Late in the Reconstruction period and for many years thereafter, white-supremacist paramilitary groups often committed acts of terrorism in the southern United States. That much is clear. Also clear, at least to Daily Kos blogger Denise Oliver-Velez, is that the spirit of those groups lives today in American police departments and in the viewership of Fox News.
“They don't kill us in bunches anymore. Now they just murder us one by one,” argued Oliver-Velez in a Sunday post. “One by one, as we are murdered by red shirts in blue, the message is re-enforced by bullets in the back, and chokeholds around our necks, no different than the nooses hung from trees. The audience is now on Fox News, rather than standing around the bonfires of death.”
From Oliver-Velez’s post (bolding, as well as Red Shirts and Tillman links, added):
#Blacklives (still) matter to black people and our allies but nothing has changed in the systemic racism of America.
Who's it gonna be next week? Oh, wait...next week has already happened. Spell it "Freddie Gray." Will it be my (or your) son-father-cousin-nephew-godson-husband-neighbor-student...or me next? Sistas get murdered too.
They don't kill us in bunches anymore. Now they just murder us one by one.
Slaughtering black folks en masse was part of an agenda of open terrorism to end any possibility of black political and economic power, or successful black and white "fusion" during Reconstruction. History books dub them "riots" because riot evokes images of scary black people runnin' wild, but they were massacres…
…One by one, as we are murdered by red shirts in blue, the message is re-enforced by bullets in the back, and chokeholds around our necks, no different than the nooses hung from trees. The audience is now on Fox News, rather than standing around the bonfires of death. As long as monuments to white supremacy are as American as apple pie—it will keep on happening.
I have been to Germany. The avenues there are not lined with statues of Adolph Hitler, nor are there buildings and streets named for other exterminationists. Why then must we live in a nation where a majority of black people must be confronted daily by shrines to killers like Ben Tillman?...
Ultimately, until white America takes collective responsibility for its inequity, it will be same shit, different day.
