Trump's second term is fueling the power of boycotts

Boston Globe

30-03-2025

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Many Target customers, especially Black shoppers, responded by spending their dollars elsewhere. According to
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'We're asking people to divest from Target because they have turned their back on our community,' the Rev. Jamal Bryant, the boycott's organizer and senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church near Atlanta, told CNN in March.
Corporate America is learning that political cowardice comes with a financial cost.
And that's far from the only boycott in response to Trump, his corporate abettors, or Elon Musk, his unelected billionaire sugar daddy. Other companies bending to Trump's will, including Amazon, Walmart, and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, have also been hit with boycotts.
And then there's Tesla. Since Musk, with Trump's blessing, insinuated himself into the federal government seemingly for the sole purpose of destroying it, Tesla stock has
On any given day, hundreds gather to protest in front of the
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Since desperate times for Musk call for dumb measures, the president hawked Teslas on the White House lawn like some late-night infomercial peddler.
'I mean, who wouldn't invest in Elon Musk?' Lutkin said. The answer came quickly when Tesla stock again dropped after his comments.
A boycott has always been a powerful tool. It is, perhaps, the simplest form of direct resistance — don't give your money to companies whose actions contradict your values.
In one of this nation's most famous boycotts, more than 40,000 Black people — the majority of the bus riders in Montgomery, Ala. — turned to other means of transportation when Rosa Parks, a seamstress and NAACP secretary, was arrested in 1955 for refusing to move to the back of the bus as laws dictated for Black riders.
Instead of taking the bus, Black people walked. They carpooled with friends and neighbors. Black taxi drivers charged Black customers 10 cents a ride, the same price as bus fare. They absorbed the losses to keep the boycott going.
After 381 days, which included threats and intimidation, the boycott ended when the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law.
Coming months after the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who was kidnapped, tortured, and killed by two white men while visiting relatives in Mississippi, the bus boycott became a seminal moment in the civil rights movement.
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In her 2018 book, 'History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Moments Have Succeeded in Challenging Times,' Mary Frances Berry, a historian and legal scholar, wrote, 'It's crucial to recognize that resistance works even if it does not achieve all of the movement's goals, and that movements are always necessary, because major change will engender resistance, which must be addressed.'
Target and other large corporations that ditched DEI initiatives or have aligned with Trump will survive these boycotts. But damage to their brand image and reputation will linger and the financial jolts will be acute. As for Teslas, even those reluctantly keeping the cars are broadcasting their feelings with bumper stickers like 'Eco Friendly, Not Elon Friendly.'
Today's boycotts link arms across generations with those that came before and defined consumers' political power. As Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, an organization of Black newspaper publishers, told the Washington Informer, 'If corporations believe they can roll back diversity commitments without consequence, they are mistaken.'
And those mistakes will continue to eat into corporate America's bottom line, one boycott at a time.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at