“They didn’t come out to vote for Hillary. They didn’t come out. And that was a big — so thank you to the African American community,” taunted Donald Trump at a mostly white post-election rally in Hershey, Pa., in December.

Trump’s celebration of lower black election turnout came to mind as I watched him on television kicking off Black History Month at the White House this week with his top black supporters and campaign workers. The assembled were all grins as they listened to Trump pay tribute to himself and past black civil rights heroes. Don’t know what they made of his off-the-wall reference to abolitionist, orator and writer Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895. “Frederick Douglass,” Trump said, “is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Say what?

Left unspoken at Trump’s black soiree, however, was the possibility that had black voters in Pennsylvania turned out in 2016 in the percentages they did for Barack Obama in 2012, Trump might have lost the Keystone State. That possibility also existed in other key states with sizable black voting blocs, such as Wisconsin and Michigan, which Trump won by razor-thin margins.

Hillary Clinton rolled up, as expected, huge majorities in black strongholds across the country. However, voter turnout tended to be lower than four years ago in many heavily African American jurisdictions, according to an in-depth look by Rasmussen Reports.

Thus, Trump again: “They didn’t come out. . . . Thank you to the African American community.”

The other elephant in the room that the president and his black celebrants knew about but didn’t want discussed was the fact that lower Democratic Party turnout — where most black voters are found — was a Trump campaign goal all along.

Toward that end, Trump got plenty of help. FBI Director James B. Comey’s 11th-hour letter on the Clinton email investigation helped depress Democratic turnout. The Russian WikiLeaks campaign also helped tear down Clinton. And voter-suppression efforts launched by Republican-led state legislatures disproportionately targeted blacks.

Measures such as requiring voter IDs, closure of polling places and the elimination of early voting were aimed at making voting much harder.

The attacks were blatant, too.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit struck down North Carolina’s voting restrictions, concluding that the state’s law targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.” How precise? In justifying why it did away with two days of Sunday voting, the state explained in court, “counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black” and “disproportionately Democratic.” That was enough for North Carolina to impede access to the franchise.

But this moralizing during Black History Month is not about targeting and suppressing votes. It is about what some voters did to themselves and, by extension, to the country.

Those voters, the ones Trump is heckling the rest of us about, ought to get down on their knees and beg the forgiveness of Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers and all of the towering African American heroes who sacrificed, bled and died to get African Americans from the fields and colored-only water fountains to the ballot box.

Voting is a sacred responsibility.

Too many did not exercise it, and for all the wrong reasons.

Contrary to what I heard leading up to the elections from black professors at Georgetown and Howard universities about the attitudes of some of their students toward voting, those privileged youth were wrong, damnably and unforgivably wrong, to believe that voting didn’t matter. That some in their generation sat out the elections on their butts in the comfort of dorm space won for them by elders they have never seen — let alone thanked — is a slap in the face.

There were also silly stories about Clinton not exciting the community like Obama did. Clinton can’t help that she isn’t black. Besides, 2016 wasn’t a style and profile show.

Those who sat out November acted as if the struggle for economic and racial justice began and ended with Barack Obama. That torch needed carrying beyond Election Day 2016.

By staying home and refraining from voting, the backsliders let down those who paved the way. They helped forfeit the shaping of America to forces that care only about their own selfish interests and values.

They helped Donald Trump to become president.

Now go forth and celebrate Black History Month with the sound of Trump’s chortling ringing in the ear: “They didn’t come out. . . . So thank you to the African American community.”

Ancestors weep.

Read more from Colbert King’s archive.