The Rosewood Massacre: Does anyone else feel like history is about to repeat itself?

On this day in 1923, a mob of over 200 white men attacked the Black community in Rosewood, Florida, killing over 30 Black women, men, and children, burning the town to the ground, and forcing all survivors to permanently flee Rosewood.

That was just one of many massacres of Black people in this country.

To that we must add the "4075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950."

That's just part of our history that MAGA wants to whitewash. We participate in that when we confine our discussions of the Jim Crow era to talk about segregation. As Hamden Rice once explained.

It wasn't that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn't sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.

You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement decided to use to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth's.

It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.

This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.

I thought about that quote from Rice as I read the ProPublica story by Joshua Kaplan about a wilderness survival trainer that spent years undercover with right-wing militias. The whole report is fascinating. But one of the things that stood out to me was that the ranks of these militias were devastated by the prosecution and imprisonment of those involved in the January 6th riot. 

They'll obviously get a huge boost when Donald Trump pardons all of them. According to Kaplan, the militias have already been active on our southern border terrorizing immigrants. But they're now gearing up to play an active role in the administration's mass deportation plan. That's like asking the KKK to police segregation in the Jim Crow south. 

Does anyone else feel like history might be about to repeat itself?