What Bayard Rustin Would Do: Part II

Our guest author is Eric Chenoweth, director of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe and principal author of Democracy Web, an online comparative study guide for teachers, students and civic activists. He worked with Bayard Rustin in various capacities in the late 1970s and 1980s. Eric visited the new exhibition at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, “The Life of Bayard Rustin: Speaking Truth to Power,” which shines a light on Rustin’s central work in the Civil Rights Movement and his contributions to the international peace and human rights movements. It runs through December 31, 2025 and will form the basis of a permanent exhibition in the museum’s expansion planned for 2026. Part I of “What Bayard Rustin Would Do” describes the exhibition and the context to Rustin’s work up to 1965. Part II describes Rustin’s work and writings in the last 25 years of his life as he faced the increasing backlash to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. The full article is posted on the Albert Shanker Institute’s March on Washington Resources page.

Introduction
Bayard Rustin was a man of politics and action who devoted his life to organizing and advocacy for greater freedom and democracy in the United States and abroad. Much of that organizing and advocacy was in the form of direct action (he was arrested more than twenty times in acts of civil disobedience), lobbying, and mass protest. Bayard Rustin was also a public intellectual who used the spoken and written word to advance his ideas for democratic change and social and economic justice. While he wrote frequently in his early years of activism for radical publications like Liberation, Rustin wrote more frequently and in more known publications after his organizing of the March on Washington gave him greater prominence. His words were always a guide for action.

From Protest to Politics 

Rustin’s most famous essay is “From Protest to Politics,” which appeared in February 1965 in the then-liberal publication Commentary. It is sometimes characterized as Rustin turning away from direct protest actions against racial injustice to advocating political compromise for achieving incremental gains. In fact, Rustin did not advocate abandoning direct action, which had been the central basis of his organizing career to that point, nor for compromising political aims. Rather, he argued for adopting a new political strategy to achieve a “revolutionary” economic program for “democratizing American society” being proposed in Randolph’s and Rustin’s bold project to achieve greater economic equality, the Freedom Budget.

“The central challenge for the Civil Rights Movement,” he wrote, was translating the success of nonviolent protest to gain equality in law into “a lasting majority political movement for social and economic equality.” This effort would require a change in strategy because it was “vastly more complicated” than ending legal discrimination. The reason, he explained, is that:

The very decade which has witnessed the decline of legal Jim Crow has also seen the rise of de facto segregation in our most fundamental socioeconomic institutions.

He argued that neither this institutional racism nor economic exploitation generally could be overcome through programs — however justified — targeted solely to address past or ongoing discrimination. These were necessarily “zero-sum policies” in which gains for Blacks would be seen as losses by whites. As a persecuted minority, Blacks could not expect such largesse by the majority, but instead must coalesce with other political forces to adopt broad economic programs that benefitted all workers but substantially bettering the material conditions of Blacks.¹

Protest against ongoing discrimination remained urgent, Rustin wrote, but with the legislative win of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to end legalized segregation, it was necessary to now address urgent economic needs. He advocated achieving these higher goals by mobilizing Black political power through massive voter registration and electoral participation efforts and enhancing Blacks’ electoral power through coalitions with those having “common interests and aims,” namely other workers of all races.

The Enduring Backlash

In “From Protest to Politics,” Rustin wrote that the 1964 Johnson landslide against Republican Barry Goldwater represented the possibility for the “majority liberal consensus” he hoped would bring about greater economic equality. But, even then, he warned that the possibility also existed for a “Talmadge-Goldwater” majority taking hold in a single party, one that combined segregationist Democrats and free market Republican extremists. “[T]he Johnson landslide [did not] prove the ‘white backlash’ to be a myth,” he stated. “It proved, rather, that economic interests are more fundamental than prejudice: the backlashers decided that loss of social security was, after all, too high a price to pay for a slap at the Negro.”

The question was how fundamental in the end were those economic interests. A partial answer came with major Republican gains in the 1966 midterm elections to slow civil rights progress. A more decisive answer came in 1968 with the narrow election of Richard Nixon as president on a “law and order” platform. It signaled the full transformation of the GOP into the “states’ rights” party. The white backlash proved enduring. Libraries are stacked with books on the shifting motivations of the American electorate since then, but one thing stands out: from 1966, a majority of white voters have cast their ballots for the anti-civil rights party, often in overwhelming numbers, making a lasting multiracial governing coalition more difficult.

