BRATTLEBORO — From the cracks of our culture, the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis have risen again in a fury of hatred and violence.
On Aug. 28, 1955, a black 14-year-old from Chicago, Emmett Till, was tortured and murdered by two Mississippi Klan members.
The nation took notice. The arc of the moral universe is long.
While visiting his uncle in Money, Miss., Till had apparently offended the protocols of the “Southern way of life” so proscribed by the Jim Crow caste system in place since the end of the Civil War.
Perhaps he whistled at a white store clerk; perhaps he looked her in the eye when he spoke; perhaps his hand touched hers when he bought some candy.
His tortured body was found in the Tallahatchie River with the fan from a cotton gin anchored to his neck with barbed wire.
Till's mother insisted on an open casket so all the world could see “what they had done to my son.”
A month after the all-white judicial system acquitted the Klansmen, a 43-year-old seamstress and civil rights activist named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus.
Like a bolt of lightening splitting the sky, Till's murder and the resistance of Rosa Parks ignited the conscience and consciousness of the nation. The Civil Rights Movement was born.
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The historian and activist Howard Zinn observed that the motion of history is propelled by thousands of individual deliberate acts. This concatenation of events can determine history's trajectory.
Between the Civil War and 1955, there had been more than 4,000 lynchings, and bus boycotts were not entirely new. Why Till, why Parks, why then? History's concatenations.
Till's murderers were confident their terrorism would be greeted with impunity. Mississippi was the first state to enact the Black Codes in 1865 that effectively established a condition of neo-slavery and quickly spread throughout the South into the formal and informal system of Jim Crow.
Blacks could not sit on juries in a state that held the record for the most lynchings in the country. Mississippi did not ratify the 13th Amendment, which officially abolished slavery, until 1995. Supremacists relied on most local and state governments as willing collaborators in the Jim Crow system.
Racial repression acts like a barometer reacting to changes in the political, economic, and cultural atmosphere. Racists have long been effective opportunists. When institutions of power promote or reinforce a culture of racism, white supremacy mobilizes, as it did in the Jim Crow system.
This racial barometer also reacts when black people struggle for and win advancements. The Great Migration of black people escaping Southern repression in the early 20th century was met with tidal waves of white race riots.
The Supreme Court order to desegregate public schools in 1954 was resisted with an upper-middle-class variant of the Klan called the White Citizens' Councils. Spawned in Mississippi, they rapidly metastasized throughout the South.
The councils' “Southern manifesto” declared no compromise with integration. Instead of hoods, fiery crosses, guns, and dynamite, the councils hid behind regional laws of white supremacy enacted unjustly many decades earlier.
The political and cultural hegemony of racism in 1955 enabled the lynch-murder of Emmett Till. In turn, that violence stimulated the rise of modern Black militancy, which ignited one of the most powerful movements for social justice in the history of the United States.
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Sixty-two years after Emmett Till's murder, on Aug. 12, neo-Nazis and alt-right protesters in Charlottesville, Va., brandished semi-automatic rifles, swastikas, Confederate flags, and Trump/Pence banners. They chanted “Jews will not replace us,” and “blood and soil,” a Nazi slogan from World War II.
“This city is run by Jewish communists and criminal niggers,” declared one protester to a news reporter.
Deandre Harris, a black 20-year-old teaching assistant, was pushed to the ground and pummeled by six white supremacists wielding steel bars and wooden clubs. Lynching is back.
An hour later, a 20-year-old neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, an activist for social justice, and injuring 19 other people.
Justin Moore, a KKK grand dragon, said he was “glad that them people got hit” and he was “glad that girl died.”
“They were a bunch of communists out there protesting against somebody's freedom of speech, so it doesn't bother me that they got hurt at all,” he continued.
How did the United States get here? What can explain the return of open racial barbarism in the United States today, and what might come from it?
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In 2012, Donald Trump joined with then–Phoenix Sheriff Joe Arpaio to advance the allegation that then-President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Trump and Arpaio perpetrated this premeditated lie to inflame racist opposition to the president.
Analysts mark the moment as the start of Trump's campaign for the presidency. Throughout that campaign, Trump voraciously slurred immigrants.
“When Mexico sends its people,” he proclaimed, “they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists.”
Trump's promotion of racism has been a call to arms for white supremacists. Six days after the violence in Charlottesville, Fox News tweeted a report that Trump intended to pardon the infamously racist Arpaio for a contempt of court conviction.
Minutes after the Fox News tweet, Trump re-tweeted it in reaction to a negative comment about Arpaio, signaling virtual policy coordination between the conservative cable station and the Trump administration.
A week later, Trump did, in fact, pardon the convicted ex-sheriff. Senator John McCain commented that the pardon “undermines [Trump's] claim for the respect of the rule of law.”
Trump encourages racism, defies the law, and lies pathologically. When the institution of the presidency models contempt for core American values, a wide door opens for neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klanners to do the same.
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Months after Emmett Till's lynch-murder, Rosa Parks launched an economic boycott of the Montgomery, Ala. bus system, which catalyzed a democratic movement.
The boycott disgraced Jim Crow and delivered the vote to African-Americans in 1965, 95 long years after voting rights had been granted to them in the 15th Amendment.
The U.S. hedges shamefully before it delivers on its democratic promises. The current government, in league with a revanchist sector of the American people, threatens to do to the Civil Rights Act what Jim Crow did to the 15th Amendment.
David Duke, the infamous Holocaust denier and former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, attended the rally in Charlottesville, declaring that its objective was to “take our country back.”
Did he mean taking the country back from “communist Jews and criminal niggers,” or taking it back to the era of Jim Crow and Emmett Till's murder?
The outcome signals both.
Martin Luther King Jr. told us that “the arc of the moral universe is long” - now we have to bend it towards justice. Charlottesville and Heather Heyer's death can be a turning point.
As Naomi Klein elaborates in her new book, Resistance Is Not Enough, people in the United States have for too long permitted the nation to drift into cold-hearted, neoliberal oligarchy.
And now, Trump incites the repudiation of equality, justice, and truth itself.
The concatenation of events is leading to a new civil rights movement - and a reawakening of democracy.