AS THE story goes, The Backlash Blues by the great African-American poet Langston Hughes was penned at the request of singer Nina Simone in response to the racist backlash against the freedom movement of the 1960s.

After the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jnr in 1963, the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Hughes wrote The Backlash Blues in 1966, and Simone recorded it in 1967 — the year Hughes died.

A year later, in 1968, King was assassinated and rebellions occurred in 113 cities. What followed was Richard Nixon’s election, his “law and order” presidency, Cointelpro, the destruction of the Black Panther Party, and the suppression of the movement against the Vietnam war.

Backlash Blues, indeed. And perhaps a foreshadowing — if we’re not careful — of what is to come with today’s Maga movement. This is not the first time they have come after our hard-won civil rights. For that context, one must look back to radical reconstruction and the democratic rights won after the civil war. Those rights included the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery; the 14th, which granted birthright citizenship and equal protection; and the 15th, which provided voting rights to black men. Women won the right to vote decades later.

A counter-revolution suppressed those rights: reconstruction governments were overthrown beginning in 1877 after the withdrawal of Union troops from the South. Then ensued a century-long reign of terror replete with an estimated 6,500 lynchings between 1865 and 1950. This era was only overcome in the 1950s and ’60s through the battle to defeat legal segregation.

It was precisely the victory over Jim Crow and the subsequent backlash that laid the basis for the rise of the Maga right. They, in turn, have launched today’s civil rights counter-revolution. The Christian nationalists and others dominating the current administration are the ideological — and perhaps even biological — descendants of those who planted bombs in black churches, murdering four children at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

The history went like this: with the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board of Education decision and the passing of the Civil Rights Acts, white supremacy suffered a historic defeat equal to — at least in their minds — the Confederacy’s defeat on the battlefield. Segregationists and their corporate backers were at a loss as to how to respond; after Bull Connor, police dogs and fire-hosing protesters, Jim Crow wasn’t exactly marketable.

Flailing, their initial response was to withdraw white children from public schools and establish segregated Christian private schools. They reasoned that Brown v Board applied specifically to public institutions. By labelling their schools “Christian” or “private,” they argued the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause did not apply.

Additionally, because these schools were religious institutions, they enjoyed 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. The federal government was essentially subsidising Jim Crow. This lasted until black families in Mississippi successfully challenged that tax-exempt status in the 1960s.

The removal of tax exemptions was a major blow to the “evangelical confederates.” It was both a financial and political setback. In response, Paul Weyrich, a founder of the Heritage Foundation, looked for a strategy to regroup. He first tried advocating for school prayer, but it lacked momentum. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) looked promising but failed to generate enough fervour. Finally, Weyrich and his colleagues landed on abortion. Unlike previous attempts, abortion resonated across various denominations. The Protestant right then formed an alliance with Catholics, and the “religious right” was born.

With the rise of the Moral Majority, followed by the Tea Party and now the Maga movement, US politics has followed an increasingly far-right trajectory. This trajectory arises from a debate over how to define democratic rights: collective civil rights versus individual property rights; federal authority versus states’ rights; a woman’s bodily autonomy versus the “rights of the unborn.”

These tensions are not new. The struggle for democracy runs like a “red thread” throughout US history. Marx put it in class terms: “Labour in the white skin cannot be free so long as labour in the black is branded.” Frederick Douglass, advocating for both African-American and women’s rights, wrote on the masthead of the North Star in 1847: “Right is of no sex — Truth is of no color — God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.”

From the beginning, democratic rights — the right to vote, to education, to abortion, to collective bargaining and to equal pay — have been intimately tied together. Because these struggles occur within the framework of monopoly capitalism’s racist and gender-based social division of labour, they are used as wedge issues to maximise political advantage and profit.

The Maga movement understands this. At the start of the current term, the administration issued dozens of executive orders restricting rights regarding DEI, voting, the census, reproductive healthcare, disability and labour. The country was subjected to a “blitzkrieg”: everything, everywhere, all at once.

