They’re erasing us, and putting names to it
- W
- May 16
- 7 min read
An op-ed by Wayne A. Ince | Big-Sarge.blog
Say his name: Private First Class Waverly Woodson Jr. He pulled men from the surf at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, with shrapnel already in his body. He was recommended for the Medal of Honor. He got a Bronze Star, because a segregated Army that sent him into the surf wouldn’t spend a Medal of Honor on a Black soldier. Say every name attached to every grave those memorial signs marked in the Netherlands. Then say this: the Trump administration looked at those memorials and ordered them gone. Not relocated. Not reconsidered. Gone.
Start right there. A government that erases the graves of Black heroes isn’t confused about its values. It’s announcing them.
This is not politics. This is a pattern. And the pattern has five faces.
A veteran left on his porch to bleed
Dr. Otis Lane is 80 years old. He is a Vietnam veteran. He survived a war, came home to The Villages in Sumter County, built a life, and earned the right to grow old in peace inside his own house.
Then someone lured him outside. A white man was waiting.
When it was over, Fox 35 Orlando ran the attacker’s words on-screen: “We don’t want people your kind living here.”
Eighty years old. A veteran. On his own porch. Those were the words.
There is no diplomatic language for that. That is a hate crime. The attacker, Kyle Parrish, now facing battery charges with a potential hate-crime enhancement, calculated Dr. Lane was safe to target because of his age, his race, and a political climate that told him no one would come for him. We are waiting for that man’s name to get the same press energy given to a Black teenager with a backpack.
Dr. Lane survived. The men in the next story needed a federal investigation just to get names in print.
Rankin County: where the badge is the weapon
If you don’t know Rankin County, Mississippi, it sits just east of Jackson. Population under 160,000. A county that stays out of national headlines until someone forces it there.
In January 2023, six Rankin County sheriff’s deputies entered the home of Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker without a warrant. What they did inside had a name before it had a headline: torture. They tased both men repeatedly. They beat them. They sexually assaulted them with a sex toy. Deputy Christian Dedmon put a gun in Michael Jenkins’ mouth and pulled the trigger. Jenkins survived by inches. The bullet shattered his jaw.
The six deputies, Christian Dedmon, Brett McAlpin, Jeffrey Middleton, Daniel Opdyke, Joshua Hartfield, and Hunter Elward, called themselves the “Goon Squad.” They operated with full departmental knowledge. Sheriff Bryan Bailey has run Rankin County law enforcement since January 2012, more than thirteen years at the time of the attack, and was re-elected without opposition in November 2023, months after six of his deputies were sentenced for torture. He has refused every call to resign.
These men were federally charged and sentenced. But only because the story broke nationally. Without pressure, without cameras, without Black journalists and civil rights organizations refusing to let it die, those men walk free today.
That’s Rankin County. And there are Rankin Counties in every Southern state. We just don’t always know their names yet.
ICE with a racial profiling problem
Here is what happens when citizenship becomes a racial question.
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE have documented complaints of agents detaining U.S. citizens based on racial appearance during enforcement sweeps. Black and Brown American citizens, people born here, people with identification, people who had broken no law, have been stopped, handcuffed, and held while agents demanded they prove their right to exist on American soil.
The ACLU of North Carolina and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice are currently in court over exactly that pattern. In Aceituno et al. v. Noem et al., two of the five lead plaintiffs are U.S. citizens: Willy Wender Aceituno, a naturalized citizen who has lived in Charlotte for 25 years, and Yoshi Cuenca Villamar, 23 years old, born in North Carolina. Both were detained without warrants during DHS sweeps. When civil rights organizations tried to get the federal records showing how wide this practice runs, ICE stonewalled every FOIA request until the ACLU sued to force compliance, and the government had still not produced a single document before the court deadline passed.
When you can be detained for looking like you might not belong, citizenship is no longer a legal status. It is a skin-tone assessment. That is the mechanism. That is what Homan and Noem built.
ICE Director Tom Homan has defended aggressive interior enforcement on the record. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has championed the policy framework enabling it. The agents are the fist. These two are the hand.
Redrawing the map, redrawing us out of power
They lost in court after the Voting Rights Act. They lost again after Shelby County v. Holder opened the door. They are back. Again. With new maps drawn by the same hands.
Georgia: Governor Brian Kemp signed redistricting legislation that cracked and packed Black communities in Atlanta’s suburbs, diluting representation in Fulton and DeKalb counties.
Alabama: Governor Kay Ivey fought a Supreme Court order twice to restore a second Black congressional district, stalling implementation through the 2024 cycle.
Louisiana: Governor Jeff Landry pushed maps that minimized Black voter influence in the Baton Rouge-New Orleans corridor despite federal court orders demanding fairness.
