Once Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, he decided the best way for him to remain in power was to falsely claim that the election had been stolen. Trump had won the majority of white votes. The base of the Republican Party was nearly all-white, and Trump had come to personify this white party in a country that was increasingly racially diverse. Having won the white vote, his strategy extended to exhorting the most racist elements of his base to threaten violence if he wasn’t allowed to stay in the White House. He specifically alleged fraud in areas with large minority populations, where, unsurprisingly, he lost by wide margins.
The country was already full of racial anxiety. Gallup polls showed dissatisfaction with the state of race relations at 71 percent, a twenty-year high. After four years of Trump, this level of dissatisfaction was the same for people of every race.1
Even before the election, Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security had declared the threat of white supremacist violence to be the biggest terrorist threat to the United States. The Trump administration tried to bury the fact that during Trump’s time in office, white supremacists, according to DHS, had “conducted more lethal attacks in the United States than any other DVE [Domestic Violent Extremist] movement.” Trump preferred that the agency downplay these threats and instead call attention to potential attacks from foreigners, Black Lives Matter, or antifa. In reality, though, it was the “white supremacist extremists… [who] have demonstrated longstanding intent to target racial and religious minorities,” DHS officials admitted.2
On January 6, 2021, Kevin Seefried, a drywall construction worker from Delaware, came to Washington after swallowing a stew of Trump’s rhetoric, including social media posts claiming that the election had been fraudulent and calling on Congress to reject the certification of Biden’s victory. Seefried took a Confederate flag to the Ellipse, behind the White House, and waved it as Trump began his “Stop the Steal” speech that morning. Trump egged on the crowd, telling them that they were to go to Capitol Hill and send a message to Congress. “We are going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country,” Trump told an increasingly angry sea of mostly white men.3 The crowd started chanting “USA! USA!” as Seefried and many others left for the Capitol.
Seefried was not a known leader of any white supremacist group. Despite carrying the Confederate flag, he claimed to be a lone actor. Later he described his provocative flag as simply a “symbol of protest,” denying it was a banner representing the defenders of slavery.4 Whether part of an organized group or not, Seefried found himself and his flag leading the charge into the Capitol, alongside organized extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, whose members included many military veterans, former intelligence officials, and police officers. They were all motivated by Trump’s demagogy, with its fiery anger and latent charges of minority voter fraud.
Trump was still speaking when Seefried climbed through a smashed window, leading a surge of people into the Capitol itself. They were at the front of the swarm of ten thousand Trump supporters violently intent on stopping Congress from declaring that Trump had lost the presidential election. Seefried used the flagpole to jab at a Capitol Police officer named Eugene Goodman, who is Black. “Fuck you, I’m not leaving, where are the members at, where are they counting the votes? You can shoot me, man, but we’re coming in,” he told Goodman.5
As Seefried was breaking into the Capitol, Trump ended his speech by telling his supporters that he was joining them to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.” After he left the stage, Trump told his Secret Service driver that he also wanted to go to the Capitol, but the agent refused, insisting that the president return to the White House because extremists were already overrunning the barriers protecting Congress. By now, Proud Boys were smashing windows as other members of their group scaled the scaffolding built for the upcoming inaugural. Members of the Oath Keepers employed military-style formations, complete with walkie-talkie communications, to storm into the Capitol.
Those radicals were joined by lone actors like Seefried, as well as rioters belonging to the right-wing conspiracy-theory community QAnon. One of them, a female Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt, was shot by Capitol Police when she tried to climb through a window near the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Babbitt was a follower of the QAnon conspiracy theory that held that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden were part of a Satan-worshipping group of child abusers. She saw Trump as her savior, fighting to protect the country from the evil establishment in Washington.
