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21 February 21
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FOCUS: Jelani Cobb | "Judas and the Black Messiah" and the Klan Act
Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker
Cobb writes: "A new movie and a lawsuit filed by the N.A.A.C.P. highlight historic disparities in the official response to radical groups."
arly in Shaka King’s new film, “Judas and the Black Messiah,” Roy Mitchell, a white F.B.I. agent, and William O’Neal, a Black informant, have a conversation about why O’Neal has been asked to infiltrate the Black Panther Party and gather intelligence on Fred Hampton, the leader of the Illinois branch. “Don’t let Hampton fool you,” Mitchell says. “The Panthers and the Klan are one and the same. Their aim is to sow hatred and inspire terror.” It’s a pointed moment not simply because it prefaces Hampton’s death at the hands of Chicago police officers during a raid in December, 1969, but because it presents a moral equivalency that raises more questions than it answers.
The Ku Klux Klan arose after the Civil War and orchestrated a campaign to effectively revoke Black citizenship; the Panthers were born a century later, as a reaction to the ways in which that campaign had been successful. Most significantly, the Klan used terrorism to achieve its ends. The Panthers were guilty of sporadic acts of violence, but they had no ethos of terrorizing swaths of the public. That distinction places the F.B.I.’s actions in Chicago in stark relief. The killing of Hampton, who was just twenty-one when he died, was part of a coördinated strategy employed by federal and local law-enforcement agencies across the country to disrupt the Black Panther Party.
The radical, armed-self-defense-oriented Panthers were not alone. Under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO initiative targeted the more pacifist wing of the civil-rights movement. It extensively surveilled and menaced Martin Luther King, Jr.—activities that are chronicled in another new film, Sam Pollard’s documentary “MLK/FBI.” Yet the Bureau took no such actions against the leadership of the Klan, which was responsible for an uncountable number of murders, or against George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, which formed in opposition to the civil-rights movement. This contrast in responses is even more remarkable given a comment that President Joe Biden made last month, when he nominated Merrick Garland to be Attorney General. Biden said that Garland would restore integrity to the Department of Justice—it oversees the F.B.I.—which, he added, was created during the Administration of Ulysses S. Grant to enforce civil-rights amendments and to prosecute the Klan.
Like so much of this nation’s traumatic racial history, the false equivalencies that Shaka King depicts in his movie have gained renewed salience. Last week, the N.A.A.C.P. filed a lawsuit on behalf of Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, against Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers, for violating the Enforcement Act of April, 1871. The Klan Act, as it is known, prohibits the use of “force, intimidation, or threat” to prevent government officials from executing their responsibilities. The suit argues that attempts to interrupt the certification of the Electoral College vote qualify as such a violation.
The Klan Act, which also made people liable for impeding any citizen’s right to vote, and authorized the President to use military force against attempts to curtail the rights guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment, led to many hundreds of indictments against Klansmen and their affiliates in the eighteen-seventies. The group was moribund for decades, until the 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” reignited interest in it. Yet the government’s successful disruption of the organization serves as an example of what can be achieved through legislation and bureaucratic commitment. Grant, who commanded the Union Army during the Civil War, understood better than most that the dangers presented by militant white supremacy were not limited to Black America, and would eventually touch every corner of the nation. That insight was all but lost on subsequent generations.
On October 6th, the Department of Homeland Security released a threat assessment stating that “ideologically motivated lone offenders and small groups pose the most likely terrorist threat to the Homeland, with Domestic Violent Extremists presenting the most persistent and lethal threat,” and expressing particular concern about “white supremacist violent extremists.” The report warned that some elements might target “events related to the 2020 Presidential campaigns, the election itself, election results, or the post-election period.” Three months later to the day, an unwieldy alliance of right-wing radicals, some bearing Confederate flags, stormed the United States Capitol, took actions that led to the death of a police officer, and called for the hanging of the Vice-President. Pipe bombs were planted near the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican National Committees. Police made relatively few arrests on the day of the attack. As of last week, well more than two hundred people had been charged, but the initial leniency, especially compared with the law-enforcement response to the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, did not go unnoticed.
The concern is not simply the disparity in treatment but the continued reluctance to recognize white racial extremism as the security threat it is until the problem has metastasized. Last Tuesday, the Times reported that at least thirty law-enforcement officers have been identified as part of the mob at the Capitol. In recent years, law-enforcement departments in Virginia, Florida, Nebraska, Louisiana, Michigan, and Texas have fired officers for membership in the Klan. A year and a half ago, the Philadelphia Police Department fired thirteen officers for posting racist or offensive messages on Facebook. Last month, more than a hundred officers were injured as they attempted to protect Congress, but the public also realized, with alarm, that among the officers’ ranks may have been some who were sympathetic to the crowd.
The fact that the N.A.A.C.P. has invoked the Klan Act to file suit against a former President is notable, but not nearly as notable as the reasons that make the law applicable today. President Biden, in his Inaugural Address, took the unprecedented step of declaring the need to destroy white supremacy. Like Grant, he inherited a situation in which the prosecution of these forces is essential not only to his agenda but to American democracy itself. The Homeland Security assessment noted that the threat of domestic extremism will persist “at least through early 2021.” That is what bureaucratic understatement sounds like. It has taken decades to recognize the threat; it will persist a spell longer than the spring.
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