Censorship on Independence Mall? Arresting Don Lemon? It’s all about reshaping reality in the image of Donald Trump

I don’t believe the Trump administration removed the slavery memorial at the President’s House at Sixth and Market Streets to protect the reputations of the dead. I believe they did it to crush the spirits of the living.

Perhaps, for those too demoralized by Trump’s chaotic presidency, the instinct to resist has faded. But Trump doesn’t know Philadelphians. We are a stubborn sort, reared in well-worn streets that are older than America itself. You cannot take crowbars to our history and pry it from the walls. Nor can you silence us when we rise up to tell the story of what you’ve done.

That’s why Friday’s arrest of Don Lemon, a journalist who toiled in Philadelphia before moving to the national stage, will only sharpen the focus on the Trump administration’s push to deport Black and brown immigrants. It’s why the arrest of Georgia Fort, a vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists, which has its roots in Philadelphia, will only shed light on this administration’s troubling strain of anti-Blackness.

» READ MORE: With Trump hell-bent on destroying Black progress, our people must stand together | Solomon Jones

Pretending that Lemon and Fort committed a crime by covering a protest in a mostly white Minnesota church is ludicrous. Yet, that’s what the Trump administration would have us believe. They want us to think that reporting on protesters who were seeking to confront a pastor said to have ties to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a criminal act. That interviewing people is enough to be charged with conspiracy against rights of religious freedom and an attempt to injure while exercising religious freedom.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees the Civil Rights Division of Trump’s Justice Department, claimed the protesters were "desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshipers.” Yet the Trump administration, just days ago, declared that they will send federal agents into churches and schools to arrest undocumented immigrants. Does that also desecrate a house of worship? Or is it only sacrilege when others do the same thing?

Don’t bother to try to make sense of it. You can’t, because the Trump administration is not seeking fairness. Nor are they seeking truth. Instead, they are attempting to reshape reality in the image of Donald Trump.

I doubt that they’ll succeed, because there’s a strange thing about truth. No matter what you do to it, truth does not cease to exist. It simply waits to be uncovered.

Prying Black history from the walls at Sixth and Market Streets will never erase truth. Instead, the truth will be amplified. Not only by Michael Coard and the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition — the activists fighting to preserve our history. This truth will be told by all of us.

George Washington enslaved nine Africans in Philadelphia. He returned them to Virginia nearly every six months, thus avoiding the requirement to free them under Pennsylvania law. One of the enslaved, Oney Judge, managed to escape from Washington and his wife, and America’s first president spent years trying to return her to slavery.

» READ MORE: I love seeing anti-Trump protests. Like many other Black folks, I won’t be joining them. | Solomon Jones

That is the truth of what happened here in Philadelphia, and on Friday, when I went to the site of the exhibit and saw the rusted, glue-stained frames that once held depictions of that history, I was angry. But the tale of the President’s House is not the only truth the Trump administration is trying to obscure.

By sanctioning the presence of a masked gang of federal agents in cities run by Democrats, and telling those agents they have absolute immunity, Trump’s administration has made us unsafe.

Shootings by federal immigration agents in Minnesota cost Renee Good and Alex Pretti their lives. We know their names, and mourn their deaths, not just because they were American citizens, but also because they were white. However, they aren’t the only ones to fall victim to the violence linked to the president’s anti-immigrant push.

The tale of the President’s House is not the only truth the Trump administration is trying to obscure.

In total, at least four people have been killed and eight others wounded by gunfire during immigration enforcement operations since Trump returned to office a year ago. Most of the other victims appear to be people of color. But when state-sanctioned violence hides behind the darkness of masks, the only thing that can expose it is light.

Journalism is that light, and quite often, when journalists begin to look for one truth, another is exposed. That’s what happened when Don Lemon and Georgia Fort walked into that mostly white church to report on a protest in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Lemon and Fort discovered that in America, where history is pried from walls and Black journalists are arrested, truth does not play out in color. Too often, it’s in Black and White.