Terror in Black and White

By William Jelani Cobb, Africana.com. Posted September 23, 2004.

Even before the death-colored clouds had cleared from the skies over lower Manhattan the words 'worst' and 'first' were already becoming synonymous. Three years after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, Sept. 11 has become a sort of touchstone in the common consciousness, a moment of catastrophic unreality that was force-fed into our real world. Looking back at the all-too-recent events of that day, it's easy to understand why 9/11 seems to have blotted out all prior memory and conviction. In its scale and media-age spectacle, it was unprecedented. Its repercussions have only yet begun to echo. It remains the context and subtext for this moment in history.

9/11 is the ghost in our bloodstream.

Still it must be said: the idea that terror is new to American soil has been politically beneficial to the Bush administration which, in the absence of any domestic accomplishments to speak of, has staked its future on "keeping America safe." In the wake of the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a misstatement made amid the trauma of so much death and destruction gradually calcified into a fact of public perception: this has never happened before.

But history is long and truth told, terrorism in America is nearly as old as America itself. Only a century earlier, a terrorist had actually succeeded in assassinating a President of the United States. William McKinley died in 1901, shot by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist assassin. And if we think of terrorism as organized acts of violence directed at civilians in order to instill fear and affect politics, then it is impossible to ignore the fact that racism and terrorism are inseparable in American history. On one level, race is irrelevant on this bleak anniversary – black remains are indistinguishable among the lost thousands cremated in terrorist flames in NY and DC. But the past is relevant here. Race is the link connecting acts of terrorism as disparate as the guerilla raids fought over slavery in Kansas in the 1850s through the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.

To cut to the chase, American history is a harvest of strange fruit.

It would be easy, at this distant remove, to forget that Timothy McVeigh, the homegrown terrorist who orchestrated the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City that claimed 168 lives did so in order to ignite a race war. McVeigh's attack was literally taken from the pages of Andrew McDonald's racist potboiler "The Turner Diaries." McVeigh himself had spoken at length about the federal government's role in usurping the rights of white people and argued that the government had become an instrument solely for furthering the interests of people of color and Jews.

At the time it occurred, Oklahoma City was referred to as the worst instance of terrorism on American soil. But that assessment required a certain historical near-sightedness to be true. The 1995 bombing was not even the worst act of terrorism in the state's history. The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, in which bands of armed and deputized whites attacked black residents of the city, resulted in twice as many deaths as the Oklahoma City bombing by the most conservative estimates. (The town of Rosewood, Florida was burned completely off the map by white rioters that same year.) In 1906, entire sections of Atlanta were burned to the ground and untold numbers of blacks were pulled from their homes and lynched. Just after the Civil War, Southern whites killed 46 blacks, injured over a hundred and burned 90-odd homes to the ground in Memphis – while Northern troops stationed in the city watched. And these are only a handful of the scores of town and neighborhood burnings that characterized black life in the pre-Civil Rights era.

William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse.

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