The history of this country is haunted by white men hunting down Black women because their flight, their freedom, and their refusal to bow threatened the whole architecture of white power.
Racist white men have always chased Black women.
In 1835, when Harriet Jacobs tried to carve out dignity from the hell of enslavement, her owner stalked her for years because he was determined to possess and break her.
When Celia, a 19-year-old enslaved girl in Missouri, finally resisted her master’s rapes and killed him in 1855, the law itself chased her down, tried and hanged her to prove that the system would sooner destroy a Black woman than admit her right to defend her own body.
And when Margaret Garner ran across the frozen Ohio River in 1856, her white master was right behind her, desperate to drag her back into bondage.
The history of this country is haunted by white men hunting down Black women because their flight, their freedom, and their refusal to bow threatened the whole architecture of white power.
And now, here we are again. Donald Trump, a racist convicted felon, has made Lisa Cook his obsession. She is a Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, the first Black woman ever appointed to that role, a position no white man in history has ever had to defend so fiercely just to exist in.
Trump tried to fire her. The courts told him no. He tried again. They told him no again. Twice defeated, Trump escalated. And now, like a slavemaster who cannot abide the idea of a Black woman out of his grip, he has dragged her case all the way to the Supreme Court, demanding Cook’s immediate removal.
Because he cannot — he will not — let the rulings stand. He cannot allow a powerful Black woman to defy him, to survive him, or outlast his fury. Like the slavemasters before him, Trump cannot sleep while the “runaway negress” remains beyond his grasp.
Why is he so fixated?
Because Lisa Cook embodies the one thing Trump cannot control: legitimacy. She has the credentials, the expertise, the history-making role. She is a Black woman sitting in one of the most powerful positions in global finance and is entrusted with decisions that move markets and shape economies. Her presence alone dismantles his myth that only white men like him can govern. Her survival after his assaults would prove that Black women cannot be so easily erased. And for Trump, that is a wound his ego cannot survive.
But why her? Why Lisa Cook and nobody else on the Board?
Trump has fumed about Jerome Powell for years, threatened to demote him, even mused about firing him outright. But he never dragged Powell into court. He never filed emergency appeals to erase him. Because Trump does not chase competence when it comes in a white suit and tie. He chases it when it comes wrapped in Black womanhood. Every other governor represents continuity, but Cook represents rupture and the breaking of a ceiling that white men have guarded for over a century. She is history standing in his face. She is proof that the Fed’s power does not belong exclusively to men like him. That’s why she is the target. That’s why he cannot let her stand.
Trump’s war on Cook is not about mortgage forms. This is about power. It is about whether a president can bend independent institutions to his will. The Federal Reserve was designed to be insulated from political interference, precisely so that decisions about inflation, interest rates, and monetary policy could not be weaponized for partisan gain. If Trump can remove Cook for allegations that predate her tenure, then every Fed governor is vulnerable. Independence collapses. Markets lose faith. Policy becomes hostage to presidential tantrums.
But Cook has not been Trump’s only target. Since clawing back the presidency in January, Trump has waged a systematic campaign against Black women in public power.
He fired Carla Hayden, the first Black woman Librarian of Congress, and the first librarian ever to hold the role, by email. Because the Library of Congress is the nation’s memory, he could not tolerate a Black woman guarding the nation’s knowledge, curating its memory, shaping what history gets preserved. Better to purge her than endure the sight of her authority.
He tried to oust Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman on the National Labor Relations Board, in a move so flagrantly unlawful that a judge ordered her reinstated. For a moment, the courts forced Trump to back down. But like Lisa Cook, Wilcox has been caught in his endless appeals with her reinstatement stayed, her seat in limbo, her work stalled.
Wilcox represents labor, the workers who make the economy run. And Trump made clear that when a Black woman sits in that chair, her presence itself is intolerable. As it stands now, the Supreme Court has frozen her reinstatement, leaving Wilcox off the Board while the legal battle drags on.
He stripped former vice president Kamala Harris of her Secret Service detail. He ended the protection Joe Biden had extended, leaving her exposed as she steps out on a national book tour. In a country where political violence is not an abstraction but a daily threat, Trump deliberately made her vulnerable. That was a signal to his base that even a former vice president could be put in danger if she is a Black woman who defied him.
Even at the local level, the smear campaigns follow. Newark City Council President LaMonica McIver’s indictment for assault against immigration officers in June didn’t happen in a vacuum; it came straight out of Trump’s Justice Department. She is the first sitting member of Congress criminally charged under his new term, and the target was no accident.
McIver is a Black woman wielding oversight power at the very site of Trump’s immigration crackdown, and for that, she was criminalized. Check the hypocrisy: Trump pardoned white Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol and assaulted officers, yet his DOJ is dragging McIver into court for allegedly “impeding” federal agents during an oversight visit. Then the media chorus chimed in, with Politico dismissing her indictment as a “flop,” trivializing her struggle and feeding Trump’s larger narrative that Black women in power are illegitimate. So insurrectionists get to walk free, but a Black woman doing her job is treated like a criminal.
Piece all these attacks together, and you can see the blueprint. Hayden represents knowledge. Wilcox represents labor. Cook represents money. Harris represents security. McIver represents politics. One by one, Trump has gone after every pillar of American life that a Black woman dared to hold. This is a racialized purge.
And the hypocrisy couldn’t be any louder.
Trump is a convicted felon, found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records. His empire is built on fraud, bankruptcy, and deceit. And yet he dares to call Lisa Cook dishonest, paint Carla Hayden as unfit, treat Gwynne Wilcox as expendable, and end Kamala Harris’s protection as if her life is not worth guarding. His corruption is permanent, but theirs is invented. His sins are excused, but their competence is criminalized.
The chase is the point.
Just as Jacobs, Celia, and Garner were hunted in their time, Trump is hunting now. The slave master has been replaced by a racist president, the hounds by court filings, the auction block by political headlines. But the logic is identical: when a Black woman runs, resists, or simply stands her ground, the whole machinery of white power mobilizes to drag her down.
Lisa Cook’s case is the sharpest edge of that blade. If Trump succeeds at the Supreme Court, the precedent will be devastating. The Federal Reserve will no longer be independent. Presidents will be able to purge governors for any reason, real or imagined. Every dissenting voice can be silenced. And the symbolic message will be even worse: if Lisa Cook can be erased, no Black woman in power is safe.
If she prevails, the meaning is just as powerful. It will prove that the law still places limits on presidential vengeance. It will prove that a Black woman can fight back and win. It will prove that independence is stronger than rage. That is why Trump cannot let Lisa Cook win. Because her survival would expose the weakness of his authoritarian grip and shatter the centuries of epigenetic inheritance that told white men they could always chase, catch, and crush Black women with impunity.
The courts told him no. Twice. Now all eyes turn to the Supreme Court to see if they will finally slam the door on his obsession. But here’s the truth: whether Lisa Cook stays or goes, the pattern is undeniable. Trump has declared war on Black women in every arena of American life — knowledge, labor, money, politics, even safety itself. And that war is not new. It is the oldest story in this country: white men chasing, hunting, punishing Black women for daring to stand free.
Every lash, every chain, every courtroom ambush has been about protecting the lie at the center of white supremacy. The lie is that white men are the only ones born to rule, and everyone else exists to serve, obey, or be destroyed. Lisa Cook is not just fighting for her seat on the Fed. She is standing in a river of history, and every “no” to Trump is a “yes” to the generations of Black women who refused to bow.
SOURCE: newsone.com