Last
month, a nearly all-White jury found Kyle
Rittenhouse not guilty of murdering two White
men - Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber - at
a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wis.,
in the summer of 2020. Rittenhouse killed
these men and injured a third as they
protested the police shooting of a Black man
named Jacob Blake.
In
his first post-verdict interview on Fox News
with Tucker Carlson (Carlson has a sympathetic documentary on Rittenhouse), Rittenhouse
said he is not a racist and in fact supports
the Black Lives Matter movement. He also
claimed he was tricked into posing for a
photo with the Proud
Boys,
a far-right militant organization, and
flashing a hand signal favored among white
supremacists. Conservatives - including Carlson - have argued further that Rittenhouse
cannot be a white supremacist because the
people he killed were White.
But
here’s the thing. White supremacists have long
singled out White allies of civil rights and
racial justice movements - and the state has
failed to defend them when they’ve sided with
Black activists.
Consider
the 1870 lynching of William Luke, an Irish
immigrant and Methodist pastor from Ontario,
who helped found Talladega College in Alabama
to educate freed Black people. Luke, who also
taught at the college, broke the rules of
White Southern society in more ways than one.
In addition to supporting Black education, he
advocated for equal pay for Black railroad
workers and taught that Black women and White
women were equal before God. For a time, he
lived with a Black family, a violation of
Southern anti-miscegenation codes.
Furthermore,
Luke sold pistols to Black people seeking
protection from White violence. Black men
patrolled the streets in response to the
beating of a Black man by a gang of White men,
and shots were exchanged. White people spread
rumors of Black insurrection - the greatest
fear for White Southerners - and accused
Northerners and Republicans of inciting it.
The
Ku Klux Klan threatened Luke and planned his
assassination. Then, when authorities,
assisted by a posse of White citizens,
arrested him and four Black men, the Klan
removed them from the sheriff’s custody and lynched
them.
According to newspaper reports at the time,
the sheriff and his deputies were overpowered
by the armed and disguised Klansmen and had no
choice but to surrender them to the mob.
Before
they hanged him, Luke wrote a letter to his
wife in Canada telling her: “I die tonight. It
has been determined by those who think that I
deserve it. God only knows I feel myself
entirely innocent of the charge. I have only
sought to educate the negro.” A grand jury
refused to indict the White men accused of
murdering Luke, despite 800 pages of evidence
and testimony from 140 witnesses. Alabama Gov.
William Hugh Smith failed to understand that
local officials were unable and unwilling to
stop Klan violence and were complicit, and
federal troops rarely did anything to
intervene.
Decades
later, when White activists mobilized to
support Black civil rights activists, they
faced similar violent retributions. Jean
Graetz and her husband, Robert, a
White Lutheran minister, supported the
Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama in 1955
and befriended Rosa Parks, who used a room
in the Rev. Graetz’s Trinity Lutheran Church
to hold meetings of the local
NAACP chapter.
As Robert Graetz preached
in support of the boycott from the
pulpit of his all-Black church, Jean Graetz
helped organize the boycott, arranged child
care for participants, made lunches and
arranged media interviews for boycott
leaders. The Graetz couple also stored cars
on their property provided by other
supporters, organized carpools, drove
Black residents to and from work and helped
fundraise for the effort.
The
Graetz family received death threats and found
their tires slashed and sugar poured in their
gas tank. When their home was bombed, an
all-White jury acquitted the seven White men
charged with the crime. Robert Graetz
recognized what he called “a long pattern” of
injustice. “Any White man who was charged with
any kind of crime against a Black person was
freed,” he said, noting that “a White
person who was helping a Black person was
seen as worse than the Black person.” While
White civil rights allies were in harm’s way
and some were assaulted, this was only a
taste of the violence visited upon Black
activists in the South and that Black people
experienced regularly in the century between
the Civil War and the height of the civil
rights movement.
They
were not alone. During the 1960s, civil rights
workers from across the country - including
White activists - descended upon the South to
engage in the battle for racial equality,
voting rights and desegregation. They
witnessed firsthand the brutality visited upon
Black Americans under the authoritarian regime
of Jim Crow segregation - and they too
experienced white supremacist violence, Klan
attacks and murder.
In
the summer of 1964, Andrew Goodman and Michael
Schwerner joined James Chaney, a Black
Mississippian, to register Black voters in
Mississippi and investigate the burning of a
Black church. With the planned assistance of a
deputy sheriff who pulled the men over for
speeding, the Klan abducted, shot and killed
all three civil rights workers. This move
reflected how common it was for government
officials, lawmakers and law enforcement
officers to join the KKK, and prosecutors,
judges and juries often looked the other way.
The
Klan similarly murdered Viola Liuzzo in 1965
for supporting civil rights protesters in
Alabama. Following the Bloody
Sunday march from Selma to
Montgomery, in which hundreds of protesters
were met with police violence on the Edmund
Pettus Bridge, Liuzzo traveled from her home in
Detroit to the South to join the voting
rights fight. Soon after, as she drove a
Black teen civil rights worker named Leroy
Moton to Selma, a car with four Klan members
pulled up beside her and shot and killed
her. The four Klansmen, one of whom was an
FBI informant, were found guilty, but after
the trial, the FBI sought to sully Liuzzo’s
name by characterizing her as a bad mother
who abandoned her children and slept with
Black men. As a result, the Liuzzo family,
mourning the loss of Viola, received hate
mail and found a burning
cross in front of their Detroit
home.
James
Reeb, another White supporter of the voting
rights activists in Selma, was the victim of
white supremacist violence. Several men beat
Reeb with clubs, and he died of head trauma
two days after the attack. Four men were
arrested and charged with the killing, but an
all-White, all-male jury found three not
guilty, while the fourth assailant fled the
state, and the judge ultimately ruled he did
not have to stand trial.
Whether
people see Rittenhouse as a hero or a domestic
terrorist will hinge on societal embrace of
white supremacy, indifference toward racial
injustice and dehumanization of racial
minority groups and their allies.
Historically, the state has provided refuge
for white supremacist violence, with
government institutions, police and the legal
system protecting White vigilantes from
punishment and accountability.
And although White allies are vulnerable to white
supremacist violence and injustice in the
court system, Black victims - such as the men
lynched alongside William Luke, Emmett Till,
James Chaney, the four little girls killed in
the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in
Birmingham in 1963, Breonna Taylor, George
Floyd, Elijah McClain and others - are the
primary targets of white supremacist
vigilantism and the most vulnerable to the
violence.
This commentary is
also posted on WashingtonPost.com.