by Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr.

History has a way of repeating itself. Today, it rhymes with the clicking of handcuffs on two of our own: Don Lemon and Georgia Fort.

We know this playbook. We saw it in 1942, when the Department of Justice threatened John Sengstacke and the NNPA with sedition. We saw it in the 1960s when Southern sheriffs labeled journalists “outside agitators” to hide their own brutality.

The strategy hasn’t changed—only the statutes have. By weaponizing the FACE Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act to turn reporters into “conspirators,” this government is attempting to resurrect the same walls of silence that the Black Press has spent two centuries tearing down.

There is a bitter, hollow irony in seeing the KKK Act—a law forged during Reconstruction to protect Black lives from white terror—now being used to prosecute Black journalists for the “crime” of holding a camera.

When federal agents arrived at Georgia Fort’s door while her children were watching, they are sending a message to every independent journalist of color: your camera is a liability, and your witness is a crime. In 1918, when the government tried to use the Espionage Act to muzzle W.E.B. Du Bois, he looked them in the eye and said: “The right of the people to speak and to print is a right which no government in a democracy can safely take away.” He knew then what we must remember now:  you cannot build a democracy by arresting its witnesses.

Dr. Du Bois taught us that the Black Press is the only press that is “really free” because it refuses to be owned by the powerful. He called this work the “voice of the voiceless.” We, the NNPA, stand with Georgia Fort, Don Lemon, and all those arrested. We demand these charges be dropped immediately. We close with Du Bois’s eternal warning: “If the government thinks it can silence our complaints, it is making a mistake.” And we shall not be moved.

Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., is President & CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association — the Black Press of America