Charlottesville. A distinct chill of fear went through my body when I saw the terrifying images of torch-carrying white supremacists descend on a church filled with congregants on the night of Aug. 11. A church — again.
It brought me back, a Southern white woman, to the 1950s. It felt like growing up in South Africa. The days when the White Citizen Council, the urban version of the Ku Klux Klan, ruled New Orleans — the schools were closed, so they wouldn’t have to be segregated. The city swimming pools were closed, so they wouldn’t have to have black children in the same waters as white children. The stories of KKK lynchings in the Louisiana country-side, like Plaquemine Parish. If you walk through certain parts of the French Quarter, you can still feel the evils embedded in the walls where slaves were often kept before sending them up the river to “lives of forced labor, of misery, of rape, of torture,” as New Orleans was America’s largest slave market.
As a white woman I was terrified when I saw the clear rise of the KKK and other white supremacists — again, on Saturday morning. This time without the torches, but an armed mob that ultimately resulted in an actual execution. How must our black brothers and sisters feel? Are they now in fear for their lives across America?
Beginning with slavery and permeating every generation since, racism has led to bone-chilling acts of terror spurred solely by the color of a fellow human’s skin.
As perhaps the most common display of such hatred, the hanging of African-Americans by white mobs became a means to flaunt the power maintained by whites in the days of slavery, and of Jim Crow justice in the South and parts of Texas through 1968.
After the Civil War, the number of lynchings in America did not begin to diminish, but instead continued to climb.
Trudier Harris in “Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals,” explained: “[L]ynchings were carefully designed to convey to black persons in this country that they had no power and nothing else whites were obligated to respect … Black men were things, not men, and if they dared to claim any privileges of manhood, whether sexual, economic, or political, they risked execution.”
Since the 1880s, this racist hatred became a daily reminder when a black person has had to pass by a Confederate monument.
Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans, explained so eloquently in May that the Confederate generals fought to destroy our country and deny African-Americans’ humanity. Their statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause.
“These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confeder- acy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for … [T]hese statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.”
The importance of this history of racial violence does not diminish with time. To allow acts of hatred to continue is to regress into a state of barbarism thought to have been overcome by the Civil Rights Movement.
Until Charlottesville, such blatant acts of terror were virtually unthinkable in this 21st century — the KKK, carrying torches, can only bring to mind a question of what’s next? Burning crosses? Lynchings?
The KKK with its known history of lynching ropes and hangman’s nooses has made a resurgence under this man Donald Trump, who, as Hawaii’s U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz eloquently and simply stated, cannot be called my president.
Elizabeth Jubin Fujiwara is a Honolulu civil rights attorney.
