Wilmington 2021: Fear of a Black Vote
Wednesday’s riot on the United States Capitol was not about the integrity of the vote; it was a violent tantrum of privilege by a ruling class losing its dominance.
Since President Donald Trump was defeated by former Vice President Joe Biden earlier in November — and losing both the House and Senate after the Georgia runoffs in the process—Trump and his supporters have been contesting the legitimacy of the result. He’s been hiring a team of lawyers to crank out one baseless lawsuit after another alleging voter fraud, and not a single one of them has any merit.
Trump’s massive $200 million fundraising off these lawsuits notwithstanding, he is determined to make the point that his loss was at the hands of “illegal voters” and that only “legal votes” should be counted in a bid to overturn Biden’s victory.
On Wednesday, Trump told a crowd of his supporters to “fight like hell” to take this country back on the Capitol, with Rudy Giuliani saying that there needs to be a “trial by combat.”
Trump specifically zeroed in on Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit — majority black cities — as areas where were illegal votes being cast to his nearly 88 million Twitter followers. This is not just limited to black cities either.
Biden won Arizona, largely through Phoenix and Maricopa County. It was a victory largely made possible by the increasing Latino population and Native American turnout.
Wednesday’s fiasco started from the objection of Biden’s win in that state, where six Republican Senators and 121 House members objected to Biden’s win there.
This is by design, and has been an accusation that has been at the expense of nonwhite voters since the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. And sadly, the violent attempt to overthrow a biracial government is not uncharted territory to America.
In 1896, Wilmington, North Carolina was the largest city in the state and one that could have been the blueprint for future Southern politics at the time. A mixed race local government where black business owners thrived, it was formed by the Fusion Party, a mix of Republicans and Populist white farmers after defeating Democrats in sweeping victories.
After this loss, Democrats plotted ways to lure white voters back into their fold to regain power through stoking racial tensions and a campaign of violent intimidation, stating that “this is a white man’s country and white men must must control and govern it.”
On November 10th, a mob of thousands of white men marched through the city and wreaked havoc by setting black newspaper The Daily Record on fire, destroyed dozens of businesses, forcibly exiled the mayor and Fusion Party members, and killing over 300 black citizens, though some estimate this number to be higher.
When the dust settled after what Alfred Moore Waddell called his “race riots”, Waddell became the new mayor of Wilmington and Democrats installed their own government in its place. This government would ensure that black people would never vote, hold office, or work high paying jobs.
After the Wilmington coup, the state of North Carolina did not have black congressional representation in the US House of Representatives until Eva Clayton in 1992, after 90 years. In a larger ripple effect, it took only until this year to see Raphael Warnock become the first black US Senator from Georgia.
These same issues are playing out today. We have overwhelmingly white patrons who are wealthy and powerful enough to privately fly from other states who are intent on limiting nonwhite voters’ access to the ballot box — despite widespread voter fraud simply not happening.
It’s impossible to overlook social media’s influence on all of this as well, with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others creating a culture where these things could fester and radicalize people into committing acts of terror. Newspaper illustrations of harmful black stereotypes from the Jim Crow South have been replaced with visceral memes and widespread messaging.
This led to evangelicals and country club elites rubbing shoulders with Q cultists and cosplay commandos flashing white supremacist messages.
Trump‘s takeover of the Republican Party has been complete, as he pushed to make the GOP openly embrace far-right ideology as mainstream conservatism. Wednesday’s siege of the Capitol was about maintaining racial and cultural dominance in a world that is growing past them in fear that nonwhite voters will have power over them, where “legal votes” are Republican white voters and “illegal voters” are nonwhites/Democrats.
Trump tipped his hand too heavily thinking that Wednesday’s actions would intimidate the country into keeping him around, when it may seem to finally serve as his downfall. Without his vast online network to blast propaganda to, Trump has been robbed of his ability to pump out the harmful information that led to this point in time.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said that Russia was able to influence the US election in 2016 because they tapped into America’s dark history of prejudice, making these issues a matter of national security. Far-right domestic terrorism has been a problem for years in the West and is seeping into both our government and even others abroad.
We can no longer be silent about what we are witnessing. In Wilmington, the hometown of NBA legend Michael Jordan, we have seen what irrational hatred can do to our democracy. No rational person can see violent events like this and say “this is not who we are.” It IS who we are as a nation, but it does not have to be.