Twitter announced earlier this week they won’t use the same algorithms they use to detect and ban ISIS-affiliated terrorists to detect and ban white nationalists because it would inevitably lead to banning many GOP members and Trump supporters. J.M. Berger, author of Extremism, summarized this situation:
“Cracking down on white nationalists will therefore involve removing a lot of people who identify to a greater or lesser extent as Trump supporters, and some people in Trump circles and pro-Trump media will certainly seize on this to complain they are being persecuted. There’s going to be controversy here that we didn’t see with ISIS, because there are more white nationalists than there are ISIS supporters, and white nationalists are closer to the levers of political power in the U.S. and Europe than ISIS ever was.”
Welcome to the dilemma of having freedom of speech in a white supremacist society.
This dilemma has been present throughout U.S. history and up to our current political climate, allowing white nationalist rhetoric to mix with a white supremacist culture to produce violent and deadly results. This two-part article will examine the similarities between two of these situations: the post-Civil War lynching era and Trump’s political right.
The U.S. Lynching Era
In 2018 the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally known as the National Lynching Memorial. It is the first national memorial dedicated to the legacy of over 4,400 black men, women, and children lynched in the U.S. The site is also dedicated to the millions of black people who lived through this period of terror and their descendants still living through the legacy of lynching from a racist criminal justice system to a white supremacist society that criminalizes black people.
Between 1877 to 1950, there were over 4,400 recorded lynchings (many, many more unrecorded) in 800 U.S. counties. Lynching was a form of racial terrorism that enforced white supremacy on newly freed black slaves and their communities after the Civil War. White people would extrajudicially kill a black person who was often, but not always, suspected of a crime. Lynchings varied from private murders to public events with hundreds of white men, women, and children watching as they picnicked, often taking photos for postcards and body parts for souvenirs.
Postcard of the Lynching of Will Stanley in Temple, Texas, 1915. Back of postcard read “This is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe.”
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Most lynched black people had supposedly committed a crime against a white person, such as murder or rape, but most often these accusations were fabricated excuses to kill those who violated white supremacist norms from casual social transgressions, to trying to leave their debt peonage at a share cropping farm, to competing economically with a white business, to participating in civil rights movements, to voting, to simply being a black person at the wrong time and place.
The memorial structure on the center of the site is constructed of over 800 corten steel
monuments, one for each county in the United States where a lynching took place
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The history captured in this Museum came about from EJI’s massive research effort to bring to light the buried history of racial terror lynchings in the U.S., summarized in the report, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror”
This research captured several societal realities of the time that allowed for this level of terrorism to happen. Realities such as:
1. A society founded on perpetuating white supremacy
2. National stereotypes of black people as criminals and rapists to justify their oppression after slavery
3. Newspapers and politicians distorting facts and fabricating stories to instigate white mobs to lynch. The most common false narrative used to instigate white fear and violence was the myth that white women had to be constantly protected from black men who were stereotyped as savage, “out of control” rapists. In 1898, a black massacre occurred in Wilmington, NC, that killed dozens of black people and removed any political and economic power black people had gained from the Reconstruction Era. The ultimate goal of this massacre was to restore white supremacy, but white politicians and newspapers used a race-baiting propaganda campaign that sexualized black men and stoked fear of their alleged uncontrollable lust for white women. “Newspaper stories and stump speeches warned of ‘black beasts’ who threatened the flower of Southern womanhood” (Timothy Tyson, News & Observer). These efforts instigated a white mob to kill dozens of black people, banish black politicians and business owners from Wilmington, and restore white supremacy for the next century.
Lynching in the U.S. only started to phase out as legal capital punishment took its place. All-white juries, sanctioned by a 1987 Supreme Court decision that stated racial discrimination in criminal justice does not violate the Constitution, became the perfect white supremacist alternative to lynching. These juries were instrumental in the disproportionate sentencing of blacks to death in modern times.
Voicing the Violence: Reflection on Lynching Memorial by Reckon’s Starr Civil Dunigan
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