Coming To Terms With Our History of White Supremacist Violence

If you know our history, our present reality shouldn't surprise you. Nearly 4 decades after slavery ended, the nation was the site of the creation of a system of color caste, reinforced by acts terror and intimidation that ranged from night riding and lynching to pogroms and massacres. Most of this white supremacist violence never made it into our history books, but it is painstakingly being reconstructed and commemorated today by survivors, civil rights leaders, and courageous race scholars. When the full story is told, the resurgence of white supremacist violence in the US today will seem less like an aberration that a re-emergence of powerful forces which were never fully accounted for, and whose victims were never recognized. To repeat the famous adage- those who don't know their history are destined to repeat it. The battle against white supremacy has to be fought on many fronts, one of which is the building of monuments to its victims and the creation of new historical narratives