Why Frederick Douglass's struggle for justice is relevant in the Trump era | Ibram X Kendi

Douglass fought against the horrors of President Andrew Johnson who, like Donald Trump, represents the same force of racist progress, of white male nationalism, of racial walls

Related: The Frederick Douglas 200

A month after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday in 1865, the 17th president of the United States began announcing his plans to reconstruct a divided nation. The new president, Andrew Johnson, cast the four-year civil war that stole nearly one million lives as a temporary family squabble. With the war over, Johnson granted the restoration of land, rights and amnesty to the ideological ancestors of those Americans who today oppose land, rights and amnesty for undocumented immigrants. He granted nothing – no land, no civil or voting rights – to the freed people who did not break the law of treason like Confederates, whose resistance on plantations and battlefields were decisive in the Union victory.

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