In the aftermath of the Charlottesville terrorist attacks, this week’s provocative destruction of a confederate statue by anarkids in Durham, NC has many Tar Heels waiting for the other shoe to drop...for the state’s covens of white supremacist conspirators to lash out in response.
North Carolina is, and always has been, a nexus of racial struggle. Last among the states to enter the Confederacy and first and foremost in underground resistance to that rebellion, later the state would witness the opening salvos in the desegregation movement with Durham’s 1957 Royal Ice Cream sit-in and the better-known 1960 Greensboro sit-ins that resulted in the desegregation of Woolworths department stores across the south.
In this century, those same tensions have most famously played out between a proudly racist GOP-controlled state legislature targeting black voters for suppression with “surgical precision,” versus the stunningly effective Forward Together movement of the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber and the NC-NAACP, which repeatedly proved itself able to put 20,000 peaceful protesters in the streets of the state capital at a moment’s notice. Throughout much of this latter battle the state’s rump KKK remnant, Pelham NC’s Loyal White Knights (site currently down...under DDoS attack?), and its nominally neo-Confederate white supremacist covens (led by Alamance County Taking Back Alamance County, now ACTBAC-NC) have at best played bit parts, a sort of central casting for walk-on buffoons better suited to a Shakespeare comedy.
Then the elevation of a dog-whistling white supremacist to the nation’s highest office changed everything, with recent explosive results like the Charlottesville terrorist attacks and, in direct response, a nominally leftist scrum of wobblies and anarchists tearing down a Durham confederate memorial. Now the whole state...and particularly the true-Blue bastion of Durham...holds its breath in anticipation of imminent Troubles.
Nowhere is the rump KKK’s newfound confidence and belligerence better illustrated than in today’s Raleigh News & Observer report:
Monday night, Justin Moore, the Grand Dragon for the Loyal White Knights of Ku Klux Klan, said he was glad Heyer died in the attack.
“I’m sorta glad that them people got hit and I’m glad that girl died,” Moore said in a voicemail to WBTV. “They were a bunch of Communists out there protesting against somebody’s freedom of speech, so it doesn’t bother me that they got hurt at all.”
“I think we’re going to see more stuff like this happening at white nationalist events,” Moore warned.
The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is based in Pelham. Members of the group were in Charlottesville as a part of the demonstration.
In contrast to these rustics’ plain-spoken malevolence, suburban ACTBAC-NC’s marginally better-educated haters are busy playing a slightly more sophisticated rhetorical game, most recently posting on their Facebook page:
The evil has spread into the always disgraceful Roy Coopers (sic) office. HE says he does not want a Charlottesville to happen in NC, well he has no clue the division, violence, and conflict even making this mention will bring. So sad that political power is more important that (sic) the people of this state. The time is getting close brothers and sisters.
On the other side of the equation, North Carolina’s long-overlooked and marginal anarchist/wobbly/communist cosplayers, likewise sensing an opportunity for attention and relevance, are similarly itching for a fight. As one wobbly leader told me at a recent street action, “Peaceful protest doesn’t do shit, man. That’s just white liberal bullshit.”
A confrontation between these equal and opposite forces of destruction on the streets of Durham now seems imminent to many observers. Or as one state government official confided to me yesterday: “It’s going to be a rough few days or weeks ahead [for Durham]. Hopefully not years.”