Historian: White Terrorist Groups Attacked Democracy During Reconstruction, They Are Doing It Again Jan 07, 2021
MANISHA SINHA (a professor of history at UConn, University of Connecticut, author of The Slave’s Cause and The Counterrevolution of Slavery.) “Thank you for having me, Amy. Well, I think what happened yesterday was rather astounding. As a historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction, I have often made comparisons between what has happened under the Trump regime — and I call it a regime, not an administration — and what has happened earlier in our history. But I did not think that this would actually come to pass, though I should have suspected it, considering what had happened in Michigan just recently.
Now, as Bree mentioned, this attempt to disrupt the democratic process — in this case, the counting of the votes of the Electoral College — by the use of domestic terror has happened repeatedly in our history. And it especially happened during Reconstruction, not just the Wilmington coup of 1898, but before that. In each of the Southern states, either voting or actually democratic governance was disrupted by right-wing, white terrorist groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, the White League, the Red Shirts for Wade Hampton in South Carolina. There were a number of them. And so, these groups today remind me of those people. And they were the ones flying the Confederate flag in Congress. That did not happen during the Civil War, and it happened yesterday.”
“Trump is a full-blown fascist, as far as I am concerned. And if he could have used the military to orchestrate a coup, he would have done it. Mark my words. There’s no doubt in my mind that he would have done it.”
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