Connecting 160 Years Of White Terrorism

Jan. 6th wasn't an anomaly, it was an American tradition.

Image: The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law

by Justin Rosario

On Saturday morning, the six of us, Debbie, Claudia, Jordan, Anastasia, Lila, and myself, got up at a painfully early hour (for a weekend) to head over to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. We did this as part of a Smithsonian program called “Mornings at the Museum” in which a museum is opened a few hours early to allow families with special needs kids in before the general public.

It’s a wonderful way for those families who often find it difficult to go to crowded public places to participate in the truly massive number of museums in and around Washington DC. We have been doing this for the last several years and while Jordan was resistant at first, he now (generally) looks forward to going to these events. 

We usually do the divide and conquer strategy. Since Jordan is very attached to Debbie, she takes him around and shows him as much as he can tolerate. I am a huge history nerd, so I take Anastasia around and cram as much information into her head as possible before Jordan reaches his limit. 

As Anastasia gets older, the information I throw at her becomes more detailed and I connect the dots to other things we’ve previously discussed. On this particular visit (we’ve been to the NMAAHC three times), we watched a video on Black people rising up after the Civil War and the nightmare that ensued. They claimed their power by voting only to have it stolen through terrorism and violence. I explained to Anastasia how we could draw a straight line from that first wave of post-Civil War terrorism to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.  

Reconstruction fails: a recap

By the 19th century, slavery was concentrated mostly in the Southern states, so Southern landowners were incensed at the prospect of the hugely profitable industry ending. So they started a war that cost at least three quarters of a million Americans their lives. 

After the South lost, millions of freed Black men started voting under the protection of Reconstruction, essentially a military occupation of the still-hostile South. To the surprise of no one, they voted for other freed Black men and over 1,500 Black elected officials took office in the years after the Civil War. This sent the racist white men of the South into a terrifying rage. 

They did not consider Black people to be human, much less their equals, so to share power with them was unthinkable. Thus started a campaign of murderous terror. Here’s what that looked like in Georgia:

Conservatives, generally white Southern Democrats used terror, intimidation, and the Ku Klux Klan to “redeem” the state. One quarter of the state’s Black legislators were killed, threatened, beaten, or jailed. In the December 1870 elections, Democrats won an overwhelming victory.

Before we move on, just a reminder to our MAGA friends who may decide to leap at the opportunity to denounce Democrats as the real party of racism: this was over 150 years ago. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the 1960s, what party did all the racist white people flock to? I assure you, it’s not the party that elected a Black president in 2008. It is, however, very much the party that plays footsies with the KKK and Nazis.

It was the same all over the South. White militia groups terrorized and murdered Black elected officials. In some places, they simply removed them from office. No election. No recall.

For a period of time, the federal government tried to stop the violence and lawlessness. That was, after all, the point of Reconstruction; to rebuild the South but also keep it under control. However, after the heavily contested election of 1876, the North walked away from Reconstruction and left southern Blacks defenseless. 

After that, the violence escalated and every Black elected official was eventually purged. Rights were stripped from the Black population and white men re-established their dominance for another century. Very few of them faced any kind of consequences for their barbarism.

Decades of terrorism continued. Over 4,500 people, most of them Black, were lynched. It became such a community activity that they took pictures of themselves murdering Black men. They brought their children to watch because it was deemed wholesome family fun to watch a human being be savagely beaten and then hung or burned alive.

Decades of violence right out in the open and hardly anyone went to prison for it. It was still happening during the Civil Rights movement and racists were just as unaccountable. 

In August 1955, Two white men took 14-year-old Emmett Till away at gunpoint. They beat and mutilated him before shooting the small child in the head and dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were arrested and put on trial, which was a rarity in those days. This is how that went:

For his closing summation, defense attorney Sidney Carlton told the all-white, all-male jury that if they didn't free Milam and Bryant: "Your ancestors will turn over in their grave, and I'm sure every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men."

After deliberating for only 67 minutes, the jury returned a verdict: not guilty. Reporters said they overheard laughing inside the jury room. One juror later said: "We wouldn't have taken so long if we hadn't stopped to drink pop."

When the verdict was read, Milam and Bryant lit up cigars and kissed their wives in celebration before reporters.

There are quite a few racist white people who watched or participated in public lynchings who are still alive and voting today. They have benefited from living in a society that has rarely sought to punish their terrorism.

But…I’m white!

This lawlessness and lack of consequences brings us to the latest wave of white terrorism. The Bundys and their mob pointed guns at federal agents and walked away. Then they seized federal property at gunpoint and walked away. White nationalist militias have been planning large-scale terror attacks for years and the FBI ignored them in favor of targeting college kids with drum circles occupying a small park in downtown Manhattan.

A Jan. 6th rioter in the Capitol building: Chris Kleponis/Sipa via AP Images

It was in this spirit and with this history that a mob of racist white people stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

Just like the mobs who took smiling pictures of themselves with the bodies of the Black men they had tortured and killed, the January 6th rioters could not conceive of a world in which they would be held accountable for their actions. That’s why they filmed themselves, took pictures, and bragged online about what they were doing.

When the FBI showed up to arrest almost 1300 MAGA supporters (and still counting!), no small number of them were outraged at being held accountable.

They no doubt assumed their skin color would shield them from any consequences — because for the entirety of American history, this has held true. I explained this to Anastasia as we watched the short film at the NMAAHC. By the time we were done with my impromptu history/current events lesson, she was more than a little displeased, as she often is when she learns new things about just how jaw-droppingly racist certain members of our society can be.

What happens next?

Right now, MAGA Republicans are spooked. Their status as “untouchable” has evaporated. At least for now. January 6th did not go as planned, and white terrorism is increasingly under scrutiny by law enforcement. 

But will it last? It is unclear for now. These are desperate times for racist white Americans. The very thing they feared after the Civil War is just a few election cycles away from happening: the end of white minority rule. Murderous rampages happened after the end of slavery and the end of Jim Crow. The riots on January 6th were really just another attempt to violently claw back power.

What will the next wave of racist violence look like? No one knows, but America needs to prepare for it so that 60 years from now, no parent will have to explain to their child why American democracy died.

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