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Trump’s Threats to Free Speech Aren’t New to Black Journalists

Two years after Trump’s infamous invitation to the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention, the organization is adapting and bracing for escalating hostility.

Iremember, after standing in a line that spanned at least four hallways in the Hilton Hotel on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, finally entering a crowded, almost vibrating conference floor. The murmur of reporters already rife with questions permeated the room. I sat near the back and stared at an illustration of bold, yellow lettering with blue skyscrapers emerging from above. The letters read, “NABJ.” At my first National Association of Black Journalists Convention, in 2024, I waited for then–presidential candidate Donald Trump to emerge.

At the time, NABJ’s decision to invite a hostile actor to a Black advocacy space in the name of journalistic tradition left many professional Black journalists reeling. Almost two years later, in the wake of the Trump administration’s blatant attacks against Black journalists, the decision seems even more incomprehensible. From the federally backed arrests of Georgia Fort, Don Lemon, and Jerome Richardson in January, to Trump’s recent racist social-media post depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys, the president’s hostility toward Black people, immigrants, and anyone who questions power has been transparent. Even his social-media tribute to Jesse Jackson on Tuesday sparked heated backlash for using the civil rights leader’s death as self-inflating PR fodder.

“When you have an autocratic presidential candidate, you don’t treat that person like a normal presidential candidate,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times Magazine correspondent and a longtime NABJ member, told me. “NABJ in particular was created to advocate for Black journalists. We didn’t learn anything new about his views. There was nothing there that journalists got. What journalists did get was completely disrespected in our own territory.”

Before the Lemon and Fort arrests, before Karen Attiah—who stepped down from her position as NABJ convention co-chair in 2024 after learning Trump was invited to the conference—was fired from The Washington Post, there was Hannah-Jones in 2020, navigating a conservative backlash to The 1619 Project. The renowned collection of essays that interrogated the nation’s relationship to chattel slavery and Black America had US Senators like Tom Cotton smearing it as “revisionist” history........

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