In Trump's feud with John Lewis, blacks perceive a callous rival

The angry reaction is driven not only by Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts but by what many blacks say they reveal about the president-elect’s lack of understanding of the reverence with which the civil rights movement and its leaders are viewed by African-Americans.

“I don’t think we have ever had a president so publicly condescending to what black politics means,” said Mark Anthony Neal, an African and African-American studies professor at Duke University.

Mr. Neal added that while other presidents, like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, may have imposed policies that hurt black communities, they were more sensitive to issues of race. Mr. Trump, through Twitter, is giving the world access in real time to his unvarnished thoughts, which Mr. Neal called “raw, unsophisticated, ignorant and uninformed.”

“He doesn’t care that people think the civil rights movement was important,” Mr. Neal said. “He doesn’t feel the need to perform some sort of belief that it is important.”