Enfield, North Carolina, a small majority Black township about an hour’s drive from Raleigh, was once a “sundown town,” so named for the racist exclusion and terrorism of Black workers and residents after dark. It’s also Mayor Mondale Robinson’s hometown.
In 2022, inspired by the Black-led political activism and national backlash against symbols of oppression, Robinson, the grandson of a sharecropper, razed a Confederate statue in town. He livestreamed it himself as the bulldozer did its work. Almost immediately, he faced threats, including from people claiming to be from the Ku Klux Klan.
White hoods are perhaps the most recognizable symbols of White supremacy. Its purest form, however, may be violence.
Robinson argues that four years ago today, it was racism spilling out onto the steps of the United States Capitol and crashing through its doors and windows. For him, the insurrection on the Capitol was emblematic of America’s culture of violence — and the racism and privilege that fuel it.
“January 6th was a continuation of White people rioting when they don’t get their way,” the Enfield mayor told The Emancipator, calling the seditionist siege an instance of “the unchecked benefit of Whiteness.”
Supporters of Donald Trump, spurred on by his postelection enticements to “fight like hell,” stormed barricades, attacked law enforcement, hunted for lawmakers, and ransacked the Capitol, all in an ultimately futile effort to stop the U.S. House of Representatives’ impending certification of Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.
Perhaps due to all its horrors, the Jan. 6 insurrection was quintessentially American as apple pie and baseball. The nation’s origin is rooted in racialized violence and subjugation. The same U.S. Capitol building that the insurrectionists stormed was built on the blood, bones, and backs of enslaved Africans.
Throughout the United States’ history, periods of transformative change are inextricably linked to violent uprisings and displacements of people. As painful and shocking as Jan. 6 was, it was not an outlier, but part of a historic continuum.
Modern violent flash points have precedent
Despite the current political movement to erase the nation’s violent prologue from history books and popular culture, brutal episodes over the past few generations offer more recent examples of the violence inherent in America’s modern political narrative.
In August 2017, months after Trump began his first term in office, White nationalists marched on the University of Virginia to protest the planned removal of a Confederate statue from a city park. Over the course of two days, the now infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville turned deadly as White supremacists clashed with a multiethnic coalition of counterprotesters and even drove a car into the group killing one person and injuring more than a dozen others.
The Charlottesville siege was reminiscent of the 1898 massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina. In the wake of rising Black political and economic power in the city, White supremacists staged a bloody coup d’état. They burned the local Black newspaper’s office, massacred at least 60 Black people, overthrew the multiracial local government, and installed a former Confederate colonel as mayor.
“From Wilmington to Charlottesville to January 6, these events illustrate how the capitalist class has strategically manipulated segments of White Americans into blaming their inability to become billionaires themselves on immigrants and people of color,” said Danielle Casarez Lemi, a fellow at the John G. Tower Center for Political Studies at Southern Methodist University in Texas.
Lemi stressed the way in which these events are the descendants of the violence that founded this country.
“White, land-owning, colonizers enslaved Africans and stole land from Indigenous peoples for their own economic gain,” she added. “Each of these events represents the enduring refusal of White perpetrators to live in a multiracial democracy in which Black people, Indigenous people, and immigrants are treated as equals.”
Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, noted the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre and the Tulsa Race Riots in 1921 as other instances when White people resorted to violence to maintain their place atop American social and political hierarchies.
“Historically, these often started to protect the honor of White women who might have been disrespected or claimed a Black man was a sexual aggressor against them,” Gillespie said, “But the Black business district was devastated in these communities for advancing above their station and past of servitude.”
Black and Brown activists, organizers, elected officials, and scholars who spoke to The Emancipator also drew a direct throughline from racialized violence during the mid- and late 20th century to the state sanctioned police brutality in the 21st century. The former led to the Civil Rights Movement, while the latter sparked the Black Lives Matter protests.
In August 1965, a California Highway Patrol officer arrested and assaulted Marquette Frye, then 21, in Los Angeles for drunken driving. The incident was a tipping point for a Black and Brown community long frustrated over police brutality and economic inequity. Six days of civil unrest followed, which led to 34 deaths, more than 1,000 injuries, close to 4,000 arrests, and $40 million in property damage, concluding with nearly 14,000 National Guard called in to quell the situation.
In the aftermath of what happened in Watts, Martin Luther King Jr. condemned the use of violence and said, “the economic deprivation, social isolation, inadequate housing, and general despair of thousands of Negroes teeming in Northern and Western ghettos are the ready seeds which give birth to tragic expressions of violence.”
