Civil rights demonstrators participating in the Selma-to-Montgomery marches are seen in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 25, 1965.

At midnight on Jan. 20, 2009, a small group of us took a 24-hour round-trip bus ride to Washington, D.C., to see the inauguration of Barack Obama. The group included my son and his friends. I wanted them to witness the “official” end of racism in the United States.

It didn’t quite turn out that way. In the years following Obama’s presidency, our nation has become more divided than it has been since the Civil War.

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For decades, politicians like George Wallace have used the rhetoric of freedom to brutalize those who were not white. To them, freedom meant the right to oppress nonwhites.

From Wallace to Donald Trump is hardly a leap. What is happening today in Washington did not happen overnight, though. Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, along with the Heritage Foundation authors of Project 2025, deserve “credit.” Five decades of work on federal judicial selections and a blueprint for reversing years of executive, judicial and........

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