Mississippi: Governor Tate Reeves has overseen legislative map fights designed to keep the state’s majority-Black districts fragmented and politically neutered.
Texas: Governor Greg Abbott has made gerrymandering state policy. Federal courts have repeatedly found racial intent in Texas maps. The legislature returns each time with a marginally adjusted version of the same design.
These are not coincidences. They are a coalition. They coordinate legal strategy through conservative legal networks. They share map-drawing consultants. They time their legislative sessions to exhaust legal challenges before the next election cycle. They are running out the clock on Black political power, one election at a time.
Process those names. Then notice what connects them to the men who stripped those signs in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands memorial: put a face on it
The two panels removed from the Netherlands American Cemetery’s visitor center at Margraten told stories the Trump administration decided the public didn’t need to see. One honored Technician 4th Class George H. Pruitt, a Black signal-construction soldier from Camden, New Jersey, who drowned trying to pull a fellow servicemember from a German river in the final weeks of the war and was buried among the 8,301 Americans at Margraten. The other addressed the Double V campaign: the commitment Black Americans made to fight fascism abroad while fighting Jim Crow at home. Both panels were installed in September 2024. Both were gone by November 2025.
The all-Black 761st Tank Battalion, the Black Panthers, helped liberate Dutch towns in 1944 and 1945 and have their own dead across European soil. Staff Sergeant Ruben Rivers of the 761st, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor 52 years after he earned it, is buried at the Lorraine American Cemetery in Saint-Avold, France, not far from where he died near Guebling on November 19, 1944, because the Army that watched him die couldn’t bring itself to recognize him while racism was still official policy.
The men drawing those redistricting maps and the administration that removed those memorial panels are not operating in different traditions. They are operating in the same one.
They’re betting on your silence
The strategic logic is not complicated. They are running simultaneous attacks on every front because they know we can’t be everywhere at once. Overwhelm the lines. Make each front feel equally urgent. Create enough noise that nothing gets the sustained pressure it needs to change.
Pick every fight. Build infrastructure that can fight on all fronts without burning out the same people every time.
Name every official. Every time. Not “the administration.” Not “lawmakers.” Brian Kemp. Kay Ivey. Jeff Landry. Tate Reeves. Greg Abbott. Tom Homan. Kristi Noem. Make their names synonymous with what they have done. Support the legal organizations in the courtrooms right now: NAACP LDF, ACLU Voting Rights Project, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.
Protect Black veterans loudly. Dr. Otis Lane deserves the same outrage we would give any other American hero attacked in his home. Vote the full ballot. State legislators draw these maps. Governors sign them. School boards set curricula. Local DAs decide which cases get prosecuted. All of it matters.
Document, record, amplify. Their strategy depends on local stories staying local. Make them national.
You can’t hide from your own record
MAGA can call this a culture war. They can call it election integrity. They can call it border security. But you cannot remove a Black soldier’s memorial and call yourself patriotic. You cannot torture two Black men in their own home and call yourself a law enforcement officer. You cannot redraw every map to minimize Black votes and call yourself a democracy.
The record exists. The names are attached to it. They built this quietly, name by name, bill by bill, map by map. We can do the same.
Wayne A. InceBig-Sarge.blog | Breaking Ranks Books
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Sources
Dr. Otis Lane / Fox 35 Orlando — “Florida man accused of attacking 80-year-old veteran in possible hate crime,” Fox 35 Orlando, May 11, 2026. fox35orlando.com
Rankin County / Goon Squad — United States v. Dedmon et al., S.D. Miss., 2023. Mississippi Today / NYT, “Signs of Violence in Sheriff’s Office Dated Back Years,” July 10, 2025. mississippitoday.org
ICE racial profiling — Aceituno et al. v. Noem et al., ACLU of North Carolina and Southern Coalition for Social Justice, 2026. aclu.org
ICE FOIA stonewalling — ACLU v. ICE, DHS, and DOJ, ongoing. aclu.org
Netherlands / Pruitt panels — CNN, Nov. 13, 2025. cnn.com | Military Times, Nov. 14, 2025. militarytimes.com
Ruben Rivers burial — ABMC official record, Lorraine American Cemetery, Plot C, Row 5, Grave 53. abmc.gov
Shelby County v. Holder — 570 U.S. 529 (2013).
Related reading:2026 Election War Room — full tracking of voter suppression laws, redistricting, and institutional erosion ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Go deeper: Read our complete guide — Voting Rights 2026: A Complete Guide to Your Vote, Your Power, and the Fight to Protect Both.
Related: The psychological toll of voter erasure is a mental health crisis. See our guide on Black Mental Health: A Complete Guide to Healing, Resources, and Breaking the Stigma — voter intimidation is a form of racial trauma.
Related Reading
More on this in 2026 Election War Room, the running tracker on voter suppression and institutional erosion.
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