ANALYSIS: While a federal appeals court does had temporarily sided with the White House, traditional similarities to the use of National Guard personnel during the civil rights movement are extremely false.
A well-known Norman Rockwell painting stands out from the rest of his job in part because of both who we see and who we don’t notice.
A small, black girl with a book and king in hand, looking past a large spray-painted insult on the walls, N*GGER, wears a completely pressed dress and braided locks adorned by a bow.
She is escorted by gentlemen wearing yellow wristbands, who are representing the federal government, with their heads out of sync. Federal forces are also present to ensure Ruby Bridges, a young woman, makes it on her first day of school carefully because the state of Louisiana had defied the Supreme Court’s desegregation purchases.
The next time a president called in provincial troops over a country’s objections to enforcing the law is in 1960, when the image is shown. Only three years prior, President Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed soldiers to Little Rock, Arkansas to guard Black kids enrolled in Central High School.
A leader has ordered federal troops to invade a position against a governor’s request for a different reason in the year 2025, causing legitimate friction between him and the governor, who is in charge of the matter. A panel ruled against a lower court and stated the president can keep control of guard troops for the time being ( two of the three judges were Trump appointees ), which has sparked a legal battle over executive power. President Donald Trump’s order on June 7 to send thousands of National Guard troops to California during ICE protests led to a win on June 20.
Social supporters who claim there is plenty of moral justification and precedent for the use of soldiers by the executive branch have justified Trump’s use of national army against the wishes of California governor Gavin Newsom and LA president Karen Bass.
What should you do if your governor isn’t running [and ] isn’t intervening in his own state’s unrest and violence? Republican head of the State Assembly James Gallagher told CalMatters in an interview.
In response to Trump’s decision, Texas Senator John Cornyn said,” I believe he needs to restore order.” The president has clear authority in his federal capacity to deal with the National Guard, and I’m primarily concerned about public safety. So, plenty of precedent.
These justifications for the use of federal power highlight a justification for a larger campaign to suppress all history tied to race, racism, and the fight for civil rights in our country and not just on a misinterpretation of American history. The less people are aware, the harder or less inclined they will be to challenge the authorities, including the current administration.
In the 1960s, several presidents authorised the deployment of federal troops into states after governors openly defied and defied civil rights and desegregation.
” It was very uncommon. Presidents have had this authority since the early 19th century, but they haven’t used it much, according to Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, in an interview with theGrio.
Zelizer claims that President Lyndon Johnson decided to send in troops in 1965 only after the bloody violence in Selma, where images of protestors being brutally beaten by state and local police were widely circulated and used as propaganda for communism against the “democracy” there.
In the case of Ruby Bridges, President Eisenhower ordered federal troops to take her to desegregate her classroom in 1960 because angry protesters had gathered outside to block the 6-year-old. In both of these situations, states openly defied international law. Both Newsom and Bass claimed they could handle protests in California, but the Trump administration decided that their efforts were insufficient.
According to Zelizer, the federal government’s intervention in LA is more in line with darker historical periods, particularly COINTELPRO’s covert operations. The kind of double agent backstabber we saw in” Judas and the Black Messiah,” in which a Black man working for the federal government is assassinated, was used to disrupt Black Power and civil rights movement organizations.
That was a program where the government had a clear goal: to intimidate, scare, collect information, and just disrupt social protest. And I believe that’s a significant component of the administration’s strategy of putting troops in Los Angeles,” Zelizer tells theGrio.
Vice President JD Vance’s visit to Los Angeles this week best exemplifies the intimidation component of this agenda. Vance defended the court’s decision to grant Trump control of the National Guard as” a completely legitimate and proper use of federal law enforcement” during his visit, and he made the case that their occupation has a psychological and practical impact.
The soldiers and Marines are still very much a part of what is happening because they are concerned that it will rekindle, Vance said during the trip.
He resisted saying,” When you have violent agitators who make it impossible for law enforcement to do their jobs, it is necessary to protect and defend them.”
On January 6, Capitol staffers might share the sentiment. However, the violent and deadly insurrection on January 6 serves as yet another example of a historic incident that has been rewritten by many Republican leaders ( save bolder voices like ex-U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger ) as a legitimate and peaceful protest.
While the federal appeals court has decided that President Trump can control the deployment of guard troops in LA for the time being while mostly peaceful protests are occurring, they also handed Governor Newsom a minor victory, noting that Trump is still legally responsible to the courts and cannot unilaterally decide how to deploy guard troops around the country.
The court correctly rejected Trump’s claim that he could work with the National Guard and not have to explain himself to a court, according to Gavin Newsom in a statement released following the ruling.
The President is not a king, and he is not above the law. We will continue to challenge President Trump’s authoritarian treatment of American citizens by military personnel.
We will always be able to see what it meant when federal troops arrived to defend the most vulnerable of our citizens thanks to Norman Rockwell’s content painting Ruby Bridges.
Nod to facing the uncomfortable and ugly no matter where you were or who you were in America during the civil unrest, its title,” The Problem We All Live With,” was a nod.
Our society’s current problems demand that we do the same, and American democracy depends on it.
TheGrio’s Senior Vice President is Natasha S. Alford. Alford is a well-known journalist, filmmaker, and TV analyst. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed book” American Negra.” Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @natashasalford ( HarperCollins, 2024 ).
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Originally sourced via trusted media partner. https://thegrio.com/2025/06/21/the-war-over-federal-troops-in-la-and-the-problem-we-all-live-with/
