The Headless Klansman of Selma is the story of a Confederate monument that venerates the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Like the Trump political phenomenon, the statue originated as a backlash against the results of a free and fair election.
The people of Selma, Alabama elected the city’s first ever African American mayor on September 12, 2000. The defeated mayor, a former segregationist, quietly approved the KKK monument as a message for his successor and those who supported him.
The monument was vandalized in 2012, leaving it headless, and our film follows the ensuing battle to its May 23, 2015 conclusion.
Donald Trump’s golden escalator ride was three weeks later on June 16, 2015. The day after that, Dylann Roof brought a gun to a Bible Study at an African American church and killed nine people. This led to the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State Capitol grounds, a process I documented extensively.
The power of white grievance
On Feb 20, 2016, I was back at the South Carolina state capitol covering the presidential primary when I stumbled across a “Confederates for Trump” rally. This video was the result.
The Confederates weren’t exactly thrilled that Trump had said he supported the removal of their flag. But they knew instinctively that Trump was a suitable replacement, perhaps a better one. They told us Trump would save America from immigrants, Muslims, and the “ethnic cleansing of white people.”
The organizer of the rally gave us a copy of a conservative newspaper that included an article about how President Obama was a secret Muslim.
Trump’s Birtherism campaign, and his candidacy, were a backlash against the results of the 2008 election. There is a pattern here. Look up the term “Massive Resistance.”Or just consider that the Civil War was a violent backlash against the election of Abraham Lincoln. The Confederate flag being placed atop the South Carolina capitol in 1961 was a backlash against the Civil Rights movement. And, Selma’s KKK statue was a backlash against the 2000 mayoral election.
But unlike the Headless Klansman, Trump emerged after the 2008 election as a walking and talking, flesh-and-blood symbol of resentment — a rebuke and a retaliation against multiracial democracy and the outcomes it can sometimes produce. And, he had policy proposals to prevent that.
The Trump story and the Confederate monuments story fused, in my mind at least, in August of 2017 at the “Jews will not replace us!” rally — which began as a fight over a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, VA.
The torch bearers didn’t just chant about Jews. In reference to the perception that Russia had helped Trump win in 2016, they chanted:
“Russia is our friend, the South will rise again!”
The invisible word
Historian and author Tim Tyson said something that really stayed with me when we interviewed him for what became The Headless Klansman.
“When I grew up, there was an invisible word in parenthesis in front of the word Southerner, or South. And that was the word ‘white.’ When you said, ‘The South will never submit!’ you meant white!’”
Professor Tyson’s foil in Headless Klansman is Todd Kiscaden, a wealthy engineer who donated hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well as in-kind construction work, to support the Klansman monument.
Mr. Kiskaden defends the Ku Klux Klan as a “social club” designed for masquerading and parading. When the KKK discovered that their hoods and robes happened to frighten “skulkin’ around town, unemployed, getting into all sorts of mischief negroes,” they transformed into a “law and order” club. He doesn’t mention the thousands of innocent people who were tortured, murdered, and left hanging from trees, but rather the righteous objective of the KKK: to encourage African Americans to get jobs. If you don’t believe my summary, here is the KKK narrative in full:
History, if not basic common sense, will tell you that the former slaves were accustomed to hard work. Overwhelmingly, they intended to work as subsistence farmers. Jim Crow laws made it a crime, however, for them not to have jobs working for white men. It was “loitering,” punishable by incarceration, after which they could be sold back into slavery as part of their sentence. Sharecropping and working as domestic servants were the only jobs available to them, so that’s what the majority of them did. And as for the “skulkin’ around” business? That’s just one of many lies that were used to justify murder and terror.
The preferred lie was “rape” of course. Do I need to remind you which in politician in present-day likes to describe nonwhite people as “rapists” (while having been he himself accused of rape and sexual assault by 26 women)?
But let’s hone in on the “lazy loitering former slaves” lie. Did you notice in the film that two defenders of the Klansman monument connected “entitlement programs” with slavery? We heard that dozens of times in our travels. This is not just because they consider welfare programs morally equivalent to slavery. Present-day political beliefs about entitlement programs are rooted in grievances and lies made up by former slaveholders to justify the violent overthrow of democratically elected governments and decades of racial oppression.
False narratives that justify oppressing nonwhite people remain a dominant and fundamental part of our political discourse, as the Trump/Vance pet-eating lie attests. We need to come to terms with the fact that (white) false narratives lead to (white) political violence. Dylann Roof’s church massacre, Payton Gendron’s grocery store massacre (where he shot and killed African Americans and apologized to white people), the Tree of Life synagogue massacre, and January 6th insurrection are recent examples. History is filled with them, although most are forgotten.
Mr. Kiskaden gave us a copy of a book that he said proves his version of history. It is called “An Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan.” A decade later, I haven’t removed the shrink-wrap. But in the coming days, I will read this book. I’ll let you know how that goes.
Mr Kiscaden told us that when he goes to Civil War reenactments, he dresses up as both Confederate and Union generals. His performance as a Union general portrays a tyrant who intends future federal governments to oppress us by forcing us to have Obamacare.
Professor Tyson explained, rightly, “Arguments about history are always about the present.”
Fanatical Trump voters don’t mind when his racism and other forms of bigotry are out front and center. For decades, as propaganda pushed them further and further to the right, they held their noses and voted for candidates they felt were not racist enough. Along came Trump. It’s their time now.
Tepid Trump voters are the ones who rely on invisible words. Let’s add a few more invisible words while we’re at it. “Racism,” “political violence,” and the “racist lies” that stoke political violence. These are paths to (white) power when accepting the results of free and fair elections won’t do.
The tepid and the fanatical Trump supporters have formed a powerful coalition. But let’s not pretend the invisible words are invisible anymore. It’s time to stop pretending, and vote our values.
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