I am sad to report that the violence and intolerance employed at school board meetings, against school teachers and administrators, against medical personnel advocating mask wearing and vaccines as a way to defeat COVID-19, and as a way to impose voter restrictions across the country is not new. This behavior seems to be shocking to many white Americans today who have never been the targets of domestic terrorism.
However, domestic terrorism in the United States is nothing new. Welcome to the world in which African Americans and Native Americans and other communities of color have been living for four hundred years! The nation must remember this long history of racialized violence. There was the slaughter and near extermination of Native Americans in order to seize their land. There was the enslavement, social segregation, lynching and torture of African Americans intended to seal them into a permanent second-class status. There was the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two and the exclusion of Chinese after a law passed in 1881.
The violence and death associated with the insurrection at the nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2021 is not different from the rage and unchecked terror associated with white terrorists that lynched thousands of African American men, women, and children without benefit of trial or despite the results of a trial. It was not different from the white police officers who used dogs and fire hoses against children in Birmingham in 1963 and against non-violent protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965.
At the US Capitol a gallows was erected and the words “hang Mike Pence” were shouted by many in that 99% white mob. Please remember that on over 3000 separate occasions, black people were actually, brutally, callously hung from trees, bridges, and lamp posts, and sometimes burned alive in public squares.
I am not trying to minimize the evil associated with the behavior of many white people who cannot imagine an America in which they cannot have things go their way. I am just reminding people that such behavior is not new. It is too bad that people today are not shocked by the violent and threatening behavior exhibited over the entire history of this country. It is too bad they were not equally shocked when Billie Holliday and Nina Simone were singing about “strange fruit hanging from Southern trees.”
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The Rev. Marvin A. McMickle, pastor emeritus of Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, retired in 2019 as president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, New York, where he had served since 2011.