From the 1968 election, Rustin understood that everything that he had struggled for and hoped to achieve was at risk. In column after column and essay after essay, Rustin lambasted Nixon’s anti-civil rights, anti-Black, and anti-union economic policies. Nixon represented “the height of reactionary politics”; he tokenized Blacks with cynical initiatives like “The Philadelphia Plan”; his Black capitalism schemes were shams serving only a narrow business elite, while not uplifting the Black working class.

Rustin was particularly worried about the direction Nixon took the Supreme Court, the main institution propelling the Civil Rights Movement from the 1940s to the 1960s. With the confirmation in 1971 of Nixon’s third appointment, William Renquist, a Goldwater acolyte, an anti-civil rights majority was solidified. Rustin wrote that the Renquist appointment was “the bleakest chapter in what has been an unremittingly sorry Nixon Administration race relations record.” The consequence was soon felt. A 1972 ruling allowed private clubs to discriminate against Blacks. Rustin wrote that the ruling meant the “end to that institution’s role as an instrument of civil rights progress and activism.” He warned of the reversals to come and argued that this made a change in civil rights strategy around economic demands even more necessary.²

The Politics of Persuasion

For Rustin, persuasion was a political corollary to nonviolent civil disobedience. He went on any number of speaking tours and addressed thousands of audiences, as indicated by the array of meeting posters shown in the “Speaking Truth to Power” exhibit. Rustin had convinced many in those audiences, Black and white, to adopt principles of nonviolence and pacifism; to put bodies on the line in civil disobedience for justice; to commit to integrating public accommodations, schools and workplaces; and later to build alliances of civil rights and religious groups, liberals and the labor movement for a better society. It was his power in persuading interracial audiences to action (my parents were among them) that led him to believe a lasting multiracial majority for social and economic justice was possible.

Rustin rarely debated political enemies but rather those he thought he could influence. Often, as when he engaged Malcolm X in debate, he spoke to audiences frustrated by the limited results of nonviolence in addressing institutional racism. In those debates, Rustin would affirm the legitimacy of the growing anger in both the North and South that Malcolm X and the growing Black Power movement represented, but he argued that anger was not constructive to guide strategy. He repeated often, “Let us be enraged about injustice, but let us not be destroyed by it.” Nonviolence, he would continue, still offered a more strategic means to address the oppression of Blacks than “any means necessary” or taking up arms. Rustin also contended that Malcolm X’s advocacy of Black separation from white society was a reactionary reprise of past failed strategies of Black separatism that accommodated or accepted segregation. Only demands for integration, he argued, had brought concrete progress for Blacks. (Rustin later welcomed the changing views of Malcolm X on integration before his death in the essay “Making His Mark.”)

Rustin remained sympathetic to the anger of young activists. Indeed, his arguments were generally not directed at militant Black Power advocates as much at those he believed were the major impediment to addressing institutional racism: white liberals and moderates refusing to go beyond civil rights legislation by seriously funding real solutions to social and economic problems centuries in the making.

In “The Watts Manifesto” (Commentary, March 1966), Rustin delivers a blistering critique of the McCone Commission Report, the California government’s official response to the 1965 rebellion in the Watts section of Los Angeles. He describes how he and King had gone to its destroyed areas in the wake of the 1965 unrest. Black youths they met told the civil rights leaders that their nonviolence had achieved nothing while the youths had “won” by forcing white city authorities to finally come and pay attention to their plight. To meet such desperation, Rustin argued that America’s “ghettos of despair” required nothing less than a full addressing of their needs in programs such as those included in the Freedom Budget. He continued, 

Such proposals may seem impractical and even incredible. But what is truly impractical and incredible is that America, with its enormous wealth, has allowed Watts to become what it is and that a commission empowered to study this explosive situation [comes] up with answers that boil down to voluntary actions by business and labor, new public-relations campaigns for municipal agencies, and information-gathering for housing, fair-employment, and welfare departments. . . . And what is most impractical and incredible of all is that we may very well continue to teach impoverished, segregated, and ignored Negroes that the only way they can get the ear of America is to rise up in violence.

