Today, it has been 61 years since a white supremacist’s bomb went off at 10:22 a.m. at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls who were getting ready for church services.

In the environment of permissible hate that permeated the culture and the legal system in the Deep South in 1963, the men responsible went unpunished for decades. The FBI officially closed its investigation in 1968, without bringing a single indictment, although they had identified the men responsible. Racist leaders like Alabama Governor George Wallace and Police Commissioner Bull Conner tolerated racial violence, even encouraging it. The Ku Klux Klan lynched Black men and Black boys, using terror to try and maintain political control.

It sounds familiar.

Today, as church bells ring across my city and people mourn the loss of young lives and condemn the evil men who made it possible, this country is at risk of repeating that history. Just like violence against Black people was often justified by lies about crimes they had committed, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are spreading lies about Haitian immigrants—lies that are so ridiculous they would be laughable if their potential impact wasn’t so deadly serious. A woman who posted on Facebook that a Haitian immigrant had eaten her neighbor’s cat has recanted. But the truth doesn’t matter to Donald Trump, who has continued, as he did on the debate stage last Tuesday, to add outrage over immigrants eating dogs and cats to his repertoire of campaign lies. This morning, on Truth Social, Trump is unleashing a torrent of hate against immigrants—his choice in this election, as in 2016 and 2020, for a spew of venom designed to blind Americans to the truth and force them into Donald Trump’s arms.

The truth doesn’t matter to Donald Trump. It’s easier to spread hate and sow division than to work to make a country better. That’s what domestic terrorism is: ideologically driven crimes used to intimidate or coerce a civilian population and to influence policy or conduct of government. That’s the ultimate irony of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. He doesn’t have any interest in doing that. He just wants to take us back. And September 15, 1963, isn’t a place we want to go.

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