Using the elimination of DEI as a pretext, Maga launched a frontal assault on civil rights as a whole. One of their first acts was to cancel a 1965 executive order (EO 11246) issued by LBJ, which prohibited discrimination by federal contractors. This order required businesses receiving federal money to provide equal opportunity — a foundational, albeit mild, form of affirmative action.

The new administration’s executive order not only ends that practice but challenges the very definition of civil rights. It suggests that the primary victims of discrimination in the US are now white citizens. According to this logic, any attempt at equal opportunity for people of colour is inherently racist. Government agencies are now tasked with prosecuting these “racist” practices; equal opportunity is being treated as a criminal offence.

As Nikole Hannah-Jones has pointed out, this legal assault has a specific anti-labour and anti-black edge. For example, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) recently helped black workers at a Texas hospital recover $900,000 in back wages and assisted workers at Caterpillar in Illinois in gaining $800,000. This administration cancelled that office. In a parallel move, the White House cancelled collective bargaining rights for 1.3 million federal workers, a high percentage of whom are black women.

The administration then proceeded to lay off or severely reduce personnel in civil rights offices across the federal government. Presently, federal civil rights enforcement is virtually non-existent. Remaining officials were ordered to “pause” all proceedings. The Department of Justice has since dismissed four major voting rights cases (two in Georgia, one in Arizona, and one in Virginia). Police misconduct cases in Minneapolis and Louisville have similarly been sidelined. Conversely, approximately 45 cases of “reverse discrimination” have been initiated at colleges nationwide. Notably, 90 per cent of 9,000 pending discrimination cases were resolved through dismissal rather than investigation.

Furthermore, the administration has jettisoned the chief legal principle of “disparate impact.” This 50-year-old rule, established by a unanimous Supreme Court, allows a policy to be considered discriminatory if it negatively affects a specific group, regardless of “intent.” For example, if a company requires a high school diploma for a job that doesn’t actually need one, and in that town 90 per cent of whites have diplomas compared to 60 per cent of African-Americans and Latinos, if the hiring is 80 per cent white then the policy has a disparate impact which must be addressed. That “disparate impact” policy is now on the “slaughterhouse floor” of the Maga counter-revolution.

This attack concerns everyone, regardless of ethnicity, gender or class. In Marxist theory, this is an “all-class” or “all-people” issue. Environmental rights, for instance, affect everyone. Yet, cases like the “Cancer Alley” litigation in Louisiana and the sewage crisis in Lowndes County, Alabama, have been dismissed or settlements cancelled. Disability rights are also under siege; with the dismantling of the Department of Education, the protections for disabled children to receive a quality education are being savaged. If your children need transportation to school, a disabled bathroom, a special ed teacher, and the local school doesn’t provide it, there’s not much you can do. Sadly, they closed that office too.

Politically, all civil rights gains achieved over the last century now lie fallow. From Maga’s standpoint, the US ruling class has revived Chief Justice Taney’s infamous dictum in the Dred Scott case that a “black man has no rights a white man is bound to respect.” The same can be said for civil rights for all people of colour, women, LGBTQ and workers.

But all is not lost. A pitched battle is occurring across the country. We saw it in the January general strikes and marches in the Twin Cities. Struggles in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and Detroit over the last months bear witness to this truth. It was present in the mass walkouts of high school students and will be seen again in the “No Kings” protests on March 28.

Marching is vital, but it is not enough. We must use every tool in the toolbox: occupy, sit-in, write letters, canvas door-to-door, register and vote. It is an uphill battle, but we have been “downhill” before. As the old spiritual says, “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder… higher and higher.” We will not stop on this last day of Black History Month; we will not stop until we reach the promised land.

This article is based on the March 2 2026, presentation Stop the Civil Rights Counter Revolution by Joe Sims.

Joe Sims is co-chair of the Communist Party of the United States of America (cpusa.org).