In “Lessons of the Long, Hot Summer,” (Commentary, October 1967), Rustin again warned liberals to heed the message of unrest in Black communities and to change the nation’s warped priorities. By now, he was less optimistic: “Many white Americans who joined the March on Washington and applauded Martin Luther King’s dream of freedom seem far less enthusiastic about helping us realize that dream when it means altering our economic structure.”³

What distressed Rustin most, however, was the reactionary policy of “benign neglect” developed in a memo by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and adopted as policy by the Nixon Administration. In a public reply, he wrote, “Moynihan has written a memo to the President on the condition of Negroes without mentioning the disastrous effect the administration’s economic policies are having upon blacks. . . . He totally neglects social and economic injustice as he narrows the problem of the ghetto down to the simple and cruelly misleading remark, ‘Black Americans injure one another.’” As Rustin reviews social conditions that Moynihan terms “pathology,” he deplores Moynihan’s blaming of Blacks for the problems of poverty imposed on them. “There is an element of social pathology here,” he writes, “but it is not in the black community as it is in a society which permits a situation like this to continue.”

Race, Class and Labor

The A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) remained the organizational vehicle for Rustin to keep advancing his mentor’s “total vision.” The APRI organized over 200 chapters of Black trade unionists around the country to enhance Black power through voter participation campaigns and union leadership training.⁴ Central to its mission was aligning the civil rights struggle with the AFL-CIO and its economic program. In “From Protest to Politics,” Rustin had explained why. “The labor movement,” he wrote, “despite its obvious faults, has been the largest single organized force in this country pushing for progressive social legislation.” 

Rustin cited the “obvious faults” in articles because they were not easily overlooked by Blacks. Large parts of the labor movement had a history of discrimination and segregation. A. Philip Randolph, as the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the country’s first mass Black trade union, fought those practices for decades inside the American Federation of Labor, with allied unions like the American Federation of Teachers. In the early 1960s, he finally gained greater support from the merged AFL-CIO leadership for the civil rights cause. While significant pockets of exclusion remained, there were strong efforts finally undertaken to tackle discrimination within the labor movement. In “Blacks and the Unions” (Harper’s Magazine, May 1971), Rustin stated that the AFL-CIO was becoming one of the most integrated institutions in America, with Blacks now representing more than 10 percent of union membership (2.5 million members) and Black trade unionists winning more elections to leadership positions. The AFL-CIO was also the one major institution with a social and economic program similar to the Freedom Budget to answer the urgent problems of the Black community.

Rustin viewed these problems as mainly economic in nature. While he was sometimes criticized for downplaying race and emphasizing class, the two issues, as for King, were not a trade-off. Addressing class was addressing race as Rustin made clear in an address to the Tuskegee Institute (published in Dissent in November 1970):

It goes without saying that Negroes are brutalized by racial prejudice and discrimination. What is not often remembered, however, is that were we to eliminate racism today we would have solved only part of the problem, and perhaps not even the major part. . . . Automation is eliminating thousands of jobs that were held by both whites and blacks. This problem does not spring from blackness but from a technological revolution that has affected all poor people, regardless of their race. We might psychoanalyze racism out of all the prejudiced white people in the country, but until we are willing to accept the principle that every able bodied man or woman has the right to a decent and well-paying job, we shall not have begun to attack the economic roots of racial injustice. 

The Challenge of Coalition Politics

As they do with Martin Luther King, Jr., conservatives and self-described centrists today often use Rustin’s words to support their own attacks on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), “identity politics,” and “wokeism.” Some claim him for their support of the Supreme Court’s ending of affirmative action in higher education. Others believe he would reprise his debates with Malcolm X to today polemicize with Black intellectuals stressing America’s continuing racial divide in arguing for programs of redress and repair. They misread (or purposefully misrepresent) Rustin’s actual writings.

Rustin did chastise civil rights organizations for not adopting a more unified national economic program and political strategy to address institutional racism and its economic roots in class. He specifically opposed quotas, considering them “a new form of tokenism,” and he warned that some affirmative action programs, especially in times of economic scarcity, would foster white resentment. He also critiqued the “empty politics” of militant revolutionaries who took up arms or engaged in provocative direct actions to achieve separatist aims.

