Carolyn McKinstry knows about the dangers of extremism in America. She lived it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
McKinstry was the Sunday school secretary at the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama<\/a>, when the church was bombed by white supremacists on 16 September 1963, killing four Black girls \u2013 Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Roberts, all 14, and 11-year-old Cynthia Wesley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n McKinstry, who was 14 at the time, remembers it was Youth Day at the church and the lesson of the day was \u201cA Love That Forgives\u201d. She spent that Sunday morning collecting attendance and financial records from classes. McKinstry answered the church phone just seconds before the bomb went off in the church basement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI did not immediately think of it as a bomb. I didn\u2019t know what it was,\u201d McKinstry said. \u201cI heard a few people scream and then I heard somebody say, \u2018Hit the floor\u2019 \u2013 and I crawled under that very first pew where I was standing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n McKinstry remembered: \u201cI waited a few minutes and I could hear feet. I then heard shoes against the floor and I knew people were running out. So that\u2019s when I stood up to leave. I didn\u2019t know until I got outside that a bomb had exploded.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The death of the four girls devastated the nation. But it was not the last bombing in Birmingham. The lack of compassion was evident and signaled that those determined to keep the system of Jim Crow were not moved by the death of children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the city and throughout the deep south, as civil rights activists worked to take down segregation, there were more deaths, more funerals, more marches and more protests. For McKinstry, 77, and other civil rights foot soldiers who fought on the frontlines for justice and equality during the civil rights movement, the re-election of Donald Trump<\/a> is an undoing of the sacrifices and policy changes they toiled for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the first weeks of Trump\u2019s second term, he\u2002signed an executive order<\/a> eliminating federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs \u2013 including initiatives for diversity in federal contracting or grants that help farmers and minority communities \u2013 and instructed that DEI staff be laid off. Shortly after, corporations such as Target, Walmart, Lowe\u2019s and Meta followed suit in eliminating their DEI programs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even the NFL capitulated to Trump\u2019s DEI demands, ending its end zone\u2002<\/a>slogan \u201cend racism\u201d at this year\u2019s Super Bowl and replacing it with \u201cchoose love\u201d. The \u201cend racism\u201d slogan had been stenciled in the end zone at Super Bowl games since 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But those who participated in the 1960s civil rights movement are not surprised by Trump\u2019s executive orders or divisive policies. They have seen this before. As they fought against Jim Crow laws, these activists faced staunch segregationists who battled integration, including Eugene \u201cBull\u201d Connor, Jim Clark and George Wallace in Alabama; Orval Faubus in Arkansas; Lester Maddox in Georgia; and Ross Barnett and other segregationists in Mississippi<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n David Dennis Sr grew up on a plantation in Louisiana and later attended Dillard University, a historically Black college in New Orleans, on a scholarship. Dennis faced violent segregationists as a Freedom Rider and in Mississippi as a co-director of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. After civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were killed at the beginning of Freedom Summer<\/a>, Dennis\u2019s fiery eulogy of Chaney expressed the exhaustion of fighting injustice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n America is experiencing a \u201csurge backwards\u201d in terms of race, after decades of progress, Dennis said. An example of a \u201csurge forward\u201d was the Reconstruction era after the civil war, Dennis, 84, said. Then there was a \u201csurge backwards\u201d during the presidency of Rutherford B Hayes, in which troops that had protected the formerly enslaved were moved out and a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan followed. Dennis noted that Jim Crow laws were enacted and there was a conservative supreme court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf you look at that period of time, what happened then, and what\u2019s happening now, this surge back, there\u2019s quite a similarity of what happened politically and what the issues were then as it is right now,\u201d Dennis said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was another surge forward during the Eisenhower administration and with the civil rights movement, which saw the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Dennis said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That surge forward came with pain and tragedy during the height of the fight for racial equality and justice in America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n