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It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC Centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things.

Now, mostly for these February episodes, we're exploring 100 years of black history topics.

Today, it's a topic where black history meets what you might call a darker

side of white history, 100 years and more, of white resistance to federal power, like after

the Civil War and during the Civil Rights Movement. A hundred years ago, mid-1920s, was a heyday of

the Ku Klux Klan and the successful white backlash against reconstruction.

And we'll draw a timeline as we do in these segments.

So it's 100 years of 100 things, number 68.

And we didn't expect this kind of news hook for this history conversation, but here in Black History Month, we have the news,

have you heard this yet, of the cancellation not only of DEI policies by the government that

was elected in part as a backlash to diversity programs on the premise that white people

and straight cisgender men are the main victims of discrimination these days.

But we even have the cancellation of Black History Month observances in the military

by the new Defense Secretary Pete Hegsev,

and the Pentagon deciding to skip this year's Black Engineers of the Year awards

as a recruitment opportunity.

As military.com reports, the Army and other service branches are abandoning recruiting

efforts at a prestigious black engineering event this week, turning down access to a key pool

of highly qualified potential applicants amid President Donald Trump's purge of diversity initiatives in the military.

And the article on military.com adds last week,

the same Army recruiting unit that would have attended the B-E-Y-A,

...