But Rustin did not reject race as a continuing issue to be addressed, nor contest the moral argument for redress, nor even argue against embracing Black or any other identity. In his syndicated weekly columns, he backed efforts of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to tackle discrimination in the workplace; he praised the NAACP’s John Morsell for his mid-1970s initiative to bridge the divide with white ethnic groups over affirmative action; he lobbied for HBCUs as engines for Black self-affirmation and advancement. In the 1970s, he argued for extending anti-discrimination efforts to women and other minority groups. In the 1980s, he did so especially in taking up the cause for gay rights, which he called “the central struggle of democracy” of that time.

Rustin also championed what he called “real affirmative action” programs, meaning efforts targeting Blacks and other minorities in ways to effectively integrate them into the economy and society (the point of many DEI programs). These included the organizing campaigns of the American Federation of Teachers to unionize tens of thousands of paraprofessionals in urban areas, mostly poor Black and Latino women, who were able to gain economic dignity and educational opportunities to enter the teaching force through collective bargaining contracts. (He had recommended Velma Murphy Hill to UFT President Albert Shanker to lead the first successful organizing drive in New York City in 1969-70.) Rustin himself initiated the Recruitment and Training Program that brought many thousands of black and Hispanic youths into the exclusive construction trades unions. (The government-supported program did not survive the reactionary wave of Reagan.)

Throughout, Rustin sought to rebuild the March on Washington coalition as a response to the “Talmadge-Goldwater” reaction. (“No one has proposed an effective alternative,” he wrote.) In this pursuit, what frustrated him most again were not civil rights organizations, and much less Black Power advocates, many of whom by that time had adopted the strategy of gaining local power through elections. Rather, Rustin critiqued the Republican-led effort to weaken trade unions and those in the Democratic Party who distanced themselves from the AFL-CIO and derailed labor law reform. He argued that a large Democratic Party faction’s support for policies harming union workers, like deregulation and free trade, was contrary to rebuilding a lasting electoral majority. In his view, a civil rights and liberal coalition absent the labor movement could not achieve a majority, as he believed the 1972 and 1980 elections showed.

Rustin’s last speech before his death, made to the Cleveland City Club in late July 1987, shows the consistency of his positions. He spoke with characteristic energy and sharpness to remind the largely business audience that Black conservatives they pointed to may have discovered all the right problems but had all the wrong solutions; that poverty caused the same so-called pathologies in poor white British slums as in Cleveland’s poor Black ghettos; that programs eradicating poverty would better solve the problems of both poor white and poor Black communities; and that the broad-based universal economic program he continued to advocate for was the best means to end poverty and benefit all workers. He lamented that few Democratic presidential candidates advocated such a vision and the one that did (he meant Jesse Jackson) “cannot win.” While the Democratic Party remained the party of civil rights and thus still the only political vehicle for Black progress, many of its members in Congress were nevertheless allowing “all the horrible things” Reagan was doing in budget appropriations to gut poverty programs. He concluded with a dark warning that if the Democrats did not change their approach, “I don’t know what will happen.”

A Deep Faith in Democracy

Rustin’s domestic influence waned, which led him to turn more of his focus to international work, as he had in the early 1950s organizing for the pacifist movement and for African independence. 

In this later work, Randolph’s influence was again evident, with Rustin now committed more to democracy as a touchstone than pacifism. This was Rustin’s main political change over his lifetime. He continued to promote peaceful solutions to conflicts and opposed the use of arms against oppressive regimes. But Rustin wrote that he no longer saw “a political value” in pacifism “without consideration of the advance of freedom.” He redirected his actions to opposing dictatorships, advocating for human rights and humanitarian relief, and fostering democracy. He participated in dozens of missions to monitor elections and to promote the cause of refugees. Rustin also came to believe that war carried out in self-defense was just, most notably in the case of Israel. In 1973, he advocated for immediate arms deliveries when Israel’s fate was in question in the Yom Kippur War. He condemned anti-Semitism and defended Israel’s right to exist when that existence was being questioned by the very institution that established it, the United Nations, in adopting a resolution equating Zionism with racism.⁵

