I am one of the 320,000 newly unemployed, educated Black women in America, a casualty of Trump’s attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I never thought my degrees, experience, and global service would lead me back home without a job or a plan. So, I broke the unwritten rule among many Black women this year and joined the No Kings protest.
After Kamala Harris’s election loss, many of us were furious and vowed to sit this protest out, to rest, to recharge, and to let White America save its own democracy. But as I watched my livelihood disappear and my rights erode, I realized that resting would not save me or us.
Why I Couldn’t Sit This One Out
Attending the No Kings protest was not how I planned to spend my Saturday morning. I could have gone to the nail shop or worked on my business plan. Instead, I put on a T-shirt and baseball cap and joined the millions of Americans marching to defend democracy from tyranny.
Like Detroit and Chicago, my Maryland suburb had few Black protesters, despite having a large Black population.
My reasons were personal. I was living in Nigeria, working in international development, when the Trump Administration began cutting U.S. foreign assistance. On inauguration day, those of us serving overseas braced for Trump’s foreign aid cuts.
However, I never imagined that he would have the audacity to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development without congressional approval and get away with it.
When Public Service Became a Political Target
With one stroke of a pen, our entire career plans and lives were upended. Within a week, the Trump Administration launched a massive misinformation campaign to undermine the legitimacy of USAID.
Sixty years of ending global poverty, opening markets for American investors in new countries, fighting to end HIV/AIDS, and providing humanitarian assistance ended abruptly without apology or concern.
I remember watching the news with tears, listening to President Trump call USAID employees “leftist radical lunatics.”
I was shocked that the President of the United States would publicly trash and demoralize his own civil service employees. I believed that my work in development helped strengthen US-Nigerian relations in trade, investment, democracy, and combating terrorism. I thought I was making a difference.
Within six months, my family and I were forced to leave Nigeria, withdraw our children from school, and travel halfway around the world back to Maryland. At first, I thought my agency could survive the cuts and modify our programming to align with Trump’s “America First Foreign Policy Agenda”.
Surely, President Trump was not going to waste millions of US taxpayer money to send us back home. However, President Trump gave USAID mission overseas employees a firm deadline to leave the post by July 1.
The humiliation of leaving Nigeria motivated me to attend the No Kings protest. Sitting out was not a real option for me as I was exercising my constitutional rights.
Historically, Black Americans have always used the current political moment to resist and advance our interests in justice, equality, and freedom. Waiting for White America to fix itself has never worked for Black Americans.
America’s Democracy Has Always Been Black-Led
Black America has always risen to the occasion to force America to live up to its highest ideals of democracy, even if the founding fathers never included us.
Crispus Attucks, an African American sailor, didn’t stay home but decided to fight against British troops during the Boston Massacre, sparking the American Revolutionary War.
Abolitionist Frederick Douglass did not remain silent during the Civil War but, in fact, convinced President Lincoln that the Union would lose if it didn’t recruit Black men and emancipate enslaved people.
Dr. Martin Luther King didn’t wait for the perfect moment to accelerate the Civil Rights Movement.
The last time Black America “rested” and “cast down their buckets” was after Booker T. Washington famously urged African Americans to focus on economic self-sufficiency instead of political rights, which led to 100 years of Jim Crow laws.
While We Rested, They Rolled Back Our Rights
What have Black Women collectively achieved during this resting period? Our Black sons continue to be profiled by police, and now the National Guard has occupied cities led by Black mayors and those with large Black populations, all in the name of fighting crime.
Our beloved Historically Black Colleges and Universities have received bomb threats, terrorizing our children on campus. Black unemployment has risen from 5.6% in early 2024 to 7.5% by August 2025. Now, Trump’s Supreme Court Justice picks, along with the other conservative justices, are aiming to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
We’re losing in months the civil rights and economic progress that took generations to build since emancipation. Our history is being erased daily, while African American museums face relentless scrutiny.
I understand the frustration of millions of Black women who are exhausted, overburdened, and tired of carrying America on our backs. I lost the career I loved when Trump dismantled the very programs that once gave women like me a seat at the table.
My work in international development is over, and I’m left searching for stability in a nation that has turned its back on us. I can’t rest, even if I tried. The bills are due, and the economic pain from this administration is too heavy to ignore. Resting without a plan is not self-care; it is surrender. If we mistake silence for safety, we will wake up in an American nightmare of our own making.
The Black Wall Street Times amplifies the voices of Black women who refuse to rest in the face of regression. When democracy falters, it’s their courage that keeps America honest. Your support ensures these truths are seen, heard, and never erased.
Organize, organize, organize.