Source: David McNew / Getty
It should shock no one that Tennessee, specifically Nashville, is apparently, still experiencing a Nazi problem. This time, they’re using the “terror” of Black kids making music by playing in a drumming circle in a public area.
Real quick, let’s get some backstory out of the way.
The KKK, a Nazi precursor, was started in Pulaski, Tennessee, immediately following the close of the Civil War in 1865. Within five years its terrorist network had spread across the South: the lynchings, the burning down of Black towns and communities so land could be stolen, the raping of Black women and the “legally sanctioned” executions of falsely accused Black men, women and children at least as young as 14—that was a coordinated effort. It may have been decentralized in some cases but they all knew the mission: Kill the N—-rs who are doing everything better than us and loot them for all they got. The remaining ones: run ’em out, starve ’em out and make them work for you like the good ole days of Dixie and of course, kill the disagreeable ones.
George Junius Stinney Jr., the 14-year-old Black boy, the child framed for murder and the youngest person legally executed in 20th Century America .Source: South Carolina Department of Corrections / South Carolina Department of Corrections
Started From Top Now We’re Here
But it wasn’t just people who were known to be inbred rednecks who terrorized. It was presidents too. Barry Goldwater tried it in the early 1960s using what he called the Southern Strategy. It was designed to engage and empower white people in the south who’d been Democrats (well, Dixiecrats like George Wallace, not Democrats like JFK) and bring them into a new Republican Party–one that was absolutely the “Not the Party of Lincoln.” It’s the MAGA party we know now.
They did it by dog whistling racist tropes and frames and making promises of support to the whites of the region. And where Goldwater failed personally, his theory soared. By the time Richard “the crook” Nixon ran in 1968, it was fully up and running and has been used by Republican presidents from him, to Reagan to Trump–and Republicans since including Reagan and Trump, the Southern Strategy has been in play.
But before them, beloved Democrat, FDR, kind of led the way. He created policy ostensibly to help small southern farmers in 1937, knowing the Jim Crow laws of the South would ensure Black people would be harmed by a law meant to help (white people–they neglected to include that part).
It was never much, and it was never close to just, but by the early 20th century, Black people had something to hold on to…Black farmland in Mississippi totaled 2.2 million acres in 1910—some 14 percent of all Black-owned agricultural land in the country, and the most of any state.
Joe Brooks, the former president of the Emergency Land Fund, a group founded in 1972 to fight the problem of dispossession, has estimated that something on the order of 6 million acres was [taken] by Black farmers from 1950 to 1969…an average of 820 acres a day—an area the size of New York’s Central Park erased with each sunset. [In today’s dollars, that’s $6.6 billion…[a] devastating catastrophe, one created and maintained by federal policy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal life raft for agriculture helped start the trend in 1937 with the establishment of the Farm Security Administration, an agency within the Department of Agriculture.
Although the FSA ostensibly existed to help the country’s small farmers, as [predictably] happened with much of the rest of the New Deal, white administrators often ignored or targeted poor Black people [who were in need during the depression].
In other cases, they just killed Black people including landowners and businesspeople, destroying families for generations.
Nashville, Tennessee, 2024
This month alone, the streets of Nashville have seen multiple Nazi marches involving angry and perpetually aggrieved white men carrying Confederate flags, upside-down American flags, swastika flags, banners with hateful messages and other products that suggest all of the good tiki torch stores in Tennessee are currently out of business.
Last Saturday, it happened again, and, this time, the band of Third Reich rejects in Klan-Khaki Knickers reportedly shouting racial slurs at a group of Black boys who were playing drums on plastic buckets downtown. On Wednesday, the boys and their families teamed up with two Black Tennessee Democrats, Reps. Justin Jones and G.A. Hardaway, to speak out about what happened, but not before they kicked things off with a performance showing off their skills on their makeshift drums.
From WPLN News:
Detonio Wilson, 10, said that they have been playing drums downtown for about three years. Most people just walk by, while some stop to record them or drop cash in their tip jar — money the boys save up to spend on clothes and shoes. But last weekend, a group of neo-Nazis stopped to yell racial slurs.
“We didn’t say nothing to them. They just wanted to mess with Black kids like us, and just mess up our day,” said Wilson.
The kids and their families said that Nashville police officers had previously threatened to arrest them for performing downtown without a permit. And they said, on Saturday, the officers at the scene did not confront the neo-Nazis, instead escorting the boys a block away and telling them to go home.
Tennessee: A Terrorist Comfort Zone Black Dems Are Challenging
Imagine that: The Killer Kops of Karensville wanted to arrest Black kids for—*checks notes*—making live beats without a permit, but white supremacists shouting vulgar, racist slurs at minors who are minding their own business get a pass while said minors are being forced to move along.
“These are all of our children,” said Rep. Jones. “We have an obligation to protect them and to address the failure of the adults who were there, who call themselves Nashville’s guardians”
Jones continued, “What were they doing to be guardians for our babies?” (You might remember Rep. Jones as one of the two Black congressmen who supposedly anti-cancel culture Republicans tried to expel for leading an anti-gun protest on the House floor in the wake of the Nashville elementary school shooting last year. Who would’ve thought the GOP and white supremacist neo-Nazis would have the same enemy, amirite?)
“The question that we have to ask is: Why do they feel so comfortable coming to Tennessee and demonstrating that behavior, recruiting in Tennessee? Why are they coming here?” asked Rep. Hardaway of Memphis. It was an authentic question. All the effort being put into making fake history books for children while banning books that have actual, documented evidence of the past, can make it hard to see that the past is prologue.
On the other hand, maybe the Kaucasian face-Krater Koalition was just envious (as they’ve always been) of Black people’s abilities, in this case our rhythm. Maybe they were mad the Black kids didn’t make beats that Donald Trump could dance to?
Anyway, Jones and Hardaway took the group of kids on a tour of the Tennessee State Capitol, where they explained that they probably wouldn’t be going back downtown anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean a bunch of Krusty Kanker sore-having Krazies are going to make them quit drumming. It may make them louder, in fact.
See More:
Tennessee State University Hosts Protests After Governor Strips HBCU Of Its Board Of Trustees
Republican Felon Linked To Neo-Nazis Unanimously Allowed To Stay On North Carolina Ballot
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