What was most lasting from Rustin’s Quaker upbringing was his commitment to nonviolence as a political strategy. Nonviolent resistance was then succeeding throughout the world, from the “Carnation Revolution” in Portugal in 1973 to the “People Power Movement” in the Philippines in 1986. A notable case was the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980, where an entire society adopted the nonviolent strategy of sit-down strikes to gain the right to establish free trade unions from a repressive communist regime. Rustin went on a trip both to advise and learn from Solidarity leaders in May 1981 and he was a loud voice against the regime’s efforts to quash the free union movement by imposing martial law in December 1981. He strongly backed the AFL-CIO’s efforts to keep the union alive with moral, financial and political assistance. In the last four years of his life, Rustin’s main focus was organizing support for the South Africa freedom movement. He believed the greater adoption of nonviolent civil disobedience and the successful organizing of black trade unions would lead to an end to apartheid. Although he did not live to see it, democratic change did indeed come to both South Africa and Poland through adoption of nonviolent strategies.

The Rustin to Come

Bayard Rustin’s belief in nonviolent civil disobedience as a strategy for achieving human freedom was given its fullest meaning in the courage, principles and actions of Martin Luther King, Jr. At the outset of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955, Rustin and Randolph both recognized the possibility of King leading a national civil rights movement, now with the moral firepower of the pulpit. They organized support and raised funds in the North while Rustin went to Montgomery to offer guidance on nonviolence practices.

In one of his last essays, “The King to Come” (The New Republic, March 9, 1987), Rustin posited that while Gandhi had pioneered nonviolence as a political means for the vast majority to overcome British colonial rule, King achieved something historically unique. He had shown the full power of strategic nonviolence by leading an oppressed minority group in a national crusade to change the unjust laws and practices of a dominant majority. He gave a model for all other minority groups facing injustice. “King’s strategy and tactics, imbued with the spirit of nonviolence, love, and affections,” he wrote, “finally made feasible the emergence, under law, of a single nation — the states truly united.”

Feasible and yet, as Rustin understood so well, still to be achieved twenty years after King’s assassination. “The second phase of King’s revolution” — the national economic program to mount the “total attack on poverty” that King was organizing at the time of his assassination — was never adopted. Rustin encouraged the next generation to achieve the “the King to come.” Even then, however, it seemed all too unlikely. Poverty was ever more entrenched in urban slums and leading to a new form of racism. “What makes the new form more insidious,” he wrote, “is its basis in observed sociological data. The new racist equates the pathology of the poor with race.” At the same time, he continued, “the Reagan administration is zealously seeking to roll back many of the gains King gave his life to achieve.” 

Democratic Party candidates did win national elections again by crafting multiracial liberal-labor coalitions, including of Barack Obama as America’s first Black president and of Joe Biden as a stalwart pro-union president. But their mildly reformist administrations failed to achieve the lasting political majority that Rustin had hoped for through adoption of radical economic policies. Neither president could reverse a longstanding trend starting from the Reagan era that saw increasing economic inequality and greater concentration of wealth resulting from neoliberal economic policies. Nor could either president forestall the rise of a reactionary base of support behind an openly racist candidate. 

As a result, the “Talmadge-Goldwater” political backlash has reached its apotheosis in the second Trump Administration. Emulating Old South regimes and relying on increased political influence of former Confederate states, Donald Trump asserts authoritarian power, now through the federal government. He has unleashed a repressive national police force to deport masses of immigrants with the aim to reverse America’s demographic shift away from a dominant white majority. He has gotten rid of all DEI programs, ended civil rights enforcement, and turned the  EEOC and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department upside down to investigate supposed discrimination by minorities against the majority white population as violations of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.⁶ As part of an effort to maintain power, he and Republicans have launched an unprecedented assault on voting rights. With the cooperation of the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump is remaking the Constitution and the laws nearly without restraint in order to deconstruct government agencies and impose his anti-civil rights agenda on schools and universities, law firms, media conglomerates and business. As important, Goldwater’s free market extremism reigns supreme, with “Mrs. Murphy’s property rights” now corruptly exercised by Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, Trump himself, and the growing oligarchic class of billionaires backing him.

•   •  •

What Would Bayard Rustin Do Today? 

