"Judas and the Black Messiah" and the Klan Act
By Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker
21 February 21
A new movie and a lawsuit filed by the N.A.A.C.P. highlight historic
disparities in the official response to radical groups.
Carly in Shaka Kings new film, Judas and the Black Messiah, Roy Mitchell,
a white F.B.I. agent, and William ONeal, a Black informant, have a
conversation about why ONeal has been asked to infiltrate the Black Panther
Party and gather intelligence on Fred Hampton, the leader of the Illinois
branch. Dont 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.
Its a pointed moment not simply because it prefaces Hamptons 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 Pollards 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
Rockwells 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 Justiceit 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 nations 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 citizens 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 governments
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.