The rioters, some wearing Trump flags as capes and many with MAGA hats, followed Seefried into the Capitol. They outnumbered law enforcement by nearly 60 to 1. Overrun, the police ordered an evacuation of the Capitol Complex, and the mayor of Washington declared a state of emergency. As the chaos grew, explosive devices were found at the nearby Republican and Democratic Party headquarters.6
Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence, who was in the Capitol to preside at the joint session of Congress, had to be rushed to a secure location as chants of “Hang Mike Pence” echoed in the halls of the Capitol. Even with his vice president under attack, Trump continued to tweet, falsely, that Pence could stop Biden’s certification. In fact, Pence had no constitutional or legal authority to do so. “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” Trump tweeted. The defeated president also worked the phones, reaching out to congressional allies and urging them not to endorse any result that would remove him from power.7
The violence engulfing Congress amounted to the biggest threat to democracy since the Civil War. At the White House, an indifferent Trump stubbornly refused demands from staff and family to order the people he’d incited to insurrection to stop. With Trump failing to act, President-elect Joe Biden held a press conference demanding that Trump “step up.” He condemned the riot, saying it was “not protest, it’s insurrection.”8
Biden then tweeted: “I call on President Trump to go on national television now to fulfill his oath and defend the Constitution by demanding an end to this siege.”9 Former president Obama also issued a statement on Twitter, squarely blaming Trump for having “incited” the unrest by telling a “lie about the outcome of the lawful election.”10
Three and a half hours into the bloody riot, even right-wing media personalities like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity began pressuring Trump’s chief of staff to halt the insurrection. Trump reluctantly agreed to record a video in the Rose Garden, but he refused to acknowledge his part in stirring the violence. Instead, he continued to repeat the lies that provoked the anger of his supporters in the first place. “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side,” Trump said in a video that he released on Twitter. “But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order…. So go home. We love you, you’re very special…. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace.”11
By nightfall, with reinforcements from the National Guard arriving, the Capitol Police worked to push out the remaining rioters. But it was not until nearly 10 p.m., more than nine hours after Seefried had led the charge, that the building was fully secure. Vice President Pence, who at one point had been hiding in a parking garage, was able to return to the House chamber and restart the certification process: “Today was a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol,” he intoned. It wasn’t until 3:40 the next morning that Congress certified Biden’s election.12
The January 6 attacks resulted in assaults on more than 150 members of the U.S. Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Department, including the killing of Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick. Meanwhile, in addition to Babbitt, three other Trump supporters died in the aftermath of their savage assault that day.13
More than a thousand people were eventually charged for their roles in the insurrection; 18 percent of them were veterans, according to information from the University of Maryland and the Justice Department.14 Some were even active-duty law enforcement officers who had come to Washington. The presence of so many protesters with that background on January 6 was alarming given that only 7 percent of the general American population had ties to military service. In fact, a later study by the RAND Corporation showed that one third of U.S. veterans believed in the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that held that people of color were being brought into the United States to replace the white majority.15
Imagine if the protesters storming the Capitol had been people of color. What happened on January 6 stood in stark contrast to the massive law enforcement response to the George Floyd protests the previous summer, despite those protests being mostly peaceful. The juxtaposition was even more pronounced given that U.S. government intelligence agencies had been warned in advance that an attack was being planned by white supremacist Trump supporters. Even as the insurrection started, one Republican senator, Josh Hawley of Missouri, raised his fist in solidarity with the crowd. Incredibly, some U.S. Capitol police were seen taking selfies with insurgents just before the violence began.
The day after the riot, even a white moderate like Joe Biden had to acknowledge the shocking racial double standard in police response. “No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesters yesterday that they wouldn’t have been treated very differently than the mob that stormed the Capitol. We all know that’s true—and it’s unacceptable,” Biden said.16
The leaders of Black Lives Matter were even more blunt. Patrisse Cullors tweeted: “What is happening today comes from a long history of white supremacist violence against Black people. White supremacist terrorists are willing to hurt, harm and kill to protect themselves and their whiteness.”17 Makia Green, a Black Lives Matter activist from Washington, D.C., said: “It felt like abuse to see not just white privilege but white supremacy in action. To see the bias from the government, from the police.”18
Had the races been switched, “there would have been a massacre,” wrote Shaun Harper, the executive director of the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California. He pointedly said that if outraged Black people had tried to stop the certification of a national election, they would have been “swiftly killed.”
