Freedom of speech, one of the sacred rights guaranteed by our Constitution, must be zealously guarded. When governments start chipping away at the freedom to speak, other liberties are sure to follow. Reactionary and racist forces in America have long used violent means to attack free speech and to silence Black voices seeking greater justice and cultural expression.
We must therefore be fully engaged in the firestorm over free speech in the wake of the murder of conservative campus organizer Charlie Kirk, who brought his MAGA debate act to colleges all over the country. Kirk, struck down during an appearance on a Utah campus, was quickly eulogized as a martyr by his friends on the right, including President Donald Trump, for whom he extensively campaigned. Others condemned the shooting but refused to canonize the 31-year-old husband and father of two, citing his history of statements supporting the false narrative of stolen elections in the 2024 presidential race, attacking the LGBTQ movement, backing the racist “white replacement theory,” and cruelly mocking prominent Black figures like former Vice President Kamala Harris and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The arrest of Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, prompted extensive coverage of his background and associations, from his boyhood in a gun-loving, conservative Mormon household to his apparent romantic relationship with a transgender roommate. Jimmy Kimmel, a popular ABC late-night show host, criticized Trump and his coterie for doing everything possible to link Robinson to left-wing ideology.
“The MAGA gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said in his opening monologue on the Monday after the shooting.
ABC, facing an uproar from conservative viewers and Republican leaders incensed by the comedian’s statement, suspended Kimmel “indefinitely.” Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, muttered darkly about pulling ABC’s broadcast license. Despite coming into office promising to protect Americans from punishment for voicing their opinions, Trump launched a broader attack, warning that regulators could yank broadcasters’ licenses if they ran negative stories about him.
For fans of Jimmy Kimmel, the crisis passed when the Disney Co., owners of ABC, put his show back on the air this week. Consumers who opposed the show’s suspension had used their leverage properly, cancelling subscriptions to Disney’s streaming services and tickets to their theme parks.
But the larger crisis of the crackdown on free speech is not over. Trump is not backing down. His resolve to dampen free expression is an extension of the outrageous overreach of his increasingly authoritarian government, something more akin to Russia or Venezuela than our 250-year-old democracy.
Since Trump took office for his second term, corporate media leaders have settled frivolous lawsuits filed by the president, sidelined critical editorial voices and shaped programming to better suit the Republican agenda. On top of endorsing book bans, removing references to Black history in the public square and cancelling support of Black scholarship and museums teaching Black history and culture, the suppression of free speech and government whitewashing go hand in hand.
African Americans who grew up with the Civil Rights Movement know what’s at stake. The link between civil liberties and civil rights is strong. So many of the barriers to full participation in society — voting rights and bans on discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations — came about through vigorous free-speech debates and the protected rights of free assembly. Efforts to suppress the voices of liberation included government-aided campaigns against the scholar W.E.B. DuBois, the actor Paul Robeson and the preacher Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The ultimate expression of cancel culture was white resistance to civil rights in the form of murderous Night Riders and White Citizens Councils in the segregated South. The Trump administration’s version is the deployment of masked ICE agents to violently round up, detain and deport our brown brothers and sisters just because of how they look and the language they speak.
Of course we should be concerned about hate speech, particularly its rise on college campuses in an era of unchecked social media hostility. But Randall Kennedy, the esteemed Harvard Law professor who has written extensively about race in America, warned in a 2024 op-ed of the consequences of allowing concern about hateful rhetoric to spill over into suppression of disagreeable free speech: “Racial justice activists must realize that a speech-protective culture — a culture that defends even ugly expression — benefits communities that depend upon protest to make their presence and preferences seen and heard.” He cited a counter-intuitive example of a Black institution standing up for free speech. “In 1952,” Kennedy wrote, “the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper criticized the prosecution of a white supremacist who had been convicted under a state law that criminalized racist group vilification. In an editorial, the newspaper wrote that the battle against bigotry can be fought most effectively ‘in an atmosphere in which freedom of speech is not restricted or confined.’”
A search in the Banner archives finds articles from 1991, when former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke made a controversial appearance at the Old South Meeting House as part of the Ford Hall Forum lecture series. Some of his most virulent Black critics were also among the most ardent defenders of his right to speak. From Frederick Douglass and William Monroe Trotter to Al Sharpton and Cornell West, sharp rhetoric condemned by defenders of the status quo has served to shine a light on uncomfortable truths about race in America.
The Banner wholeheartedly condemns the political violence that ended Charlie Kirk’s life. But we wholeheartedly defend the free-speech rights of critics to explore Kirk’s words, actions and legacy and question what Kirk’s defenders are doing to undermine all our rights to open expression. Make no mistake — those rights, like so many things Americans took for granted not long ago, are under assault. Every means at our disposal, from protests and boycotts to lawsuits and political action, must be used to preserve our civil liberties.
Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner
