'The past is so present': how white mobs once killed American democracy

[Nevilledog]

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Lois Beckett
@loisbeckett
A series of white mob attacks in the 1870s successfully ended multi-racial democracy in the south for nearly a century.

Historian Wayne O'Bryant explains the parallels between the Capitol attack and the massacre his family survived in 1876:

'The past is so present': how white mobs once killed American democracy
January’s Capitol attack echoed an 1876 massacre that led to a racist takeover of South Carolina. Its effects lasted a century
theguardian.com
9:49 AM · Feb 22, 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/22/us-white-supremacy-democracy-capitol-attack

Hours after Georgia elected its first-ever Black and Jewish senators, a mob of white Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. They set up a gallows on the west side of the building and hunted for lawmakers through the halls of Congress.

People around the world watched in shock: was this the United States?

As he monitored the attack from his home in South Carolina, the local historian Wayne O’Bryant was not surprised. He recognized the 6 January attack as a return to the political playbook of white mob violence that has been actively used in this country for more than a century. Mobs of white Americans unwilling to accept multi-racial democracy have successfully overturned or stolen elections before: in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873 and New Orleans in 1874, and, in Hamburg, South Carolina, in 1876.

O’Bryant, who lives just five miles from the ruins of Hamburg, once a center of Black political power in South Carolina, has become an expert on the 1876 massacre. He has relatives on both sides of the attack: one of his ancestors, Needham O’Bryant, was a Black Hamburg resident who survived the violence, while another, Thomas McKie Meriwether, was a young white man killed while participating in the mob.

O’Bryant has spent years researching how the Hamburg massacre unfolded, and how, despite national media coverage and a congressional investigation, the white killers were never held accountable. Now, he is watching history repeat itself. The attack on the Capitol, he said, was “almost identical” to the way white extremists staged a riot in Hamburg during the high-stakes presidential election of 1876.

*snip*

[WhiteTara]

1. I think the story will have a different ending

this time. Merrick Garland is on the job...or will be by week's end.