Tree of Life Anniversary Approaches: Church Violence and White Nationalism

A recent news story reported the video shown at a Trump-support rally, featuring the president’s head superimposed on the body of a man who opens fire inside the “Church of Fake News” on parishioners who have the faces of Trump's political opponents and logos of media organizations superimposed onto their bodies (see photo above).

In my working paper, “Go In Disguise on the Highway”: Online Racial Terror Conspiracies and the Ku Klux Klan Act,” I am cataloging a long history of white supremacist shootings, from the late 1860s through 2018.

Here is an account from a Meridian, Mississippi newspaper in 1871, related during hearings to pass the Ku Klux Klan Act: “During the night the residence of Aaron Moore and the colored Baptist church were burned by some unknown persons.” https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llcg&fileName=100/llcg100.db&recNum=628

  

Fast-forward to 1963, when four KKK members planted dynamite at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four children in the church.

In the current period, there is Dylan Roof’s shooting and killing of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina; the Christchurch slaughter of 51 worshipers in a mosque; the 2012 shooting and killing of 7 worshipers in a Wisconsin Sikh temple; and the October 27, 2018 shooting and killing of  11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue-- and more. 

Why do these killings occur at a place of worship? What are the specific motivations for linking white supremacy to terror centered around an activity where “outgroups”— blacks, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs— are in their own space, and not co-mingling with white, Christian nationalists?

I’m open to your ideas and thoughts.

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Why does this matter?

The KKK Act holds racial conspiracies and their conspirators liable for damages that end in terroristic violence.

But here’s the catch: Congress limited relief to a “class” of victims that courts have said are only blacks and their political supporters— so the act applies where, for example, terror is used to intimidate blacks protesters, or voters.

But it misses the “church violence” phenomenon, and also work-related forms of racial terror.

I am combing the congressional record from 1871 and earlier and finding that Congress intended to hold domestic terrorists responsible to these “classes” of victims.

And what is my point? To create a legal framework to make gun producers (gun sellers [e.g., Colt], internet platforms [e.g., Facebook]; political groups such as those that created and distributed the Trump video responsible for the immense damages caused by these occasionally live-streamed terror, internet fueled, AR gun-enabled slaughters at houses of worship and workplaces.