The Color Between The Lines with Esther Dillard

Dr. Alvin B. Tillery: The Fallout After Trump’s Election and the Fight for Civil Rights

• Esther Dillard • Season 2 • Episode 15

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Dr. Alvin B. Tillery breaks down how Trump’s policies are threatening civil rights in America and what Black voters can do to fight back.

Join Esther Dillard on 'The Color Between The Lines' for a pivotal discussion with Dr. Alvin B Tillery. In this powerful interview, Dr. Alvin B. Tillery, a renowned political analyst, breaks down how Trump’s policies are directly attacking civil rights in America. As the nation faces growing political divides, Dr. Tillery explores the impact of the Trump administration on Black America and vulnerable communities, offering critical insights into the future of racial justice and equity.

Dr. Tillery delves into key topics, including the Civil Rights Act, Agenda 47, and Project 2025, shedding light on the white nationalist agenda and how it threatens decades of progress in civil rights. He urges Black voters to mobilize and take action, emphasizing the power they hold in protecting civil rights law and racial equality.

If you're passionate about defending civil rights and ensuring equity for future generations, this interview is a must-watch. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe to stay informed on the latest discussions about racial justice and political activism.

🔔 Subscribe to the podcast for more enlightening talks and join us in exploring how historical narratives shape our future. You can also watch it on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@thecolorbetweenthelines

