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 congressional voting maps that would eventually wipe out Black-majority districts.
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 redistrict his state to create an additional five Republican-leaning congressional districts.
The president intends to maintain political power and control by circumventing the will of voters — eliminating fair congressional districting through partisan and racial gerrymandering. To have a president issue this type of order and then have a state governor carry it out is disturbing. The result is 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-century American industrialists and financiers who amassed enormous wealth through unethical and controlling practices. Their key tactics included exploiting workers through extremely low wages and poor working conditions; forming monopolies and “trusts” to control entire industries and eliminate competitors; and corrupting government officials through lobbying or outright bribery to secure favorable land grants and subsidies. Critics focused on their greed and the unethical methods by which they created human suffering and extreme economic disparity. In the late 19th century, the top 1% owned roughly 51% of property while the bottom 44% owned only 1.1%.
These robber barons included John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil), Andrew Carnegie (Carnegie Steel), Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroads and shipping) and J.P. Morgan (finance and banking). When asked by a reporter how much money he needed to finally have enough, Rockefeller said, “Just a bit more.” He was America’s first billionaire and was ultimately forced by the government to dissolve his monopoly. Vanderbilt was known for ruthlessly eliminating competition in transportation.
Jay Gould was among the worst of them. A railroad magnate who founded the Gould business dynasty, he repeatedly used deception, manipulation and political corruption to extract wealth from others rather than create it. His pattern was to rig markets, water stock, bribe officials and crush labor — leaving investors and workers ruined while he walked away richer.
Many Gilded Age tycoons were ruthless but also associated themselves with major productive achievements or philanthropy. Gould was notorious for enriching himself through schemes that even contemporaries called socially destructive. During labor conflicts in the 1880s, he was quoted as saying he could “hire one half of the working class to kill the other half” — a line that captured his willingness to set groups of workers against each other. Even during his lifetime, Gould considered himself the most hated man in late 19th-century America, and contemporary press, clergy and politicians depicted him as the very embodiment of greed.
What we have today in the White House is a modern-day Jay Gould. The way observers saw Gould deliberately run companies into the ground and then rebuild them in ways that benefited him is the same tactic Trump is using with the federal government. The unfair advantage of congressional representation gained through unethical racial and political gerrymandering parallels the monopoly tactics of the 19th-century robber barons.
Robber barons never totally went away. We have them in modern tech moguls such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. We simply never had one as president.
Even King Charles III has noticed a different and alarming America under the current administration. Speaking before a rare joint meeting of Congress, he offered a subtle warning regarding the need to uphold democratic traditions, specifically highlighting the importance of checks and balances on executive power.
It has been a while since Black America has experienced a Jay Gould-type robber baron as president — particularly one whose goal is to ruthlessly destroy Black political power and prosperity.
Marshall is the founder of the faith-based organization TRB: The Reconciled Body and author of the book “God Bless Our Divided America.”
