Standing up to a bully requires
more than slogans, press releases or
carefully staged outrage. It requires
looking power in the face, refusing
intimidation and saying, plainly, no.
Congresswoman Joyce Beatty has that courage.
The Ohio Democrat and former chair
of the Congressional Black Caucus is
standing virtually alone inside the Kennedy
Center’s governing structure against Donald
Trump’s attempted seizure of a national
cultural institution. Trump has installed
loyalists, pushed aside dissenters and tried
to plaster his name onto a building Congress
designated as a living memorial to President
John F. Kennedy.
Beatty sued. And she won - not
once, but twice. She did not merely issue a
statement; she used the law, reminding Trump
and his enablers that public institutions
are not presidential playthings and that a
board vote cannot erase an act of Congress.
Trump answered with insults and
threats. During a virtual board meeting, he
reportedly called Beatty “destructive,”
claimed she had “never built anything,” and
threatened to hold her responsible if the
deteriorating building caused a death. That
was not argument. It was intimidation
dressed up as authority.
Beatty did not fold. She has been
pepper-sprayed while protesting police
violence and arrested while demanding voting
rights. She knows what it means to put her
body - not merely her name - behind a
principle. Now she is defending a public
institution from a president who thinks
anything touched by government belongs to
him.
Audacity means boldness - nerve,
even temerity. It is neither virtue nor vice
until we ask: audacity in the service of
what?
Trump’s is criminal audacity: the
brazen nerve to privatize public memory and
turn a national memorial into a vanity
project. It is audacity in the service of
ego, domination and theft.
Beatty’s is righteous audacity: the
moral nerve to confront illegitimate power
and refuse to be muted. Accepting the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. declared, “I have the audacity to
believe,” then spoke of food, education,
culture, dignity, equality and freedom for
people everywhere. That was audacity in the
service of justice. That is the tradition
Joyce Beatty claims.
Coming out of Congressional Black
Caucus week, her example provokes a larger
question: What is Black political power for?
The CBC was founded in 1971 by 13
members who understood that representation
without collective action was insufficient.
They boycotted President Richard Nixon’s
State of the Union address and demanded a
meeting about Black America. They were not
invited to power’s table because the
powerful developed good manners. They
organized, insisted and disrupted.
Today the CBC is larger and more
institutionally powerful than its founders
could have imagined. Black members hold
seniority, key committee positions and party
leadership. Hakeem Jeffries could become the
first Black Speaker of the House. But
proximity to power is not power, and titles
are not transformation.
CBC week brings urgent policy
debates about voting rights, economic
justice, health, education and Black
political power. It gathers ambitious young
people, seasoned public servants, advocates
and entrepreneurs - along with more
receptions than any human can reasonably
attend. Yet we must not confuse access with
action or networking with movement-building.
The measure of the gathering comes after the
ballroom lights go dark.
Will voting rights be defended and
predatory redistricting challenged? Will
Black unemployment, Black maternal mortality
and the racial wealth gap be treated as
emergencies rather than perennial panel
topics? Will elected officials confront
authoritarianism when it is risky?
Joyce Beatty has answered with her
actions.
Her fight is about more than a
building. Cultural institutions tell us
whose history is honored and whose names
endure. Trump’s desire to rename the Kennedy
Center is part of his effort to rewrite
history, punish dissent and place himself at
the center of every American story. He does
not simply want power. He wants tribute.
Beatty refuses to pay it.
Black women have often supplied the
labor and backbone of American democracy
while others received the credit. They
organize voters, steady institutions, defend
the Constitution - and are told to lower
their voices. Beatty’s voice was literally
muted during a Kennedy Center meeting. She
found another microphone: the federal
courts.
Resistance is not always a march.
Sometimes it is a lawsuit, a vote or a
refusal to consent. Sometimes it is one
woman in a hostile room saying, “You may
have the votes, but you do not have the
law.”
Courage deserves to be named. We
saw it in Barbara Lee, standing alone
against the sweeping 2001 Authorization for
Use of Military Force and warning against a
blank check for endless war. We saw it in
Barbara Jordan, a freshman on the House
Judiciary Committee, making the Constitution
thunder during Watergate. We see it in
Maxine Waters, using her financial
leadership to confront predatory lending,
discriminatory finance and attacks on
consumers. And we see it now in Joyce
Beatty.
The CBC has long called itself the
conscience of the Congress. Conscience is
not a ceremonial title. It is a duty. At a
moment when too many people accommodate the
outrageous, normalize the abnormal and
calculate the cost of speaking, Beatty has
chosen to fight. Her righteous audacity is
not simply that she challenged a president.
She refused to let public memory become
private vanity.
