fb-pixelOpinion | Trump’s revisionist history faces grassroots resistance Skip to main content
OPINION

Yes, even small victories against a tyrannical Trump matter

Nothing this president does should go unchallenged.

A photo of abolitionist Harriet Tubman, which was removed and then restored on the NPS webpage. (Harvey B. Lindsley/Library of Congress)

Even by the standards of this ruinous year, Monday seemed particularly miserable.

Hellbent on making President Trump into the king he already thinks he is, the conservative-led Supreme Court ruled that the administration can, for now, continue to deport Venezuelan immigrants under the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act. It did not address the various illegalities, including a denial of due process.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The court should not reward the government’s efforts to erode the rule of law.”

That came hours after the court temporarily paused a federal court’s deadline for the Trump administration to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was snatched by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents while driving to his Maryland home with his 5-year-old son. Along with dozens of immigrants, he was sent to a notorious prison in his native El Salvador.

Advertisement



And Trump’s tariffs and trade war against much of the world continued to roil the stock market and shred 401(k) plans.

But there was one small but important win: Harriet Tubman is again getting her full due.

One day after a Washington Post story revealed that a prominent photo of Tubman had been removed and her role as the Underground Railroad’s most famous “conductor” and the brutality of 246 years of slavery minimized on the National Park Service’s website, the original content was restored.

“Trump is trying to rewrite the history of the Underground Railroad,” Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland posted on social media before the removal was corrected. “The Underground Railroad is an important part of the American story. We cannot let him whitewash it as part of his larger effort to erase our history.”

Advertisement



Tubman, who escaped slavery, returned to the South nearly 20 times and led more than 300 enslaved Black people out of bondage. Years later she said, “I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

This isn’t the first time that the Trump administration has had to restore history that had been expunged under what is essentially Trump’s white-men-only view of America. Last month, the Defense Department returned pages to its website on baseball great Jackie Robinson, who served in the US Army during World War II, and the famed Tuskegee Airmen that it claimed had been “mistakenly removed.”

In the wholeness of what this authoritarian administration is doing, such admissions seem minor. But every victory against Trump, no matter how small, is an important strike against a man who demands nothing less than total capitulation.

At first, opposition to Trump’s blur of executive orders, massive firings of federal employees and dismantling of agencies without congressional approval, ICE officials snatching immigrants from their families and communities, seemed sluggish at best. It was as if many didn’t know where to start.

That has changed. On Saturday, about 1,000 people in Sackets Harbor, N.Y, protested last month’s ICE detention of their neighbors — a Guatemalan mother and her three children. After 10 days in federal custody, the family was released on Monday.

Advertisement



There are also protests and court actions against the sudden revocations of foreign student visas — more than two dozen students at Massachusetts colleges and universities alone.

Millions nationwide took to the streets on Saturday in opposition to the Trump administration, including the unelected Elon Musk who has been a driving force in deconstructing the federal government — although you might not have known it from the generally muted media response.

Absent the kind of unified Democratic leadership against Trump that many have craved since Jan. 20, ordinary citizens are mobilizing — whether it’s call-bombing their congressional representatives, organizing boycotts, or taking to social media to decry Trump’s whitewashing of this nation’s past through book bans and reductive, revisionist history.

Every action will not yield a desired result. It’s been said many times because it is true — working for justice is a marathon, not a sprint. And a component of the Trump scheme is to test our stamina to stand up for the values this nation has espoused, even as it has often come up egregiously short in living up to them.

Of course, there’s no comparison between the Trump administration disappearing human beings and disappearing from a website historical figures who are not straight white men. But in such desperate times, even small victories foster hope and prove that no response to this president’s cruelties and lawlessness is unworthy and no one ever won a battle that goes unchallenged.


Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.

YOU'VE BEEN SELECTED
We hope you've enjoyed Globe.com
Continue reading by subscribing for just 99¢.