What we are seeing in America today is something that Black people haven’t experienced in a very long time—citizenship with no workable Voting Rights Act in place. Immediately after the Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais ruling, five southern states wasted little time in redrawing new congressional voting maps that would eventually wipe out Black-majority districts in their states. We can’t place all of the blame for the dilution of Black and Latino voting power through election manipulation at the feet of this one Supreme Court decision. Last July, President Trump ordered Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to redis-trict his state to create an additional five Republi-can-leaning congressional districts.
The president intends to maintain political power and control by circumventing the will of voters by eliminating fair congressional district-ing through partisan and racial gerrymandering. To have this type of president make this type of order and then have a state governor carry it out is disturbing. As a result, we have a “redistricting arms race.” This is what happens when America elects a robber baron as president. A robber baron is a term used to describe powerful 19th-centu-ry American industrialists and financiers who amassed enormous wealth through unethical and controlling practices. Their key tactics included (exploiting workers), maintaining wealth by paying extremely low wages and providing poor working conditions, (monopolies) formed “trusts” to con-trol entire industries, allowing illegal or aggressive means to dictate prices and eliminate competitors, (political corruption) influencing government officials through lobbying or outright bribery to secure favorable land grants and subsidies. Critics often focused on their greed and the unethical methods by which they created human suffering and extreme economic disparity between the very wealthy and the poor. In the late 19th century, the top 1 percent owned roughly 51 percent of property while the bottom 44 percent owned only 1.1 percent.
These robber barons included John D. Rocke-feller (Standard Oil), Andrew Carnegie (Carnegie Steel), Cornelius Vanderbilt (Railroads and ship-ping), and J.P. Morgan (finance & banking). Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, when asked by a re-porter how much money he needed to finally have enough, said, “Just a bit more.” Rockefeller was America’s first billionaire and was forced by the government to dissolve his monopoly. Cornelius Vanderbilt was known for ruthlessly eliminating competition in transportation. Jay Gould was one of the worst robber barons. He was an American railroad magnate who founded the Gould business dynasty.
Gould’s pattern was to rig markets, water stock, bribe officials, and crush labor, leaving inves-tors and workers ruined while he walked away richer. Gould, was notorious for enriching himself through schemes that even contemporaries called socially destructive. He was infamous for how he treated workers, reinforcing his image as morally callous.
What we have today in the White House is a modern-day Jay Gould in President Donald Trump, who entered his second term in office using robber baron tactics to govern. The way ob-servers saw Jay Gould deliberately run companies into the ground and then rebuild them in ways that benefited him is the same tactic Trump is doing with the federal government.
Robber barons never totally went away.
It has been a while since Black America has ex-perienced a Jay Gould-type robber baron as pres-ident, particularly one whose goal is to ruthlessly destroy Black political power and prosperity.
David W. Marshall is the founder of the faith-based organization TRB: The Reconciled Body, and the author of the book God Bless Our Divided