THE AMERICAN HERO TRUMP PREFERS
YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT
by Cash Michaels
I’m going to do something right now that your president, and his MAGA Republicans in your state legislature, would prefer I didn’t.
In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if, after reading this piece, some MAGA Republican in the NC House or Senate, quickly proposed another crazy anti-DEI law like Senate Bill 227, based on Trump’s executive order of January 29, 2025 “to protect American students…,” specifically banning this commentary, charging that it promotes “divisive concepts” that might cause “an individual” (read white person) to “…feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” because it does not tout, as Trump insists, America’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.”
Well until that stupid measure is written and passed, or one of Trump’s MAGA legal turkeys actually says something to my face (seeking to trounce my First Amendment Rs, which better NOT happen), here’s goes nothing.
A great man of American history, not just African-American history, but AMERICAN history, left us last week.
U.S. Air Force Reserve Major General (ret.), Wilmington, N.C. native and member of the historic “Greensboro Four, ” Joseph Alfred McNeil, passed away Sept. 4th at age 83. The NY Times reports he died in a hospice in Port Jefferson, NY on Long Island, and had been in failing health in recent months.
The Times added that his wife, Ina McNeil, said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.
As you may recall, the “Greensboro Four” were four black students from NC A&T University who, on February 1st, 1960, decided they had enough of racial segregation, walked downtown to the Woolworth store, took seats in the “whites only” section of the lunch counter and defiantly ordered food, re-igniting a struggling civil rights movement that literally changed the South and this country.
McNeil later graduated NC A&T in 1963 with an engineering physics degree; serve six years in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War; join the U.S.Air Force Reserve; work for the Federal Aviation Administration; and retire in 2000 at the rank of two-star major general.
In Sept. 2019, Maj. Gen. McNeil's hometown of Wilmington renamed North Third Street downtown "Maj. Gen. Joseph McNeil Way," in his honor because of the American values he stood for both in and out of uniform.
I had the distinct honor and privilege of interviewing Maj. Gen. McNeil on-camera for my 2014 award-winning documentary, “Pardons of Innocence: The Wilmington Ten” in October 2013. When I got word that he had passed last week, I immediately thought of that session, and all of the extraordinary things about his life he told me about growing up black in Wilmington, why he and his three fellow classmates put their lives and liberties on the line that fateful day, and why he still believed so strongly in freedom, justice and equality.
As I watched that interview, I was struck by what he shared with me twelve years ago, and felt much of it was too important and too relevant to what we are seeing today, not to share now upon his passing.
So, at the risk of being accused of bringing tears to some poor white person’s eyes, in addition to “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” as Trump and his Republican cohorts warn is bound to happen if we share anything about this country’s fact of the matter racial history, here is Major General Joseph A. McNeil, American hero, in his own words, edited for space:
What was it like growing up black in segregated Wilmington during the 1940’s and 50’s, especially given the legacy of the 1898 race riot massacre there?
Wilmington was different from many progressive cities in North Carolina [for blacks], I’ll say, because it didn’t have the educational facilities. University of Wilmington was the only college, and there was no historically black college in Wilmington, so most of the education after high school [for blacks] was done in other places outside of Wilmington.
A good portion of students who graduated went on to join the military for a couple of reasons. One was the draft, and second, there just weren’t any opportunities, no job opportunities. Being an assistant on a soda truck was the type of job [black] males could have.
And so, Wilmington lost a lot of bright people who went to other areas of the country for economic opportunities. People …tended to go to Chicago, New York, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee.
There were no [black] policemen, except one, Officer Hanes. And the only types of jobs other than being a teacher that paid fairly well in those times was the postal system, but the positions [for blacks] were very limited. Probably six or seven, but they served our community.
We learned to adapt and adjust, and to grow.
Growing up as a black child in Wilmington, did you ever face racism?
I can remember poignantly as a kid coming up, I had a dog - and a boy and his dog, it’s like his best friend. My dog was a huge dog, and his name was “Trigger.” Trigger got hit in his hind legs by a car, and my Dad and I cared a heck of a lot about Trigger, so we took him to the veterinarian.
And the vet refused to work on Trigger, and the reason he said he couldn’t do that, or wouldn’t do that, was because Trigger was “a colored dog.”
That was an example of the type of mentality that existed. So we went to another veterinarian eventually, but that absurdity was characteristic of the time.
Speaking earlier, you noted that there were limited opportunities back then for blacks and whites to come together - blacks could attend St. Mary’s Catholic Church with whites, for example, and in early athletics, you had football and baseball players from your senior high school, Williston, play with white players from New Hanover High school in the early ’50’s. How did that happen?
It was sandlot, and it was voluntary. Left to our own devices, [kids] found a way to engage in some friendships, though very limited, on our own.
Talk more about the importance of your all-black high school, Williston Senior High School, and how the teachers there inculcated you and other students with high moral standards, exceptional academic and cultural rigor, and a strong sense of pride in yourself and your community that has shaped the man you are today.
The people who were tasked to educate [Wilmington’s] black community in the [40’s, 50’s and 60’s] demanded high standards.
I can recall [studying subjects] like college algebra, physics and chemistry, [in addition to] strong courses in government that were very character-forming. Courses that talked about our responsibility as citizens, conversations around racial segregation, and how it was not only inappropriate, but we needed to keep our manhood, stand up and challenge racial segregation and separateness wherever we could.
