Boycott Target, and other marching orders from Black church leaders

“Resistance is a sacred duty,” one prominent pastor says

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground,” the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass once declared. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Leaders of the Black church are heeding Douglass’s words and calling from their pulpits for people to stand up for civil rights and decency against the onslaught from the Trump regime.

The Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP, delivered a particularly stirring rebuttal to Trump’s address to Congress on March 5:

This is the time, as Fredrick said, to increase, intensify, and embolden our agitation and to declare that … a wannabe king is only a king if we bow down… But bowing down is not an option. My knees and your knees are not made for bowing to a power-drunk neofascist. We bow only to God. Otherwise we stand tall.

He continued:

It may take mass call-ins…. It may take mass nonviolent actions. It may take mass pray-ins…. But that's all right. Whatever it takes…. The lies and the greed cannot have the last word….

We may have to do it all. I suspect we will. I suspect and prophesy tonight that when it gets warmer you may see in America the same thing you saw in Egypt and places, you may see a fresh Freedom Summer – organic, just coming up….

Stand up in every pulpit. Stand up in every federal job. Stand and protest and expose what they're doing…. Flood the Congressional phone lines. Flood them with calls of protest and moral dissent. Stand up in the town halls. Go to their offices…. Stand up because God can do more with the remnant that will stand than a crowd that will bow. Stand. Stand and don’t let anything keep you from standing, because bowing down is not an option now.

This past weekend marked the 60^th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when 600 civil right supporters crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and were brutally beaten and teargassed by police. The national attention that ensued helped lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, a major victory for civil rights.

The Rev. Raphael G. Warnock, the Democratic senator from Georgia and leader of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, spoke to YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen shortly before attending the commemoration in Selma.

“I love the story of Selma,” Warnock said, “because these are just ordinary folks and they didn't have any reason to think that they could win. And I think that is so important right now because we're up against so much. I think it's easy to shrink, to give in to cynicism.”

He continued:

It is our job to show up in this moment. We never know when that moment will come where change happens. But every single day we have to make the case. We have to stand up for the struggles of ordinary people, stand up for health care as human right, stand up for women to have a voice and to have autonomy over their own bodies, stand up for children and young people so that they have a path towards prosperity, so that their parents' income doesn't determine their outcome. These are the things that we have to center every single day. And no, we don't give in to the autocrats. We believe in democracy….

I think that the work of the activists, the work of those of us who care about ordinary people, is to keep showing up -- doing it day after day after day and sometimes, quite honestly, you have to take the long view. If you look at the whole history of our country, there are moments when the democracy expands and there are moments when it contracts. And we're in a moment of contraction. But our work -- our moral work, our holy work, in my view -- is in this moment of contractions to stand up, to show up, to be faithful. And it's often in those moments that you give birth to something that's even larger and bigger and better. We’ve got to keep pushing our country towards its ideals.

In an essay published by the Contrarian, African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Reginald T. Jackson wrote about the need for the Black church to “lead the resistance against this administration's efforts to turn back time.” That includes making clear to everyone what Trump’s plan is for African Americans:

In 2016, when Trump first ran for the presidency, he asked the African-American community, "What do you have to lose?" Well, now we all know. Opportunities for Black professionals have stalled. Federal job openings for people of color have vanished. Corporate training programs designed to uplift our communities have been scrapped. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department has ceased enforcing protections. Funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives has been gutted. And history itself—the raw, unvarnished truth of slavery, of Jim Crow, of the long and ongoing struggle for freedom—is under attack. Our children are being deliberately cut off from the knowledge of their own past and, in turn, their right to claim their future. This is now the America we live in under Trump and, specifically, what we, as Black Americans, have now lost in only one month. These are the facts. As faith leaders, it is our job to shine a strong light on the truth.

And the Black church, he wrote, “must mobilize and galvanize our people”:

Black faith leaders must use their voices and leadership to motivate and encourage Black people, other people of color, and other Americans to be involved and organized to fight against this administration's efforts to turn back time. This moment is not a time for waiting. This is not a time for hoping that, somehow, decency will prevail on its own. We must shake loose the dangerous complacency that tells us things will "work themselves out." They will not. We must move, and we must move now. Black faith leaders must wield their pulpits as instruments of urgency, calling on their congregations not only to pray but to act. As faith leaders, we must remind our sisters and brothers that resistance is a sacred duty. As leaders within our neighborhoods and communities, we must register voters, engage in civic education, and build coalitions. The intention behind this administration's actions is clear: to return us to an era when people of color "knew their place." That cannot be allowed to happen. As our forebears did before us, we must proclaim, "Ain't nobody gonna turn us around."