“The Watts rebellion and instances like that have existed all over the country in response to continued oppressive conditions particularly, and disproportionately, placed on the Black community, but also other marginalized communities,” said Aislinn Pulley, co-executive director of the Chicago Torture Justice Center, which emerged out of the historic 2015 reparations ordinance for survivors of Chicago police torture.
During the summer of 2019, a gunman killed 23 Mexicans, Latinos and immigrants and injured more than two dozen others inside a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. For many Latino residents of Texas, the massacre echoed the past. According to research by authors William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, from 1848 to 1928, mob violence and lynchings claimed the lives of at least 232 people of Mexican descent. Local community advocates for the victims believe the massacre was spurred on by modern-day Republican officials who have habitually stoked anti-Latino hate.
“It all comes from the same place,” said Julissa Arce, a social justice advocate and formerly undocumented author from San Antonio. This country is “extracting our culture, cuisine, our land, but without wanting us — the people. And violence is the best way to exert power and keep us quiet and afraid.”
When it comes to violent political uprisings, a racialized double standard
“Historically, there have largely been two kinds of racial political violence,” said Ibram X Kendi, founder of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University and the co-founder of The Emancipator. “Riots and insurrections to conserve racism like January 6; Uprisings and rebellions against racism like in Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992. Some Americans have resorted to political violence when they believed they were losing their freedom to oppress. Others have engaged in political violence to gain their freedom from oppression.”
Activists and academics who study the insurrection also contrasted the different standards of judgment applied to the largely White insurrectionists and law enforcements’ brutally militarized backlash against the Black Lives Matter protesters.
“Whereas White-led violent events are often performed as a show of dominance and meant to incite fear in anyone deemed not White, these events such as the 1965 Watts riots and the 1992 L.A. riots are in response to the systemic over-policing of Black communities and the pitting of non-Black people against Black people,” Lemi said.
We need to take this pain and turn it into actual organizing.
Amika Tendaji, Black Lives Matter Chicago
The four-hour-long siege on the Capitol ultimately led to nine deaths of both officers and insurrectionists. Though final estimates vary, according to congressional testimony 140 police officers were injured, nearly 4,000 participants were arrested, and rioters caused nearly $3 million in property damage. Altogether, roughly 1,700 law enforcement officers from 18 different agencies were deployed to try to quell the unrest.
More than 1,200 of the rioters, who Trump last year called “unbelievable patriots,” have been federally charged. According to the Associated Press, 730 have pleaded guilty and an additional 130 were convicted at trial. Last year on Truth Social, Trump vowed to “pardon many of them.”
Experts say the racist double standard in responding to violent political protests is tried and true. They point to the varying responses to the May 4, 1970, Kent State University shooting and the one that occurred just 11 days later at the historically Black Jackson State University.
When Kent students protested U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War on their northern Ohio campus, the U.S. National Guard shot 67 rounds over 13 seconds, killing four and wounding nine. However, at Jackson State in Mississippi, the gunfire lasted for 30 seconds according to NPR. Forty state highway patrolmen reportedly fired more than 460 rounds and their shotgun blasts shattered every window of a dormitory.
“People talk about Kent, but don’t talk about Jackson,” noted Pulley, the Chicago social justice advocate. “All these instances of when the government has used military violence, like bringing the National Guard into Watts, are unfortunately not new.”
Another hallmark of Jan. 6 was the level of restraint law enforcement used, social justice advocates and academics point out.
“There is a huge contrast between the level of violence we experienced, 1,000 arrests during the first week of [Black Lives Matter] protests. I saw people taken to the hospital with broken bones as a result of police violence,” Pulley said. “But on January 6 we saw massive restraint we never experienced in response to racialized police violence, towards people who actually did kill a police officer.”
A less bloody path forward
With so much violence in America’s distant and recent past, it’s an open question whether the nation could choose a less bloody path.
“Anger is a useful emotion for organizing,” said Amika Tendaji, an organizer for Black Lives Matter Chicago. “We need to take this pain and turn it into actual organizing.”
Gillespie stressed that the question is not just one about violence, but about how willing Americans are to acknowledge things like the existence of systemic racism and being born on third base and thinking they hit a triple.
“You always have to hold out hope for transformative social change being as peaceful as possible — there’s a way for us to do this without killing people — but can we do this without it being uncomfortable or without there being a cost to it? That is the question,” she said. “People seem to be okay with social change and social justice as long as it does not call certain people’s undeserved privileges into question.”
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