. “This is George Wallace’s dream come true. He lost when he ran for president, but he won the culture wars.”
Trump ran the three most overtly racist presidential campaigns since Wallace’s bid in 1968. A former Alabama governor, Wallace was the embodiment of stubborn and often violent white resistance to sweeping federal civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
Clardy argued that “the MAGA people and the neo-segregationists of the 21st century don’t understand that we are not the society of 1966. We are more diverse; we are more technically integrated. African Americans and others have achieved high political office; minorities are homeowners, business owners. They are also the makers of culture.”
Clardy said those who “think for one moment that we are going back to ‘colored’ and ‘white only’ signs, or that we are going to lose the right to vote and participate in liberal democracy, or that we will not continue to make culture on an integrated, multicultural stage, are delusional.
“It will not happen.”
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