The G.O.A.T. Tournament Day 4: Movement and Mobs

The fourth division in our quest to find the Greatest Oppressors of All Time features some of white history's most notorious thugs.

Welcome to day four of our journey to find the greatest racist in American history! If you missed the first three rounds, here’s how this works: Each day, we’ll focus on one division. Readers will have three days to vote on each matchup, and the winner will move on to the next round. At the end of the competition, we will crown the G.O.A.T. of white supremacy (You can see the whole bracket with updated scores here. Only subscribers to ContrabandCamp can vote).

On Tuesday, our single-elimination tournament focused on the political giants who embedded white supremacy into the fabric of our country. On Wednesday, we watched the racist influencers compete for a spot in the second round, followed by organizations and institutions. But racism is not always an individual act, nor does it always have a membership roll. So today, we focus on the recurring campaigns and spontaneous acts of whiteness that etched themselves into white history. Here are the contestants in the Mobs and Movements division:

Maybe it’s their culture.

There was a time when Black people voted Republican.

That lasted about 30 years.

The 14th Amendment (granting African Americans full citizenship and equal protection) was ratified in 1868. The 15th Amendment passed in 1870, guaranteeing voting rights to Black Americans. But at the 1888 Texas Republican State Convention, the GOP’s “Lily-White” faction expelled Black delegates. The Lily-White movement exploded by 1900 when 90% of African Americans lived in the South. As more Southern states disenfranchised Black voters, post-Reconstruction white Republicans clawed back power from Black politicians. So, while many African Americans at the time identified as Republicans, they lived in places most Black people could not vote.

And to appeal to the white people who could vote, Republicans got really racist. It was never conservative or liberal. It was never urban or rural. The party was never anti-slavery or pro-civil rights. It was for white people. A Republican president (we’ll get to that) ushered in Jim Crow. Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress during the Red Summer of 1919. They controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency for the next decade, yet they refused to protect Black voters, pass an anti-lynching bill or uphold our constitutional rights.

So in 1936, Black people stopped voting Republican.

And if you’re wondering why I didn’t mention that the Republican Party began as an anti-slavery party, I don’t care. That was white folks’ business. Plus, the original Republicans wanted to end the institution of slavery because of the stranglehold the Southern states had on politics. They wanted to preserve the Union. If most of them believed in equality, they wouldn’t have labeled the pro-civil rights faction as “Radical Republicans.”

The idea that Black Americans endured systemic disenfranchisement, a lynching epidemic, racial apartheid, education inequality and one of the most openly violent eras in the history of the modern world — all while one of the two major parties was fighting racism — is one of the most absurd lies that white people have ever believed.

The Lost Cause narrative is not really about the Civil War or the antebellum South. It’s really about white fragility. If you believe that there were “happy slaves” and noble Klansmen, then you can easily believe that the people who started the bloodiest war in American history were victims. Then again, if you believe the Civil War was unjust …

Then you think Black people should still be enslaved.

As an institution, the Democratic Party is not much different than its Republican counterpart. Just as the present-day GOP capitalized on white supremacy, the Democrats went through their pro-white era. But here’s an interesting exercise (Remember, we’re talking about history in its totality):

Since the Democratic Party’s founding in 1828, which party disenfranchised more people because of their race? Which party’s members destroyed more Black lives? Goldwater/War on Drugs-era/MAGA Republicans or Klan-era/nativist movement/segregationist bombing/mass incarceration Democrats? Which one is the king of dog whistles? Which one systemically lies to Black people more? Which one hides its racism while capitulating to whiteness more?

The answer is “yes.”

Weaponizing white supremacy to overthrow the government is an American tradition. Remember, the Founding Fathers were technically insurrectionists. So were the Confederate States of America. And the Jan. 6 Capitol coup. Then there were local insurrections that slaughtered Black people en masse, like North Carolina’s Kirk-Holden War and the 1898 Wilmington Coup, Louisiana’s Battle of Liberty Place, Georgia’s Camilla Massacre and South Carolina’s Red Shirts — and those are just the successful ones!

Eugenics in America has a long history that begins with slave breeders. But the modern movement known as “newgenics” begins with American “scientists” whose efforts to create a master race inspired (and funded) a young eugenicist named Adolph Hitler. North Carolina’s Eugenics Board sterilized Black women until the 1950s. Today, tech moguls like Elon Musk, J.D. Vance mentor Curtis Yarvin and whoever is the next guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast have extended the work of modern eugenicists like Charles Murray. But unlike the eugenicists of the past, the Venn diagram of newgenicists’ belief system meets at one nexus:

Black people have lower IQs.

I hate the term “Christian nationalism” because it’s false and misleading. Black people are more likely to identify as Christian, pray more and are more likely to attend church. White people are just more likely to use their religion to explain their politics, resistance to change and their bigoted beliefs. But it has nothing to do with Jesus or patriotism or even their country.

The Klan was a Christian organization. The men who wrote human trafficking into the Constitution were overwhelmingly Christian. The Confederate states seceded because they believed the Union was “attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.” Adolph Hitler’s speeches contain more mentions of Christianity than Jews or Judaism. Yes, they were nationalists, but they did not believe in the teachings of Christ.

Christian nationalism is just a pulpit for white supremacy.

Although we are singling out “white women voters,” an election is nothing if not the largest, most effective political poll. And if you believe the Republican Party is racist, then you can’t separate the party’s second-largest voting block from the GOP at large.

If white women were actually concerned about the welfare of every American, abortion would be legal nationwide, affirmative action would still exist and Donald Trump would not be president. More importantly, if white women would not vote for racists, the Republican Party could not afford to appeal to white supremacists. In fact, if white women were not so wed to the doctrine of white supremacy, they would ally with the only party fighting to end employment discrimination, men controlling women’s bodies, the wage gap, maternal mortality, lack of access to health care and equality in education.