It was an imperative for survival….and many teachers stepped forward, and taught us….to prepare us for something better.
That kind of high quality academic instruction and civic inspiration at Williston was indicative of a number of all-black schools across North Carolina and the South during the 1940s, 50’s and 60s because education was seen as the great equalizer for African-Americans then, and black students were pushed to work twice as hard in order to compete in, and ultimately overcome, a segregated America.
So you graduated from Williston in 1959, and attended N.C. A&T State University in Greensboro, which was, like the rest of North Carolina and the South, governed by segregation laws - whites and blacks had to live and work separately; use separate but unequal public facilities; were legally treated differently; and on February 1st, 1960, you at age 17, along three other freshmen - Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair, Jr (later known as Jibreel Khazan), went to the F.W. Woolworth five-and-dime store in downtown Greensboro, and decided segregation there must be challenged, but challenged nonviolently. Why?
People were angry, kids were angry that they were treated differently, that there were people overtly and covertly working to deter or hurt their ability to achieve. Somebody would take time out of their life to make sure, or to make you less of a human being, or attempt to do that. Well, we weren’t buying that act.
Thousands of students were experiencing this, as people ahead of us were experiencing it, and we were often just quiet about the way we were treated. But we felt very strongly, and it was no joke.
So we decided, after talking about this, my three colleagues and I, that we were part of the problem. We would talk about it, but nobody was doing anything. Nationally we had [the racial conflict at Little Rock High School] and the [lynching] tragedy of Emmett Till. We had untold tragedies on a daily basis, and this anger boiled up, not just in [the four of us] but thousands of others [across the South] to take a stand, to be strong, to be nonviolent, to endure the threats from the [Ku Klux] Klan, and to not be afraid, and come back the next day.
You didn’t know what would happen after refusing to leave that lunch counter until closing, even though a police officer came. You caught everyone by surprise, and that probably saved you from being arrested or harmed. As a result, hundreds of students from area colleges and high schools showed up in later days and weeks, and within six months, that Woolworth store was forced drop its “whites only” lunch counter policy.
Indeed, in cities across the South, students nonviolently followed suit, and it wasn’t long before SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) was founded at Shaw University in Raleigh in April 1960, with young leaders like Julian Bond and John Lewis, to push desegregation efforts across the South, resulting in the 1961 bloody Freedom Rides; the 1963 March on Washington; and passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
All because you and your three buddies decided one day you had had enough, and it was time to “take a stand, to be strong, and to be nonviolent.”
And like we rallied in the ’60s, it’s become obvious that we may have to rally again to save our country from hatred and efforts to hurt other Americans.
I must tell you, seeing and hearing this great, principled American icon of history share his thoughts and feelings about being a young black man in this country over 65 years ago, yearning for freedom, justice and equality, and willing to put his life and future on the line to make it happen against a white supremacist power structure determined to crush him and other brave Americans like him into the ground, just to maintain an unjust system of racial tyranny, is refreshing, and inspiring.
In this ridiculous day and age, you just don’t hear that kind of refreshing talk or spirit anymore, and if the Trump Administration has anything to do with it, you won’t ever again!
What gets me is that Trump and his Republicans are so, so anxious to “protect” white students in particular from the “… discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” of reading and learning about what Maj. Gen. Joseph McNeil, and other black Americans in and before his generation went through in this country during their struggle for freedom, but Trump and company refuse to pay due tribute to their “…discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress," because Republicans would rather whitewash American history as an “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.”
Stop! Think for a moment just how insulting that is!
Trump and his GOP sycophants aren’t smart enough to realize that you can’t accomplish ANY of that whitewash in a vacuum. In order to advance liberty and establish individual rights in order to attain human happiness, there must be an absence of such first. It had to start from somewhere! That’s the essential part of America’s struggle to live up to its founding creed that “all men are created equal.”
THAT’s the critical part of America’s journey Trump and his MAGA cowards are afraid to have revealed, studied and admitted to - that America had to learn the hard lesson of freedom - because it screws with the unholy game that they’re playing on all of us.
Trump and his MAGA Republicans see teaching the truth about America's racial past as a rodent infestation that must be exterminated from the national memory.
America was never a “perfect” nation, and we damn sure aren’t perfect now. But what fueled the imaginations and determinations of Joe McNeil’s generation of African-Americans was hope, and the possibilities of a better day.
Of true and equal citizenship.
I honestly don’t see that “hope” today anymore, and those possibilities are being viciously strangled at the neck by a hate-filled president, and his administration and political party who apparently have been waiting for this sinister moment in our history their whole, sorry lives.
Maj.Gen. McNeil, as bad as it looks today, and believe me, neither I nor a lot of other people have the faintest idea what the future holds for our country beyond the hurt and hate this crackpot in the White House is promising, I promise YOU, sir, that I, too, will continue to do whatever I can to make this country a better place for all of its citizens and non-citizens, before I leave.
But if failing health, if not other circumstances require that I, too, have to leave sooner than expected, I hope to see you again, sir.
And this time, unlike twelve years ago, I will salute you, Maj.Gen., because your historic moral leadership, courage, and commitment to freedom, justice and equality, demands it!
Thank you for your service, sir, both in and out of uniform.
Somehow, I don’t think that Donald Trump would agree.
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