Racial Violence and Government Response in the Civil Rights Era and Beyond

Racial violence alone did not launch the civil rights movement, but the fundamental brutality of white supremacy shaped its philosophy and tactics. Non-violent direct action, from the student-led Freedom Rides and sit-ins to mass demonstrations led by Martin Luther King, Jr., anticipated and amplified white supremacist violence for an international audience.

Project. On a lonely dirt road in Neshoba County, three civil rights volunteers - two northern whites and one black Mississippian - died at the hands of Klansmen and local police. By summer's end Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act and, after the Alabama Highway Patrol’s assault on marchers at Selma's Edmund Pettis Bridge in early 1965, the Voting Rights Act.^[154]

Anti-civil rights violence exposed the tensions and contradictions inher­ent in a white supremacist movement steeped in generations of blood. Robert Patterson, leader of the segregationist Citizens’ Council, claimed he would ‘gladly lay down [his] life to prevent mongrelization’ yet distanced his organisation from the Ku Klux Klan’s brutal reputation and murderous tactics.

Ironically, political and academic interest in the nation’s violent past surged not in response to white terrorism but rather in the wake of urban riots, campus unrest and the civil rights movement’s perceived turn towards violence in the late 1960s. Cries of ‘Black Power’ and images of armed Black Panthers fuelled popular fears of a rebellion aimed at whites. The organisa­tion of the Brown Berets by Chicano youth in southern California, subse­quent armed demonstrations by the American Indian Movement, and the embrace of ‘power’ politics by a diverse array of marginalised groups prompted concerns that historical perpetrators had become contemporary targets of ‘racial violence'. Those fears found official sanction in a campaign of police repression, from local raids on militant groups to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's covert Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), but also in federally commissioned research. The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, established by Lyndon Baines Johnson after the Kerner Commission's 1968 report on urban riots, included a task force to study the history of American violence.

Racial violence in recent decades has echoed the white supremacist tactics of previous generations and adapted to undermine changes wrought by the civil rights revolution. Great Society immigration reforms that abolished quotas and bans based on national origin, as well as an aggressive Cold War foreign policy that created a wave of refugees from South-East Asia, broadened white supremacists' range of targets. In the 1970s, Klansmen firebombed school buses in Michigan to undermine school desegregation, conducted armed border patrols in the south-west, and set fire to the shrimp boats operated by resettled Vietnamese refugees along the Gulf Coast. In November 1979, emboldened Klansmen and neo-Nazis gunned down white and black protesters in Greensboro, North Carolina, in broad daylight and with news cameras rolling. This new wave of racial violence echoed a tradition of white supremacist violence that melded apocalyptic racism and revolutionary tactics.

Michael Donald by Alabama Klansmen, the 1988 murder of Ethiopian student Mulugeta Seraw by Portland skinheads, the 1998 dragging death of black Texan James Byrd, and the 2015 Charleston church shootings all reflected the racial terrorists' belief that their vanguard tactics could spark a race war that might again redeem the nation.^[157]

Rather than the last gasps of white supremacy, these recent attacks under­score the urgency of examining the ways racial violence has shaped American history and infused ongoing conflicts over pluralism and democracy in the twenty-first century. ‘Unlike almost any other object of historical study', Karl Jacoby contends, ‘violence simultaneously destroys and creates history.' As the most pervasive form of political violence in the American past, racial violence leaves behind a bloody trail for historians to follow. Yet the urge to forget, as evidenced in ongoing debates over who and what Americans see fit to carve in granite and cast in bronze, remains strong. Historians continue to expand our understanding of racial violence and the attendant ills - from sexual and gendered violence to poverty and mass incarceration - that white supremacy continues to reinforce. And the inherent violence of our racial present, from politics to policing, underscores the urgent need to confront the lessons of the past.^[158]