As I watch America’s elite institutions abandon diversity, equity and inclusion because a White House bully threatens them, I picture John Lewis, a 25-year old Black man in a tan raincoat, walking over an Alabama bridge into a phalanx of armed and helmeted policemen because he wanted to vote.

Courage does not begin to describe what it took for Lewis, Josea Williams, and 600 unarmed citizens to challenge and absorb the billy club blows of entrenched white supremacy on Selma’s Edmund Pettus bridge.

Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, captured on film and televised that evening during an interrupted ABC screening of “Judgement of Nuremberg,” brought a climactic and triumphant end to the civil rights movement.

Five months later, on August 6, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the last of the great civil rights laws that broke the back of systemic racism. After a tumultuous decade of marches, sit-ins, beatings and murders, America agreed to honor its founding creed that we are created equal. Their efforts transformed the world’s largest slaveholding nation into a beacon for human rights.

Over the next 60 years the goals of the movement became the law of the land, tested and affirmed case by case as people at every crossroad and city demanded to be seated or served. Women,Native Americans, the disabled, Latinos, gays, lesbians, transgenderedand other marginalized communities each in turn demanded and won access to America’s promise.

In the private sector, President Kennedy’s 1961 executive order required companies with federal contracts to practice “affirmative action” to end job discrimination -- this, at a time when many Black men, if hired at all, became janitors.

In time, these combined efforts, capsulized as diversity, equity and inclusion, became institutionalized, guarded by policies and offices in government, colleges, school systems, businesses, nonprofits, and the military. Each advance sparked a backlash, most visibly in the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan, against the perceived loss of supremacy.

In 2023 the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action as discriminatory, and in the wake of the George Floyd protests, DEI became the most visible vehicle for promoting equal rights. While there were opportunists who saw a chance to make a buck with DEI workshops that made people feel guilty and resulted in little if any change, there have also been genuine strides toward greater understanding and respect as corporations, schools and public offices took a hard look at themselves.

Like the Klansmen who tried to turn the clock back to slavery days, Donald Trump and his enablers have made DEI part of their effort to recreate the America of the 1950s. On Jan. 22 he issued an executive order terminating “radical DEI preferencing” in federal contracting and “directing federal agencies to relentlessly combat private sector discrimination.” But by using DEI as an epithet the president cheapens the struggle of Americans who fought to make the country theirs, too.

Every year, on the first Sunday in March, thousands gather in Selma to recreate John Lewis’s historic voting rights march. Cresting the bridge, as Lewis did, looking down and imagining what he faced, is, for me, an 80-year-old white man, a call to action.

I first met the congressman on his annual pilgrimage to the bridge. At the time I was writing a guide book to the Civil Rights Movement, and he agreed to write its foreword.

The book gathers stories of ordinary heroes in ordinary places — bus stops, lunch counters, churches — in an effort to preserve and memorialize them. Visiting them today helps me remember how and why we created a country that embraces DEI. Here are three, starting with the one that is best known:

Montgomery, Alabama, Dec. 1, 1955: Riding home from her job as a seamstress, Rosa Parks was ordered to give up her bus seat to a white customer. Remembering the brutal murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi four months earlier, she declined. When the driver warned that he would have her arrested, she replied, “You may do that.” Blacks boycotted buses for a year, defiance that was copied by other southern communities. The Reverend Martin Luther King rose to prominence before the Supreme Court ruled that segregated seating on a public bus was unconstitutional. Though world famous, Mrs. Parks lost her job, endured death threats and growing jealousy among her boycott colleagues, and moved to Detroit. She died in 2005.

Farmville, Virginia, April 23, 1951: Fed up with school classes for Black children in a tar-paper shack, 16-year-old Barbara Johns led a student strike. A lawsuit filed by the NAACP was merged with four similar cases in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1964 the Supreme Court desegregated schools. Rather than integrate, Farmville schools closed, and a “lost generation” of black students received no public education before another Supreme Court order forced schools to open in 1974.

Birmingham, Alabama, September 15, 1963: The 16th Street Baptist Church, a center for civil rights rallies, was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan, killing four little girls. The bombing came seven months after children marched from the church into fire hoses and attack dogs, a confrontation, captured in photos, that forced Birmingham to desegregate lunch counters and drinking fountains, and hire African Americans as clerks and salesmen.

In his foreword to my guidebook, Lewis wrote: “The modern-day civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is one of the most stirring chapters in American history….As a product of the segregated South, I was swept up by its vision for an all-inclusive American community — a truly interracial democracy rooted in peace, justice and brotherhood. It was a vision so bright that no form of evil could dim its glow.”

I would imagine that Lewis, who died in 2020, would be appalled to read Trump’s January 22 proclamation blaming “radical DEI” for “reversing” progress toward a colorblind country, and, in rose-colored Orwellian logic, arguing that civil rights can be protected by “restoring the values of individual dignity, hard work and excellence.”

I can’t imagine what Lewis, a man of incomparable courage, would think of politicians and institutional leaders who, apparently fearful of losing money, position or favor from President Trump, have surrendered to his signature scrawled in contempt and ignorance of American history.

Jim Carrier is the author of “A Traveler’s Guide to the Civil Rights Movement.”

Slavery Days :::: Burning Spear

If You’re Brown ::: Lord Kitchener

Merry Go Round :::: Fred Neil

Slavery Days Dub ::: Burning Spear, King Tubby

Say It Loud, I’m Black & I’m Proud ::: James Brown

White & Black :::: Lord Kitchener