Declaring March Irish Heritage Month, President Trump paid tribute to “the tremendous role Irish immigrants and their descendants have played in the development of our great nation.” It was a perfunctory proclamation, issued every March since 1990 by presidents Democratic and Republican. But given the professed nativism of the president praising this once reviled immigrant group, it’s worth looking a little more closely at the Irish in America. They have indeed played a tremendous role, just not the one Trump or many Irish Americans might choose to remember.

As St. Patrick’s Day approaches Irish Americans are once again pulling out our Donegal tweed flat caps and preparing to sing our wistful songs. The Irish in America are tenacious in their cultural identification, claiming an Irish identity a century or more after our forbearers stepped off the boat. We keep our poetry and our grudges, but in the long years of assimilation we seem to have shed what was once a hallmark of Irish identity: a solidarity with the oppressed.

Irish names are prominent among Trump loyalists. Many Irish Americans have adopted his brand of nativism, as well as an every-man-for-himself faith in the market and a tight-heartedness that would have been anathema to our grandparents. Half of us voted for Trump in 2016. But Irish American history is filled with characters who looked outward from their Irishness, who stood, sometimes fiercely, for the outsider and the exploited, who could see their plight in the struggles of other peoples.

The Sons of Molly Maguire, a clandestine organization of Irish and Irish American labor radicals in coal country Pennsylvania in the 1870s, took their inspiration—and possibly some members—from a group of the same name in Ireland that set fires, killed livestock, and assassinated the gentry who had starved them off their land when the potato crop failed. There needn’t have been a famine: Food was exported to England all across those hungry years. Likewise, there was no lack of income in America’s coal country. The Molly Maguires directed their rage at the mine owners growing fat off their bent backs and blackening lungs. Their actions helped pave the way for unions and collective bargaining. Better to sit across a table and negotiate than forever be checking for dynamite.

Mother Jones, after whom the magazine is named, was a sharp-tongued and formidable Irishwoman, a type recognizable even today. A famine refugee, she was born in County Cork in 1837 and ended up in Tennessee, married to an iron molder. After yellow fever took her husband and all four children, she became mother to child laborers, miners, and the kind of workers who would never win an H1-B visa today. She traveled incessantly, organizing and speaking, comforting miners forced into a tent city by John D. Rockefeller in Colorado, rallying workers in West Virginia and in Pennsylvania. She helped found the Wobblies with William “Big Bill” Haywood. In 1903, advocating an end to child labor, she led a march of mill worker children from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s grand estate in Oyster Bay, New York.