I’m not talking about the Democrats …

I’m talking about Black people.

The MAGA movement is racist.

They hate Black history. If they really cared about history, there’d be an executive order banning Christopher Columbus and the Lost Cause mythology from textbooks. If they hated DEI (not Black people), they’d outlaw legacy admissions and donor loopholes. If they were interested in preserving monuments (and not white supremacy), they’d prosecute the white boys who keep shooting up the Emmett Till sign. If they were worried about people losing jobs to immigrants, they would’ve deported Elon Musk after he fired half of Twitter’s staff. If they cared about waste, fraud and abuse, they’d reform the prison system and tackle police misconduct.

If they wanted to make America great again, they would.

The Proud Boys. The KKK. The White League. The III Percenters. Atomwaffen. Constitutional Sheriffs. The Redoubt Movement. Random white boys with guns. They’ve tried to kidnap a governor, intimidate Black voters, overturn multiple elections and successfully overthrew the government multiple times. The problem is not guns or “big government” or lack of sex or video games. We have to call it what it is.

Same with the alt-right.

The difference between the alt-right and the regular right is how they express their racism. The alt-right wears khakis and polos instead of tailored suits. They have Nazi tattoos instead of flag pins. They wear bandanas around their faces instead of pointy hoods. They’re business-casual Klansmen. Neo-Nazis who like cryptocurrency.

On March 2, 1877, five U.S. senators, five Congressmen and five Supreme Court justices decided a presidential election. By an 8-7 vote, the United States Electoral Commission crowned Rutherford B. Hayes the president of the United States. Although historians usually refer to the decision to end Reconstruction as the Compromise of 1877, no one actually “compromised” anything. All of the members were white. Only one of the members was from the South. In exchange for a peaceful transfer of power, they subjected Black people to the most violent era of terrorism in American history.

The Resegregationist movement is defined by one all-encompassing narrative:

Everything Black people achieved is anti-white.

President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 was racist because it required employers to “take affirmative action to ensure … that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” The Black unemployment rate has been twice the white unemployment rate since the government began collecting the data, but requiring an agency or business to be diverse, equitable and inclusive discriminates against people who use shampoo-and-conditioner-in-one. Seven in 10 Black children attend segregated schools. Even school funding is segregated. But what we really need are laws that target a handful of transgender athletes competing in high school women’s sports. Resegregationists want to segregate the military, history lessons, literature, private corporations and even families.

Redeemers are not just limited to the post-Reconstruction era white terrorists. About every 30 years, a new version of this stagnant pro-white movement returns. Unlike the people who want to Make America Great Again, Redeemers want to reinforce the white supremacy that already exists before things get out of control. The nativist Know-Nothing movement of the 1920s was anti-immigrant, pro-Protestant and anti-Black. They enacted racial quotas for immigration to ensure that America stayed white. The massive resistance movement of the 1950s wanted to keep education segregated. Reagan and Nixon’s “silent majority” wanted to ensure that civil rights bullshit didn’t marginalize working-class whites. They use violence under the guise of “law and order.” They don’t necessarily want to return to the past; they are afraid of the future.

Because the future is Black.

Carolyn Bryant lied on Emmett Till.

Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam went to the house of Emmett Till’s family and asked for “the nigger who did the talking.” The 14-year-old’s aunt offered them every dollar she had to go away. His uncle begged. The white men refused. They hog-tied him, put him on the back of a pickup truck and drove 48 miles to Glendora, Miss., pistol-whipping him along the way. It took more than an hour. Emmett Till was still alive.

They went to a spot where a group of their drinking buddies had been drinking. The men joined in the beating for about an hour. Emmett Till was still alive.

Then they loaded him into a truck and took him to a barn on Milam’s farm. The fact that Till did not address them as “sir” angered them more. They beat him in the head with an anvil. They pierced his skin with an awl. They put his head in a vice and hand-drilled a hole in his head. Then, Till said something to the effect of “he was as good as they were.” J.W. Milam pulled out a .45 caliber pistol. Someone else picked up a shotgun.

Emmett Till was not alive.

They used barbed wire to affix a fan to his body, threw him into a river and walked home.

On Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, members of the United Klans of America planted at least 15 sticks of dynamite under the steps of 16th Street Baptist Church. Then they made a call to the church and told said: “Three minutes.”

It was one minute.

The blast was so strong that a man driving by was thrown out of his car. Windows shattered two blocks away. Five members of the children’s choir were standing in the basement. The terrorist act killed four of them — 14-year-old Addie Mae Collins, 11-year-old Carol Denise McNair, 14-year-old Carole Rosamond Robertson and 14-year-old Cynthia Dionne Wesley. Twelve-year-old Sarah Collins had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and lost an eye.

“Dynamite” Bob Chambliss was convicted 12 years later. He was 72. Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry were convicted 35 years later.

The Tulsa Race Massacre began when 75 Black men tried to stop a lynching.

A Black man had never been lynched in Tulsa. But within minutes, a white mob of nearly 2,000 appeared. Public officials and law enforcement agents handed out guns to white men and started killing Black citizens in the Greenwood District known today as “Black Wall Street.” They drove cars into the Black neighborhood and fired into homes indiscriminately. Contrary to popular belief, most of the 1,256 homes and “nearly every church, school, business…hospital and library” in the town were destroyed by white citizens and government agents who looted after the massacre. The Oklahoma National Guard arrested virtually all of the residents of Greenwood who survived.

According to the Tulsa Race Commission: “Not one of these criminal acts was then or ever has been prosecuted or punished by government at any level, municipal, county, state, or federal.”

Choose.