What would Bayard Rustin do today? One can only surmise from his life’s actions and teachings. But with reactionary politics in full hold of the country, Rustin’s legacy of radical protest and politics offers enduring lessons.

At home and abroad, he worked to expand rights and freedoms, to take up the cause of the oppressed and disadvantaged, and to promote democratic change through peaceful means. Speaking truth to power, Rustin raised his voice against injustice and threw his body into the gears of reactionary repression in acts of peaceful civil disobedience. As an apostle of nonviolence, he refused to respond in kind against acts of state violence and exhorted others to follow his example, with the understanding that the adoption of nonviolence as a political strategy was the best means to end injustice and achieve social change. Using powers of persuasion, he inspired thousands to activism and won adherents to integration, social justice, economic equality and coalition politics. He helped build Black political power through the ballot box and the union card. He acted individually and by building organizations and national coalitions to overcome the entrenched social, economic and political forces committed to maintaining legalized segregation and imposing economic inequality.

And for twenty-five years, he continuously exhorted the nation to rebuff reactionary appeals to law and order and free market extremism and to expand its understanding of equality. “It would be no exaggeration to say that the history of American political life has been the history of the struggle for equality,” he wrote in a column decrying Reagan’s transfer of wealth “from the very poor to the very rich.” In his view, “the creation of the nation’s most significant programs like Social Security, national funding for education and unemployment insurance for the jobless” was “clear proof” that the majority of Americans considered economic equality as part of that struggle. He could not abide Reagan’s “reversal of the 50-year-trend toward social justice” as a permanent expression of the national will. He argued that a lasting majority would still be built around the idea to achieve greater social and economic equality.

These principles, practices and beliefs joined Bayard Rustin together with A. Philip Randolph and are what joined them together with Martin Luther King, Jr. They are a short-term guide to mobilizing resistance to Trump’s cruel injustices and rejecting his attempt to consolidate authoritarian power. They are a longer-term guide to developing the broader organizational and political strategies for overcoming a 60-year-long reactionary backlash against the bold attempt to achieve full social and economic equality in the United States. Civil rights histories usually downplay the large synchrony of Randolph’s, Rustin’s and King’s legacies and generally overplay less meaningful disharmony. It seems time to stress the stronger synchrony, as the “Speaking Truth to Power” exhibition at the National Civil Rights Museum begins to do.

Endnotes

¹In a New Yorker article reviewing the recent voluminous literature on the subject, Idrees Kahloon, Washington Bureau Chief for The Economist, concludes that approaches like the Freedom Budget would still likely be more effective than reparations in narrowing over time the wealth gap of Blacks and whites, which has not been reduced since the 1960s (“What We Miss When We Talk About the Racial Wealth Gap,” The New Yorker, July 28, 2025).

²On the Supreme Court’s retreat on civil rights under a 50-year-long conservative majority, see “The Colorblind Campaign to Undo Civil Rights Progress,” by Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times Magazine, March 13, 2024.

³Martin Luther King, Jr. was even more trenchant. In Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, also published in 1967, King wrote, “White America was ready to demand that the Negro should be spared the lash of brutality and coarse degradation, but it had never been truly committed to helping him out of poverty, exploitation or all forms of discrimination. . . . White Americans left the Negro on the ground and in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor. It appeared that the white segregationist and the ordinary white citizen had more in common with one another than either had with the Negro.”

⁴Rustin delegated the running of the Institute and its programs to fellow CORE veteran Norman Hill, who had been tapped also to be the national organizer of the March on Washington. A description of the APRI’s work, along with that of earlier civil rights struggles, can be found in Hill’s recent joint memoir written with his wife Velma Murphy Hill, Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain (Regalo Press, New York: 2023).

⁵In relation to today’s tragic situation, it should be noted that Rustin also supported the rights of Palestinians, called for the end to the use of violence and terror to try to achieve them, and backed all efforts at peaceful solutions to the Middle East conflict. At the core of his support for Israel was its democratic character, including its then-strong labor movement, the Histadrut.

⁶See also the article by Nikole Hannah-Jones, “How the Trump Administration Upended 60 Years of Civil Rights in Two Months,” New York Times Magazine, June 27, 2025.