General
This is an opinion column.
Presidential signings once meant something. Not all of them, of course, some were as thin and inert as the paper upon which they were signed.
Yet many signings were momentous. Many enacted new laws that had been constructed and forged through Congress, laws that changed lives.
At least one changed mine.
I was eight years old when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on Thursday, July 2, 1964, rendering segregation in public spaces illegal from henceforth on. The moment certainly wasn’t televised live, but it was eventually broadcast to the nation its pen-strokes changed.
“Let us lay aside irrelevant differences,” Johnson said ahead of the signing, in the East Room in the White House, “and make our nation whole.”
Afterward, he handed historic pens used to numerous true influentials who gathered around LBJ as he signed, including Sen. Hubert H. Humphry (the act’s lead author) and Dr. Martin Luther King.
I don’t recall seeing the ceremony, but I do recall this: Three days later, following church on Sunday, my family ventured to the Picadilly cafeteria in downtown Tulsa for dinner. It was nothing special, an ancestor of today’s meat-and-threes. We went there, though, because on that prior Thursday my family would not have been allowed to eat there.
No Black family could.
I also remember two things: The food was awful, or a whole lot worse than what we normally got at Betty’s Chat ‘N Chew in North Tulsa — the Black part of Tulsa— on Greenwood Ave, across the street from my dad’s store. And my baby brother knocked over his water, making a scene that drew all eyes toward our table.
I don’t think we ever went back, but the point was made: We could go back.
Many presidential signings, if not most, are executive orders — pen strokes that wield the power of the office, denote the delusion of the signatory, or something in the murky middle.
Some, too, have been monumental and life-changing. America-changing.
Seventy-four years before the Federal Registrar began tracking executive orders, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring that enslaved people in Confederate states were “and henceforward shall be free.” It would be two years, though, before the 13th Constitutional Amendment was passed and ratified, officially ending slavery.
Executive Order 9981, signed by Harry Truman in 1948, ended legal segregation in the military.
Executive Order 10730, signed by Dwight Eisenhower in 1957, authorized the deployment of the National Guard and active-duty military to enforce federal and state court orders to desegregate Arkansas schools.
Executive Order 10924, signed by John F. Kennedy two months into his ill-fated presidency, created the Peace Corps.
Alas, not all executive orders are for our good. On February 19, 1942, in the heated wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the creation of military concentration camps. Ultimately more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were U.S. citizens, were forced from their homes and held in one of 10 such camps, the final one of which did not close until 1946.
On Monday, within hours of his no-hand-on-the-Bible swear-in (Evangelicals, y’all cool with this?), Donald Trump, with cartoonish bluster, signed more than 100 EOs, far more Day One signings than any other president.
He signed and signed and signed again before tossing pens into the crowd like manna to hungry minions.
I’m not sure any single signature made us better — let alone great.
He renamed a body of water and a mountain (snore); contradicted his own “efficiency” quest by ordering all federal workers into the office; poured white-out over all references to diversity, equity and inclusion in the federal government, resuscitated the government-sanctioned murder (the death penalty); did a Simone Biles-backflip with TikTok; yanked us from vital international organizations; tried to pour more white-out on the birthright constitutional amendment; and pen-swiped a lot of jargon-salad decrees declaring “protection,” “America first,” and various “emergencies” allowing him potentially to weaponize the U.S. military against, well, any of us.
Oh, and yes, he pardoned or commuted the prison sentences of more than 1,500 charged or convicted of crimes committed during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those convicted of assaulting police officers. (Y’all good with that, officers?)
That includes avowed white supremacists, leaders and members of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
That’s frightening.
Alas, sigs might as well have been signed with invisible ink; no pen can rewrite the Constitution, no matter who wields it. Many of his EOs will likely be tied up in courts for years.
Before signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Johnson looked into the nation’s eyes and said:
I urge every American to join in this effort to bring justice and hope to all our people and to bring peace to our land. My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing we must not fail.
My fellow citizens, seventy-four years later, we must not fail this test, either.
Watch Lyndon Johnson address the nation here.
Watch Trump toss pens here.
Let’s be better tomorrow than we are today. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, Instagram @roysj and BlueSky.
Read More
