Trump’s Firing of Federal Reserve’s First Black Woman To Serve On Board Of Governors Sparks Outcry Over Purge of Black Leaders

Donald Trump’s removal of Dr. Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, has sparked outrage among civil rights leaders, scholars, and advocates who see it as part of a wider attack on Black leadership and representation. Just a day after her dismissal, the White House released a photo showing Trump and 23 others in the Oval Office with only one Black person present—a visual that critics say reflects his pattern of erasing diversity from top levels of government. “He chose to fire her out of all the governors because she’s a Black woman,” said LaTosha Brown of Black Voters Matter. “In America everything is about race. It is as lethal as a nuclear bomb.”

Cook, a Spelman and Oxford graduate who taught economics at Harvard and Michigan State, built her career studying how racial discrimination and violence stifle economic progress for African Americans. She also advised governments in Nigeria and Rwanda. Yet Republicans dismissed her work as “too focused on race,” while Democrats defended her as deeply qualified. Her refusal to resign and subsequent lawsuit against Trump highlight her resistance to what Derrick Johnson of the NAACP called Trump’s inability to “stomach Black excellence when it reveals his failures.”

The firing aligns with Trump’s broader campaign against diversity initiatives. Within months, he has ousted Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the first Black chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Carla Hayden, the first Black librarian of Congress; and Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman on the National Labor Relations Board. Congresswoman Nanette Barragán described it as a “disturbing pattern” of pushing out “smart, competent women, in particular women of color.”

For many in Black and Brown communities, these actions are inseparable from Trump’s long record of racist statements and policies—from housing discrimination lawsuits in the 1970s to promoting the “birther” lie about Barack Obama, to calling Haiti and African nations “shithole countries.” Antjuan Seawright, a strategist, warned: “We went from generational progress to generational rollback, and what this president and this administration has done in seven months could take 70 years at least to replenish.”

Link: The Guardian