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Guest Essay

By Margaret Renkl

Ms. Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, reports from Nashville on flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.

When officials at the General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s real estate holdings, announced on March 4 that they had identified 440 government-owned buildings for potential sale, they noted that taxpayers should not be paying “for empty and underutilized federal office space.” If you accepted that statement as a true accounting of the Trump administration’s motives, you probably gave the matter no more thought. Why should Americans be paying to maintain empty office space?

But as with nearly everything else this administration does, the real truth is in the details. And many of the buildings on the original list were not “underutilized” at all. They were simply being used for government work that the president didn’t like or by government officials whom the president wanted to punish. All on the grounds that they were “not core to government operations.”

Among the less recognizable buildings slated for potential sale were several bearing the names of civil rights leaders, including Rosa Parks and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the building that houses the Freedom Rides Museum, which occupies the old Greyhound Bus Station in Montgomery, Ala.

The Freedom Rides Museum commemorates the courage and sacrifice of a group of civil rights advocates — Black and white, young and old, female and male, Southern and Northern — who risked their lives on a series of bus rides through the segregated South in 1961. Their aim was to test the strength of Boynton v. Virginia, a 1960 Supreme Court decision that ruled it unconstitutional to segregate facilities provided for interstate travelers — in other words,........

© The New York Times