Taking on Trump for Our President

I can remember when I was a teenager and Nelson Mandela was released from prison. I had read about him fighting apartheid but before he was released no one even knew what he looked like. The only pictures available were the old ones of him before being jailed. I was in Decatur that summer working in a bakery for summer money. Mandela was touring the United States. When he came to Atlanta, my parents and my Uncle Lee and his wife drove up, picked my sister and me up in Decatur and we went downtown Atlanta to see and Mandela speak. He would be at the Georgia Dome.

I will never forget that feeling of when we got downtown the rest of my life. There were black people EVERYWHERE! There were hundreds of thousands of them. The streets were packed. There were no cars, just black folk marching through every corner of downtown pumping their fist chanting, "The People United Will Never be Defeated!" That gave me chills. I had never seen such Black togetherness.

On another note, I can also remember in the early 90's when Jesse Jackson called for a boycott of Nike to protest its business practices. He claimed that the shoes annual income from blacks was over 200 million, yet the company had no high-ranking black executives and did not do business with black-owned advertising agencies.

I can remember rap group Public Enemy had a song out called "Shut em Down," that summer where Chuck D rapped, "I wear Nikes but wait a minute/ My neighborhood support so put some money in it."

A few months into the boycott Nike put money into black owned banks, advertised with black owned media, did business with black owned companies and put a black on its board of directors.

I remember being in Brooklyn, New York a few years later and a track and field facility was being built in Bedstuy, an all black community. Nike was building it. My cousin joked, "Nike ain’t gonna let them come out again and say they don’t put money in the communities."

Those types of things happened more in the 60's with the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other things, but in the 80s and 90's those same blacks knew how to get businesses’ attention.

I recently thought about these things after watching Donald Trump harass our president about showing his birth certificate to prove he is an American citizen and now asking him to show his school records to show the kind of grades he made before going to Harvard.

Who is Donald Trump to demand such things? President Obama told Oprah on her show that he only showed it because it was being such a distraction to other things he was trying to get done.

What Trump is doing is blatantly racist. He is trying to get those redneck and tea party voters that don't want Obama in office anyway to get on his side, in case he decides to make a run for office. He wants to be a distraction to anything Obama is trying to accomplish. He has gone on to say that he will make an official announcement at the end of his show, Celebrity Apprentice, about if he will run for President.

Our president has too many battles to fight to be bothered with this one. We can fight this one for him. We should come to our president's aid and do what our folk have successfully done for generations. Boycott anything dealing with The Donald. That means especially The Celebrity Apprentice and its advertisers. That means Trump Casinos. That means anything Trump.

This generation may not be familiar with the power of boycotting. But when any outside entity does something that will affect your community in anyway the best way to get revenge is hit them in the pocketbook. And if there is one thing The Donald loves its money and fame. Let’s not give him either.

United we stand, divided we fall. The people united will never be defeated.

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