On this edition of the Color between the Lines. This is a replay of an interview I did for the Black information network in February2025. It takes a look back at the election and the fallout and what one analyst says that he believes has happened and what needs to happen next. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the same day that President Donald Trump took the oath of office for a second time. On Inauguration day, he signed 26 executive orders. They've ranged from immigration to citizenship, as well as pardoning those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I spoke with political analyst Alvin Beach Hillary he's a Northwestern professor and founder of the 2040 Strategy Group. Last year, he warned Democratic leadership if Trump were elected back to office, there would be consequences. I spoke to him about his feelings after Inauguration Day and if he had an answer. For many black folks who are asking, what do we do now? It's unfortunate. I mean, I think that the worst nightmares of those of us who. Campaign to wake up black voters to the dangers of Project 2025 and Agenda 47 and Mr. Trump's white nationalist agenda, you know, are seeing what we feared coming to fruition. And probably in a slightly faster time frame. Than some had anticipated. So it's really dangerous times for black people and other vulnerable populations in the country. This morning, the State Department said that the Trump administration's directive directive was to refrain from openly observing Black History Month in February. Is this a surprise? No. It should not be a surprise to anyone. I think the Republican Party writ large has been hostile to black people since Barry Goldwater ran his campaign in 1964 on the plank of overturning the Civil Rights Act. Now, of course, he was clobbered in that election, but what people need to understand about Mr. Trump is that there are hundreds of people behind him in right wing think tanks and other sort of spaces that are living out their dream to try to reduce black people back to a condition of a racial caste system whereby you would be denied opportunities in this country. And so that's what's happening. And you can't fray that away. You can't post about your black excellence or just wait calmly for the next election. It's game time now, and people need to wake up to that. What is your administration, your organization, doing to try to thwart some of this huge wave of change? Yeah. Well, what I'm trying to do as a Democratic strategist and also through my work with the alliance for Black Equality is we're trying to remind black voters and black people in our communities that we have a lot of power right now. In this real moment when Dr. King and the other civil rights leaders, Ms. Rosa and everyone worked to pass the Civil Rights act in 1964, there were three black members of Congress, and Congress was a segregated institution. They had to enter through different doors. They couldn't eat in the lunchroom, et cetera. There are 63 black members of Congress, including four black senators who have the power to filibuster. So what the alliance for Black Equality is going to try to do and. Black History Month is wake up and activate black constituencies to put pressure on black Democratic elected officials at every level to respond with protections for our community. And so that's what we're mobilizing to do right now. What should the average person, like the mom at home, the teacher, the bus driver, what should they be doing to help in this effort? Because they're concerned, likely as well. Well, you know, they can go to the alliance. Blackequality.org and sign some of the petitions that we'll have coming out in the next couple of weeks that we want to deliver to the politicians that we want to reach. If you can give a dollar, that would be fantastic. We're asking if. Listen, if every black voter of voting age gave $1 to progressive change campaigns, we'd have a pool of like $100 million that we could use to maintain pressure on these politicians. If you can't do that, then give to the naacp, Reverend Sharpton's organization that are trying to sustain boycotts. Right. Boycotting corporate brands. We've got to put pressure not on the Trump people and the people that are. Serving in his administration as much as we do on the opposition. And the opposition includes corporate leaders who would probably willingly defend our interests if we made them do it. And so, you know, the kinds of boycott efforts that are. That are coming underway, I think that those can be really productive if we can sustain them. Let's not do what we did with Colin Kaepernick when he was trying to get everyone to take a knee and talk about police brutality. And black viewers flocked right back to the NFL. Right? So let's try to, like, you know, earn some respect from these institutions that are courting us for votes. For dollars for support and put pressure on people to push back because the things that Mr. Trump is trying to do are not legal. No one can ban equity. People equity is enshrined in the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights act of 1964. So despite what he's saying, he has not banned equity. No one can take away our history. If we tell our history, if we become obstinate and demand that our stories are told, we can push back against white supremacy. Hiring you. Look. Look at Pete Hegseth and Mr. Trump himself. I see black women online posting, you know. Well, these are DEI hires. No, they are not. DEI hires are of qualified people who are just being given access to a pool so that their talents can shine. Pete Hegseth is Secretary of Defense because he is pledged to uphold white supremacy. He is not qualified by any other metric. And so let's start calling that what it is, right? We have to talk about these legal challenges, the elimination of the DEI programs. What do you make of it, and how do you think that it's going to be challenged? Or is it completely something that is going to be carte BLANCHE until perhaps Mr. Trump moves out of the White House? Well, by the time he moves out of the White House, if he ever moves out of the White House, because I'll point that his people have introduced a constitutional amendment trying to give him a third term. So what I will say is that we need to stop talking this language of DEI and get to the fundamental language of equity. So all this language around DEI is just meant to soften up the heads of white people into thinking that these programs discriminate against them, so then they can do what they're already doing. Trying to overturn the Civil Rights act, which makes discrimination against blacks, women, lgbtq, religious minorities, disabled, illegal. They want that off the books so that defense contractors like Elon Musk can discriminate against whomever they want. Right. So the the corporate DEI programs, which are voluntary, are a much smaller piece of the puzzle here. What they ultimately want to do is stop the collection of the EEO1 data, which is where we all check the boxes saying who we are, so that then they will be able to make the racial caste system that existed in this country from 1660s until 1968 operative again. So let's get our heads in the game. Forget about what Target and Walmart are doing, except if you want to boycott them, and focus squarely on protecting the Civil Rights act of 1964 and the 14th Amendment, which has that equal protection clause Trump wrote. An executive order saying that they're overturning the birthright citizenship aspect of that. They can't do that, but they're going to try to do it. I want all of your listeners to know that the big grudge against the 14th Amendment is that it guaranteed equal protection of the laws to black people. And with people like Goldwater, And all those Southern governors, Strom Thurmond, they have never forgiven the Democratic Party for putting that in place. Right. For making an enforcement law. The Civil Rights act is an enforcement law of the 14th amendment. And so that's what they're going for, people. So don't get distracted and wait for Target to bring back their corporate DEI programs. The. They're not. That doesn't matter anyway. What matters now is that we can array enough power to make sure that the Civil Rights act is not overturned and the 14th amendment is not overturned. And then we can hold these companies accountable with lawsuits in the workplace and with sort of our corporate dollars in a way that can make them feel real pain. Capital punishment, there is is a big thing on the table in regard to that. And the reinstatement of, I guess, the federal death penalty, what is that going to mean for African Americans, for just Americans in general as far as our communities? What's this mean? It's awful. And so. So what Joe Biden did on his way out the door was he commuted the sentences of all but two of the federal death row inmates. So the people that are already there, Trump won't be able to execute them. But for new prisoners going forward, they will be able to put that back into place. The bigger problem with criminal justice issues, and this is what the alliance for Black Equality tried to show all through the election cycle, is. Mr. Trump promising federal stop and frisk that's likely coming, but him also promising to pull back from all of the Department of Justice's consent decrees and investigations of local police departments. He's already written an executive order doing that. And so what that means is that if you're in Chicago or St. Louis or, you know, Milwaukee or Los Angeles, if your police department was being investigated or even if they said, you know what, we agree, we had some patterns in practice of discrimination, we want to cut a deal. We want to pay settlements to people that we've brutalized. Mr. Trump is saying that if you do that, you will lose federal access to Department of Defense dollars that pay for a lot of this police equipment. And so we've got to now lean on our local governments to say, pull out of the Department of Defense. Do we need tanks and all these things that they want to give to us anyway? Probably not. So, yeah, that's a big part of the puzzle, and that's a much bigger piece than capital punishment is. I know you mentioned birthright citizenship. Is that anywhere that we. Is that just a bunch of bells and whistles that people. Look over here, look over here. Distraction versus something that's really important that people should be paying attention to? Yeah, I think. I think we should absolutely be paying attention. We should absolutely be paying attention to it. I mean, I think, you know, the corrupt Roberts court has made Mr. Trump a king. They've given him an immunity grant that no one had ever given to any other president. It is not above Roberts. Alito, you know, Thomas, all of those people to say, okay, well, Mr. Trump does have a line item veto because he controls immigration. And we're going to allow him to, you know, to say that you can't kill birthright citizenship altogether. But we'll say that he can give some parameters to what that means. I believe that they are capable of that. And, you know, we should be ready for that. Black people should also be ready for them to define us as beyond the birthright, because birthright citizenship was put in place to protect us. There is just so much that we could talk about, but I know we only have a limited amount of time. What other areas do you think that people should, you know, are really top of mind, top of the list that, you know, that people should start putting on their list as to what they should do, what they should pay attention to. So then in the next time we come back together and talk, you have a progress report. Yeah. Well, what happened last night, the freezing of federal funds for Head Start, school lunch, snap, you know, all of that is going to have a disproportionate effect on black and brown communities, and people should be paying real attention to that. We should also be paying attention to Trump's ability to freeze money for all of the 501C3 groups, the NAACP, the Urban League, all of these groups that are nonprofits. He has wide discretion under national security laws now to deem people as supportive of Hamas or whatever to freeze their funding. That's the same thing they did to our civil rights leaders in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Oh, they support the Soviets, and so let's spy on them, wiretap them, hurt them that way. I could see that happening with someone like Kash Patel in charge of the FBI. And so we need to be prepared to step up, give our $2, whatever we can afford to those organizations grow their following in such a way that we can embrace them and support them and the critical work that they're doing. I would be remiss. Well, I appreciate all that you. You've shared with us. And I know that this is going to be not the last conversation that we have in regard to what's happening in Washington. So thank you, Dr. Tillery, for joining us on the bin. Thank you, Esther. If you like this interview, please subscribe to the Color between the Lines. Also, give me some feedback. Love to hear what you liked and what you'd like to see more of. That's it for this edition of the Color between the Lines. I'm Esther Dillard.