Cambridge, 1963. Four white supremacists are shot during civil rights unrest.
Gov. J. Millard Tawes decides the festering wound caused by this Eastern Maryland city’s fight over entrenched segregation has gone on long enough. He sends in 400 National Guardsmen.
There’s an AP photo from those days of Gloria Richardson, a founder of the city’s Black protest movement, pushing aside a guardsman’s bayonet.
“A first-class citizen does not beg for freedom,” Richardson said.
A wise president or governor sends in the Guard only in an extreme crisis, and always with a healthy fear of the consequences.
In 1963, the response was Richardson’s inspiring nonviolent protests. But Tawes’ decision to send in the Guard changed nothing.
Four years later, Black nationalist H. Rap Brown gave rise to the chant “Burn, baby, burn” when he urged protestors to get a gun. Another wave of protests erupted in Cambridge.
Standing up to injustice requires courage, and every step toward despotism by this president is another call to show it.
No one following the second presidency of Donald Trump honestly thinks what he did Monday — taking over Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, dispatching 500 federal agents and calling out 800 D.C. National Guard troops — was about law and order.
Trump doesn’t care about law and order.
“We needed him to call out the National Guard on Jan. 6, 2021,” said U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat whose district lies just outside the city. “That’s when Democratic and Republican leaders were begging him to activate the National Guard to put down the mob violence he had unleashed against us at the Capitol. He didn’t do anything for hours and hours.”
More than 140 Capitol and D.C. police officers were hurt that day, and other responding officers later died, as Trump supporters tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
It’s about power. It’s about distraction. Worst of all, it’s about despotism, where sending the military onto the streets becomes the first response, not the last.
“They fight back until you knock the hell out of them, because it’s the only language they understand,” Trump said Monday. “It’s a disgusting thing.”
The president sent the Guard to clear protesters near the White House five years ago. His military and staff advisors pulled him back then.
Now they’re gone, replaced by sycophants. So California was next. Trump nationalized the Guard and sent them in with a contingent of Marines to quell protests against immigration raids.
The courts didn’t stop him, so now it’s D.C.’s turn, where the mission will be much broader than crime.
“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social. “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong.”
Other cities, all with Democratic mayors, could be next.
“We have other cities also that are bad, very bad,” Trump said Monday. “You look at Chicago, how bad it is, you look at Los Angeles, how bad it is, other cities that are very bad, New York is a problem, and then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland — you don’t even mention that anymore, they’re so far gone.”
This is not about crime.
D.C., like Baltimore, is seeing a historic decrease in crime, particularly homicides and shootings. But individual crimes outrage the public conscience and present an opening for opportunists — and Trump seizes on them often.
Raskin will try to remove Trump’s declaration of emergency in the District of Columbia, and U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen and D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton will try to pass a bill handing full control of the D.C. Guard and police to the elected mayor.
In a Congress controlled by Trump’s GOP, both will fail.
Trump can use the Guard in Washington because it is not a state. Its home rule is a concession of the federal government, and one that can be taken away.
The D.C. Guard is the only unit of the U.S. military that is both exempt from the Posse Comitatus Act, a post-Civil War ban on using federal troops for civilian law enforcement, and under direct command of the president.
That power, and the willingness to use it, come in handy when a despot needs to distract the public.
Trump is headed to Alaska for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, where he may give away parts of Ukraine without that country’s agreement in a cynical bid for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Joblessness is up, and firing a federal economist won’t bring it down. Inflation refuses to go away and new tariffs are about to make it worse.
Or maybe Trump needs a distraction from the Jeffrey Epstein files, a conspiracy theory that helped get him elected, only to become a political liability now that he’s in office.
“Nobody is asking him to activate the National Guard in Washington or take over the D.C. Police Department,” Raskin said. “It’s a transparent ploy to change the subject from the Epstein files.”
I wonder what Richardson, who died in 2021, long after her role in those Cambridge protests had been forgotten by many, would say about this.
Fifty years after that confrontation at bayonet point, Richardson spoke about it in an interview with Democracy Now!, a progressive news program.
“He was going to stab me, so I had to push it.”
It will take courage to stand up to Guardsmen, federal agents and federalized police who’ve been given a mission to intimidate.
Trump is moving this country to a dictatorship, one outrage after another.
When institutions and political parties fail to stop him, it is up to all of us to stand up.
As the president takes over a city just 25 miles from Annapolis, and 30 miles from Baltimore, we all have to be Gloria Richardson now.
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