One concrete step being advocated by many mainline Black denominations is the boycott of Target during Lent, from March 5 through April 17. “We’re asking people to divest from Target because they have turned their back on our community,” the Rev. Jamal Bryant said in an interview with CNN. Bryant, who is leading the boycott, is the pastor at an Atlanta-area megachurch.

Target was previously a major advocate of DEI programs as well as LGBTQ+ issues. But after Trump’s executive orders vilifying DEI, it was particularly quick to backtrack.

Bryant says that 140,000 people have signed up at targetfast.org, which has also taken off on TikTok. Here’s how the group explains its thinking:

In recent days, we have witnessed a disturbing retreat from Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives by major corporations—companies that once pledged to stand for justice but have since chosen the path of compromise. These rollbacks represent more than just corporate decisions; they reflect a deeper erosion of the moral and ethical commitments necessary to build a just society. As people of faith, we cannot be silent. We are called to resist systems that perpetuate exclusion and inequity.

And leaders of some of the largest Black denominations in the country will be in Chicago on Thursday, Politico reports, to announce a campaign to call out companies that have dumped DEI. So stay tuned.

It is, of course, not only Black church leaders who are resisting and urging resistance.

Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who is white, remains the only faith leader to directly confront Trump about his policies, which she did during the inaugural prayer services she led at the National Cathedral on Jan. 21.

“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” she said then.

In a recent Facebook post, Budde thanked supporters, including about 20,000 who wrote her grateful letters after her sermon. “Now is a time for us to stand together, to take courage from one another, and to learn together how we are to be brave now,” she said.

The Catholic Church installed Cardinal Robert McElroy, an outspoken advocate for immigrant rights, as the new archbishop in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

“Mercy and compassion must be our first impulse when confronted with sin and human failure,” he said in his homily. “God sees us as equal in dignity and moral worth. How deeply that contrasts with the world that we have.”

Back in 2017, McElroy was considerably more overt about his opposition to Trump. "President Trump was the candidate of disruption," McElroy told a gathering of activists. "Well now, we must all become disrupters."

He continued:

We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our streets to deport the undocumented, to rip mothers and fathers from their families. We must disrupt those who portray refugees as enemies, rather than our brothers and sisters in terrible need. We must disrupt those who train us to see Muslim men and women and children as sources of fear rather than as children of God. We must disrupt those who seek to rob our medical care, especially from the poor. We must disrupt those who would take even food stamps and nutrition assistance from the mouths of children.

Dozens of faith organizations – white, Black, Christian, Jewish -- are party to a lawsuit intended to keep ICE out of houses of worship, after the Trump administration reversed policies that had restricted officials from carrying out immigration enforcement in churches and schools.

The dean of the Georgetown University Law Center last week brilliantly rebuked the acting U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., for threatening not to hire the law school’s students if it does not remove DEI from its curriculum.

Dean William Treanor wrote back to Ed Martin that “as a Catholic and Jesuit institution, Georgetown University was founded on the principle that serious and sustained discourse among people of different faiths, cultures, and beliefs promotes intellectual, ethical, and spiritual understanding. For us at Georgetown, this principle is a moral and educational imperative. It is a principle that defines our mission as a Catholic and Jesuit institution.”

And the Washington Post reports about what happened when senior Trump aides invited the leaders of faith-based charities to a closed-door meeting, apparently assuming that because most of them were associated with evangelical Christianity they would support the administration’s “zeroing out” of foreign aid.

But instead, according to one participant in the meeting, “One by one, the aid leaders artfully explained the benefits of foreign assistance and what is being lost by ending it.”

Protests Continue to Spread Across the Country

ICE’s arrest of a permanent resident on Saturday – apparently on account of his First Amendment-protected role as a Palestinian activist at Columbia University – quickly led to protests in New York City. Mahmoud Khalil remained in ICE custody as thousands protested on Monday in New York’s Foley Square, with more protests taking place on Tuesday at Columbia and elsewhere.

