Gov. Abbott’s Anti-Muslim Tactics Mirror Racist Governors of the 1960s. He, Too, Must Fail

Mustafaa Carroll is a civil rights activist who serves as executive director of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). He submitted the below op-ed.

As a young Black kid living in Indiana in the 1960s, I had the honor of participating in the Civil Rights Movement as president of the NAACP Youth Council. 

Although Americans now widely celebrate the Freedom Rides, lunch counter sit-ins and marches of the 1960s, many Americans vehemently opposed our activism at the time. So did prominent racist political leaders. Several southern states, including Texas and Alabama, even tried to shut down the NAACP.

Today, fifty years later, I serve as the leader of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, our nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization. 

Although the political opposition to American Muslims advocating for civil rights today is very different—and much less dangerous—than the opposition other Black Americans and I faced in the 1960s, I have noticed disturbing similarities in recent months.

Take Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who on Nov. 18th unilaterally and baselessly declared our civil rights organization a “foreign terrorist organization” and a “transnational criminal organization” without any due process and in violation of federal law and the Constitution.

Gov. Abbott is wrong and he knows it. CAIR is an American organization funded by the American people that serves the American people. He also knows that CAIR has opposed all forms of unjust violence, including terrorism. In fact, CAIR spoke out against ISIS’ violence so often that the group once publicly threatened our national executive director.

Gov. Abbott’s attack on CAIR-Texas is not the first time he has misused his office to smear Texas Muslims and threaten their constitutional rights, especially Texans critical of the Israeli government.

In recent years, CAIR has filed three separate federal free speech lawsuits in response to Gov. Abbott’s policies and won all three of them, thereby restoring the rights of Texans to boycott the Israeli government and to peacefully protest its policies on college campuses.

Gov. Abbott’s other anti-Muslim stunts include declaring that “sharia law” is banned in Texas even though Texas Muslims are following the personal rules of sharia, or Islamic law, whenever they pray five times a day, fast in Ramadan, tithe annually, and avoid drinking alcohol, gambling or eating pork.

Abbot also signed a bill that purported to ban “sharia compounds,” although none obviously exist in Texas. He even ordered a failed and frivolous investigation into a Muslim community’s planned neighborhood development project.

The playbook that Abbott is using against American Muslims is, sadly, nothing new.

During the Civil Rights Movement, Governors George Wallace in Alabama, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, and Orval Faubus in Arkansas, among others, became infamous for their overt opposition to racial integration and civil rights for African Americans. 

These governors misused their power to block desegregation of public schools, deployed state power to enforce segregation, and employed inflammatory rhetoric to rally opposition against federal civil rights mandates.

Alabama banned the NAACP for eight years. Texas launched investigations into the NAACP’s Houston and Dallas chapters, temporarily forcing them to close. Black civil rights groups and activists were repeatedly accused of being part of a global Communist plot to take over America.

Sound familiar?

These claims about Black activists made no sense then and they make no sense about Muslim activists today.

The population of Texas in 2025 is estimated to be around 32 million and the U.S. population is over 300 million. American Muslims represent only one percent of the national population. 

Yet according to Abbott, this small population of American Muslims who have been contributing to our nation for decades are on the verge of imposing “sharia law” across the great state of Texas and the entire nation as part of an international conspiracy hatched by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. 

Although this claim is as ludicrous as the claim that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the NAACP were plotting a Communist revolution, Greg Abbott is not concerned with logic or facts. He cares about smearing Texas Muslims advocating for justice, especially justice for Palestinians.

Gov. Abbott has even targeted students.

Abbott’s failed effort to turn Texas public college campuses into another stage for his political theater by expelling students who express support for Palestinian human rights reminds me of the southern governors who staged televised public events blocking African American students from accessing school and punished students engaged in civil rights activism.

George Wallace and other southern governors eventually and ultimately failed. The NAACP survived. Schools were desegrated. Black Americans received the right to vote.

Greg Abbott wants to threaten, marginalize and drive away a vulnerable minority, even if that means shredding the Constitution. The rest of us must ensure that he, too, like the Civil Rights-era governors who came before him, ultimately fails.