Just days after the November 5, 2024, elections, thousands of African American children, college students, and working professionals in more than 20 states from New York to California, and the District of Columbia, received mass texts from unrecognized phone numbers telling them they were ‘selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation.’ This blatantly racist message with its hate-filled words harkens back to a painful and bigoted past, America’s Jim Crow era.
A spokesperson for the campaign that filled the airwaves with a deluge of nativist, sexist, anti-immigrant, anti-LBQT, and racist messages through this campaign season, including calling the island of Puerto Rico garbage at one rally, immediately issued a statement that the ‘campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages.’
At this point I have to call ‘time out,’ and disagree most vehemently with the foregoing statement. Words have meaning and consequences. All one has to do is recall American history of the 1950s and 1960s, during the Civil Rights movement, when southern politicians, digging in their heels to prevent the dismantling of Jim Crow laws that treated citizens of color like second and third class citizens, engaged in some of the most virulently hateful rhetoric imaginable.
I remember people like Strom Thurmond of Mississippi and George Wallace of Alabama labeling Whites who traveled from the north to show solidarity with Blacks seeking the right to vote, to live where they chose, or to attend certain schools, as outside agitators bent on ‘destroying the southern way of life. Young Black students peacefully demonstrating for the right to vote, go to school, or simply eat at a drugstore lunch counter, were set upon by water hoses and police dogs, and demonstrators young and old were called Communists, and beaten by mobs and arrested by the police.
Civil Rights activists like Viola Liuzzo from Detroit, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City, were murdered by KKK aided by local police. Black activists like James Chaney of Mississippi, who was murdered along with Goodman and Schwerner; Medgar Evers, a military veteran and Civil Rights activist in Mississippi, were also brutally murdered because of their demands for equal treatment under the law.
On September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed just before Sunday morning services The bomb, planted by four members of a local KKK chapter, killed four young girls who were getting dressed in their choir robes, and injured several others.
Even though the FBII concluded that the local KKK was responsible for the bombing, no one was prosecuted until 1977, when one of the four was finally tried and convicted of first-degree murder of only one of the victims.
The politicians of that time disavowed any responsibility for these heinous acts, which also included the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., by career criminal James Earl Ray. Their disavowal rings as hollow as a dried gourd. It was their incessant drum beat of hateful rhetoric that empowered these murders to commit such heinous acts, that and the fact that in most cases, the perpetrators were either not prosecuted or were acquitted by local all-White juries. Their words had consequences, but they refused to acknowledge or accept responsibility.
Today’s denials ring just as hollow. When you’ve labeled people as garbage and scum, accused them of ‘eating pets,’ and all the other vile and hateful verbiage that has polluted the airwaves for most of this year, you’re creating an environment in which those who would act on this rhetoric feel emboldened. I have no doubt that no one from the aforementioned campaign is directly involved in crafting or distributing this message.
Many, if not most, of them are probably just as shocked and repulsed as I am—I hope. But to try and avoid all responsibility for this reprehensible act is a bridge too far. Words have consequences. When your words have led to bad things, own up to it and reform.
Just saying. | NWI