Stand Up for Science rallies drew thousands across the country on Friday afternoon in Washington, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Birmingham, Ala., and Raleigh, among other cities.

The lead organizer of Stand Up for Science was Colette Delawalla, a clinical psychology Ph.D. candidate at Emory University in Atlanta who put her grant application on hold after federal agencies began flagging projects that include keywords like “women,” “diversity,” “female” and “gender”. After not finding any events planned, “I had this moment of ‘be the change you want to see in the world,’” she told Science News. She announced a rally of her own on the social media site Bluesky. Soon, she had a team and was planning events across the country. “I think everybody was just waiting for somebody to say the word,” Delawalla said.

Chicago is turning into quite the protest hotspot, with the Chicago Tribune noting the existence of at least six significant protests in a recent week. They included a rally for Ukraine on March 3, a Stand Up for Science rally on Friday, an International Women’s Day rally on Saturday and a Tesla Takedown rally on Saturday.

Meanwhile, the grassroots, social-media phenomenon calling itself 50501 – which started on Reddit and stands for “50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement” -- is calling for protests and sit-ins in all 50 states on April 5.

Journalist Andrea Pitzer writes in her newsletter that attending small protests is like building democratic muscle mass. “Going to demonstrations now can build public support, but it can also be a form of training,” she writes. “[J]ust as a government shouldn’t send military recruits off to war without basic training, Americans should imagine they’re likewise in training to save the country.”

Resistance Hero of the Week

Tiffany Flick, who served as the Social Security Administration’s acting chief of staff until she was forced out in mid-February, is telling the world what she saw before she left.

In a 12-page declaration filed as part of a federal lawsuit challenging Elon Musk’s access to Social Security data and systems, Flick describes how Musk’s team exposed data in unsecured areas outside Social Security offices, refused to explain why they needed taxpayer information that is protected by law, ignored the normal chain of command, and more.

Lawsuit Watch

• The Supreme Court on March 5 rejected the Trump administration’s request to keep billions of dollars in foreign aid approved by Congress frozen, sending the matter back to the district court.

• Democracy Forward and Public Citizen are trying to get a judge to block the shutting down of the U.S. Agency for International Development. On Tuesday, they asked the judge for an emergency order to stop the agency’s destruction of classified documents and personnel records.

• A Washington, D.C. federal judge on Monday ruled that Elon Musk’s “DOGE” operation is likely subject to FOIA and issued a preliminary injunction requiring the preservation of documents and expedited processing of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s FOIA requests with DOGE.

The Value of Talking to an Empty Chair

Residents of Michigan’s 1st Congressional District last week aired their grievances to an empty chair representing Jack Bergman, their Republican U.S. House representative. Here’s some video.

Ezra Levin, a cofounder of Indivisible, told Contrarian’s Jen Rubin to expect more of this during the next congressional recess — which, for the House, starts today. He explained:

We know now Republicans are going to say “We’re not going to hold town halls.” That’s fine. That’s fine. Constituents can reserve a space, they can invite their friends and family members and community members. They can invite the local press. They can invite other elected officials. And they can invite their Republican electeds. And when and if that local congressman or senator doesn’t show up, they should be ready. You should have a cardboard cut-out. You should have a person in a chicken suit or a live chicken on stage…. So you can make the point that not only are these Republicans backing an extremely unpopular agenda in the form of Project 2025, they’re also cowards.

Little Things You Can Do

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau union is selling mugs that poke fun of the botched mail merge used to fire probationary employees. Proceeds go to the CFPB Union Solidarity Fund, which provides grants to recently fired employees. Buy a Hello My Name is [EmployeeFirstName] Mug.

• Choose your words intentionally. John Ganz, in his Substack newsletter, writes that “I believe it’s appropriate now to refer to the present government of the United States not as an ‘administration’ but as a ‘regime,’ with all of that word’s dark and ugly connotations.” And the New York Times has a list of words that are disappearing under the Trump regime. Use them frequently!

• The State Department is accepting public comments through the end of this week for people to submit their concerns about the new passport policy that forces trans, intersex, and nonbinary people to out themselves when they have to show ID. So the ACLU is encouraging you to flood their comment page.