When domestic terrorists fueled by outlandish conspiracy theories spun by a white supremacist president of the United States stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to overthrow the government, I was shocked. But not surprised. Our history is filled with eruptions of violence when our nation’s entrenched system of white supremacy feels that its place at the center of American life is threatened.
David Blight, Ron Chernow and Nikole Hannah-Jones, three chroniclers of our fraught racial history, were the perfect people to put the Capitol insurrection into greater perspective.
“We have plenty of precedents for what happened on January 6, not at the federal level, but in white-on-black violence in the South during Reconstruction,” Chernow told me in a primer he emailed to me before appearing on my Sunday show on MSNBC. “During this dreadful period, we had numerous cases of rampaging whites invading legislatures.” Chernow is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a biography of President Ulysses S. Grant. Continue reading.