The Scary History of Trump’s Second-Amendment Call to Action

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-scary-history-of-trumps-second-amendment-call-to-action/

Stopping on the campaign trail in Wilmington, North Carolina, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested that violence may be the only way to stop Hillary Clinton. He spent the following day basking in the shock value of his words, while maintaining that he’d been misunderstood. I’m not sure Trump understands the demons he has unleashed, but Wilmington is a good place to learn.

About 120 years ago, Charles B. Aycock, a leader of the white-supremacy campaign in North Carolina, aroused a crowd of angry white men looking for someone to blame for their problems. Aycock pointed at my ancestors, who had been enslaved in eastern North Carolina, and to their white neighbors, who had formed a Fusion party to vote together for policies that led to economic development for all families. Aycock suggested that the white race would be justified in using violence to overthrow a Fusion government in Wilmington, the state’s largest city at the time.

Two years later, following a Fusion victory in the election of 1898, Aycock’s crowd turned his words into deeds. Scores of angry white men burned down the only black-owned daily newspaper in the state, rampaged through the streets with a Gatling gun, shot dozens of un-armed African Americans, and banished from Wilmington every black and white Fusionist leader. This white-terror attack—the only successful coup d’état in a large American city—was sanctioned by every white church in Wilmington. It was also the precursor to many copycat white terror attacks, which firmly established Jim Crow laws throughout the South.

Donald Trump doesn’t need to know Aycock’s story to know the power of an appeal to white rage in North Carolina. He repeatedly calls Hillary Clinton “crooked,” then smirks when his crowds yell, “Lock her up!” Every Southerner, black and white, knows exactly what he was suggesting when he said the “Second Amendment people” know what to do if Clinton is elected.

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