There’s a history of white terror suppressing black voters
But why don’t we call it that?
When right-wingers set fire to Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi last week, they helpfully added the spray-painted message “Vote Trump.” So, at least we know who we’re dealing with. It was only the latest violent prelude to what may come on Election Day and beyond.
Various groups — from Neo-Nazis and the National Socialist Movement, to offshoots of the Ku Klux Klan — are threatening to send “armies” to black precincts. And who knows what they are planning to do away from the polls. The self-identified “Alt-Right” is threatening a war against black Americans if Donald Trump loses the election.
Their aim is simple: to keep black people from voting, using terror tactics.
But Americans rarely, if ever, call them what they are: terrorists. Instead, we call them white nationalists and white supremacists and right wingers and hate groups — any term but terrorists.
If these people trying to intimidate black voters are not terrorists, then what are terrorists? If their threats and attacks should not be classified as terror, then what is terror? If Donald Trump is not their leader, then who is their leader?
For weeks, Trump has been firing up these heavily armed terrorists by claiming the election is rigged. For weeks, Trump has been urging his heavily armed supporters to police black voting districts. For months, threats and attacks from these terrorists have been coming down on voters.
Despite it all, I suspect black voters will not be intimidated. Trying to intimate black voters with terror is like trying to intimate a boxer with punches. Sadly or gladly, black voters are used to racist punches. America’s long and wretched history of terror has steeled them.
It is easy to forget the violent infancy of black voting. In 1868, the critical mass of black people located in the former slaveholding South voted in the presidential election for the first time. After losing the Civil War, southern states were forced by the Republican-dominated Congress and local federal troops to enfranchise the mass of black (male) voters. The southern-friendly Democratic platform attacked Republicans for subjecting the South “in time of profound peace, to military despotism and negro supremacy.” The Ku Klux Klan, founded originally in 1865 as a social club in Tennessee, made a charade of the “profound peace.” The Klan commenced a “reign of terror” on black voters and their defenders during the 1868 election.
“Nigger voting, holding office, and sitting in the jury box, are all wrong,” blared Mississippi’s Columbus Democrat in 1869. “Nothing is more certain to occur than these outrages upon justice and good government will soon be removed.”
In March 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant sent to Congress documentary evidence of more than five thousand cases of white terrorism against black lives. Between May 1870 and April 1871, Congress passed three poorly funded Enforcement Acts that turned a wide range of Klan-type terrorist acts into federal offenses. As a result, the Klan had declined by 1871. But the train of terror still rushed down the tracks under new names.
And 140 years ago, that train rushed the South away from democracy. It took months to finally resolve the horrifically violent and contested election returns of 1876. In the end, Democrats handed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency, while Hayes imperiled the South’s interracial democracy by withdrawing the remaining federal troops. When troops departed Shreveport, Louisiana, a black man grieved about his people being back in “the hands of the very men that held [them] as slaves.”
And over the next century those very men terrorized southern black voters into near nonexistence — with the decisive help of Jim Crow voting policies. It would take the civil rights and black power movements — with the decisive help of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — to empower the southern black voter. And in the historic 1966 midterm elections — 50 years ago — millions of southern blacks voted for the first time.
Not by coincidence, the Klan almost tripled its national membership between 1971 and 1980, unleashing its gun-toting terrorism in more than one hundred towns to try to destroy the gains of the 1960s. Lynchings were still occurring — at least twelve were committed in Mississippi in 1980, twenty-eight black youngsters were killed in Atlanta from 1979 to 1982, and random street-corner executions took place in Buffalo in 1980. Into the 1990s and even before the rise of Trump, powered by anti-Obama sentiment, the firebombing of black churches — quite possibly the most historic form of white terror — continued to occur with a striking regularity.
Between 9/11 and that fateful June day in 2015 when Dylann Roof shot to death nine Bible-studying Charlestonians inside the oldest A.M.E. church in the south, white terrorists murdered forty-eight Americans — almost twice as many as killed by Islamic terrorists during the same time period. At the height of the War on Terror against so-called “radical Islam,” law enforcement agencies were more concerned about the activities of these white terrorists (although they hardly called them that) than Islamic terrorists.
Why don’t we call these white terrorists what they are? Because they identify as Christians? Because the black lives they routinely terrorize don’t matter? Because the victims of terror attacks can only really be white? Because the perpetrators of terror can only really be non-white? Because the regularity of these terror attacks have made them nearly invisible? Because black voters remain unfazed by white terror?
Just because black voters will not stay home, vote Trump, or quietly tip toe to the polls on Tuesday out of fear of these Trump supporters does not mean the dangers of all-American terror will not be real on Election Day.
I will never call them anything but what they are: terrorists. And if you truly care about the lives they terrorize, then you will too.
Trump has given them a new lease on life. Let’s lease their new life a new name.
Ibram X. Kendi is an assistant professor of history at the University of Florida. His new book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation), was recently named a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Follow him on Twitter @DrIbram.
This article is part of our White Terror U.S.A. collection, covering the shameful history of white supremacy in America.
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