Civil rights leaders discuss the lessons of the ’60s for the Trump era
In the nearly six decades since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement has reinvented itself time and again, moving from a fight to eliminate Jim Crow to more contested political and economic terrain, from affirmative action to affirmative actions.
Leaders across the movement say that one year into the Trump administration, they face a new inflection point.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion programs throughout the federal government. Top administration officials have urged White men to file complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, casting programs benefiting women and people of color as discriminatory. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on a case this year that could eliminate a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which transformed who gets sent to the House, state legislatures, city councils and school boards.
“The level of attack is so great, it’s going to require a greater sense of coordination and strategy,” said Bernice King, the youngest child of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. “That’s why it’s important for people to study my dad’s movement because they were very good at coordinating efforts across all their different campaigns.”
As the definition of civil rights continues to evolve, The Washington Post spoke to activists about the 1960s civil rights movement and what comes next.
Doris Crenshaw
“In addition to Mrs. Parks, I had the pleasure of working with Dorothy Height, Fannie Lou Hamer, Coretta Scott King, Juanita Abernathy and so many other women of the movement. The women were really the wheels that propelled the movement. So while men were often in the spotlight, it was the unsung leadership of women that really powered the whole thing. Between 1955 and 1965, there were only a little over 200 people that were on the staff of these organizations, so it was the sustaining role of women and youth that carried the movement forward.”
Crenshaw, 82, joined the civil rights movement after meeting Rosa Parks at the age of 12. A short time later, Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a city bus helped spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Parks persuaded her to become a member of the local NAACP and she eventually became the president of the chapter’s youth council.
Key to the success of civil rights campaigns was the involvement of women and young people, said Crenshaw, who runs the Southern Youth Leadership Development Institute, a training program for youths interested in activism.
Joel B. Rosen
“We went out into the community and asked them what was important to them. People needed coal, so we started a coal co-op. We started a food co-op. This may sound like nothing, but it was a big deal. We built outhouses. I was not good at carpentry, I’m still not, but I was a damn good hole digger. We organized women who worked as maids to get better wages. I’m so very proud of what we did but I always emphasize we were a tiny speck, there were some people who were beaten and there were even some people who gave their lives. The truth is I think I got a whole lot more out of it than I gave.”
Rosen, 78, dropped out of college in 1966 and went to Huntsville, Alabama, as part of a Volunteers in Service to America program. The federal initiative, part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” sent thousands of young people to low-income communities to tackle issues like poor housing conditions and unemployment. Rosen, just 20 years old at the time, said he and his partner, Joe Murphy, both White men, were able to get into rooms that Huntsville’s Black residents could not, often showing up at the mayor’s office in their overalls. One person might not make much difference, Rosen said, but together they helped spread the civil rights movement throughout the South.
After the program, he spent 30 years as a lawyer, including as a federal prosecutor, a deputy state attorney general, and a federal magistrate judge in New Jersey.
Ash-Lee Henderson
“In the 1950s and 1960s, there was this moral clarity that came from people realizing that the status quo way of doing things in this country had to change. I think that is where we are at this moment. I don’t know that in my lifetime we’ve ever had a better moment to actually enact our vision for the world than right now. I imagine that this is how people in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or the African National Congress in South Africa felt when they were on the verge of getting the kind of foundational change they were fighting for. I think that it is really going to be a matter of us tripping over our shoelaces if we lose right now by getting into unproductive debates about tactics. When our elders and ancestors in the Black liberation movement said by any means necessary they meant by all the means.”
In 2017, Henderson, 40, became the first Black woman to run the Highlander Research and Education Center in eastern Tennessee. The center, founded in the 1930s as a training ground for labor activists, had opened its doors to civil rights activists like King and Parks, who spent weeks there preparing for the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
In recent days, Henderson, who left Highlander in 2024, said she has been thinking a lot about what the work done by the activists who passed through the center can tell us about the modern civil rights debate. They prevailed, she said, because activists from across the ideological spectrum presented a unified front.
Damien Durr
“The Proctor Conference was born out of concern that by embracing ideas like the prosperity gospel and focusing on individual success, the Black Church was actually diminishing its significance and distorting its original intent. And so as a result, the Black Lives Matter movement was the first civil rights movement that was not based in the church. So the church missed a unique opportunity to engage a demographic of younger people who want to live their faith in ways that make an impact and a difference. And I think, in turn, the Black Lives Matter movement missed out on the way that spirituality can propel people.”
Durr’s path into activism can be traced back to his time at American Baptist College, a tiny seminary in Nashville that produced an outsize number of civil rights giants, including John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette and James Bevel. Durr, 47, leads the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, a group of social justice-oriented Black clergy.
For Durr, the biggest lesson of the civil rights movement is the important role that the Black church can play. Spirituality has a unique way of compelling people to action, he said.
Bernice King
“I don’t think people realized how difficult it was for the people who were boycotting the buses for 382 days. They had to continue to shift their strategy and their plan because there were all kinds of efforts to stop them. And I remember my mother sharing with me when the city filed an injunction against the carpools and it seemed like they were going to have to give up. It was one of their darkest hours. But as they were sitting in court fighting that injunction, they heard that the Supreme Court had issued a ruling declaring segregation on the buses unconstitutional. It was unbelievable, so the key thing is to remember that you cannot stop doing good, because at some point there is going to be a change. We have to remain vigilant. We have to remain hopeful. And we have to remember that our ancestors faced some even more difficult times.”
King, the CEO of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, said in recent days that she has found herself thinking a lot about the stories her parents told her about when victory felt impossible. The current challenges to the civil rights victories her parents helped secure offer a silver lining, she said. “It’s in moments like this that people realize what’s at stake,” King said. “Whenever we get comfortable, we lose ground.”