“Snipers would have gunned down every Black protester scaling the Capitol. One Jan. 6 insurrectionist was shot and killed; surely, there would have been hundreds, perhaps thousands more had they been Black,” Harper wrote.19
The glaring double standard even drew attention from Major General William Walker, the head of the D.C. National Guard and a Black man. “I think it would have been more bloodshed if the [racial] composition would have been different,” he said.20
The most visible immediate response to Trump’s violent white supporters was political. Within a week of the attack, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump for his role inciting the insurrection. It would be Trump’s second impeachment trial, unprecedented in American history.
“There’s no question—none—that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” said the top Republican in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.”21 But shortly after Joe Biden took office, McConnell, like most Republicans, refused to convict Trump, using as an excuse the fact that he was no longer in office by the time they voted. Only seven Republicans voted in favor of conviction, not enough to reach the two thirds necessary to win a guilty verdict.
At Biden’s inauguration on January 20, on the steps of the Capitol that had recently been under siege, the new president spoke in emotional terms about the racial trauma the nation had been through. “A cry for racial justice some four hundred years in the making moves us,” Biden told the crowd, calling attention to race as the central factor in both the insurrection and the George Floyd protests. This was the heart of the Second Civil Rights Movement on display before the entire nation. “The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer…. And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront, and we will defeat.”
Referring to the promise of Dr. King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered from the other end of the Mall, Biden told the crowd: “Today, we mark the swearing-in of the first woman in American history elected to national office—Vice President Kamala Harris. Don’t tell me things can’t change.”22
Also marking the historic significance of the moment, Biden thanked former president Obama, who was seated behind him. Here was a moment in history where the first Black president not only watched his vice president take office, but also saw the first woman—and the first person of color—assume the vice presidency. Their presence on the dais signaled the extent of the racial change taking place in America, despite the white supremacist riots violently trying to stop it.
There was further political celebration for Democrats. In addition to gaining control of the White House, they had gained control of both the House and Senate for the first time since 2009 and 2010, the first two years of Obama’s term.
This was possible because of the late outcome of two U.S. Senate races in Georgia. Both were special run-off elections held in early January, and both saw the Democrats take seats previously held by Republicans. Jon Ossoff, a Jewish candidate, and Raphael Warnock, a Black candidate, defeated two white incumbents. Republican voters failed to turn out, as Trump continued to broadcast lies about voter fraud and to promote the idea that elections should not be trusted. The victories in Georgia meant that the Democrats in Washington now had a 50-50 split in the Senate. With Vice President Harris as the deciding vote, they took control of the legislative agenda in both houses of Congress.
Georgia’s new senators owed their victories in part to the work done by Stacey Abrams to register and energize Democratic voters, especially Blacks. There had been concern about Black voter turnout for the special election at an unusual time of year, but Black voters came out in record numbers, with 94 percent of them, according to AP VoteCast, backing Ossoff and Warnock.23
“The work that we’ve done to build infrastructure absolutely was the game changer,” said Abrams, describing the 2020 election. “You compare it to 2018. There is a measurable and meaningful difference in the size of the [Black] electorate participation rates and support rates. That’s meaningful.”24
Black Lives Matter should have been poised to take off at the start of 2021. There was a new energy with diverse leaders in so many positions of power in Washington. A Black politician, James Clyburn, was the number-three ranking member in the House and had unparalleled influence with Biden. Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco liberal who had expressed support for Black Lives Matter, was speaker of the House. And the Squad was putting left-wing pressure on Biden to enact a progressive agenda that Black Lives Matter favored.
Patrisse Cullors, the organization’s remaining leader, asked to meet with Biden and Harris after the election, but Biden never responded. Instead, the president-elect met with Black leaders from every other civil rights group, including the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, and the National Action Network (Al Sharpton’s organization). “To set up a meeting with civil rights leaders, without BLM, is unacceptable,” Black Lives Matter angrily tweeted.25 Cullors made the case that her organization had been involved in getting out the vote, enabling Biden and Harris to win the White House. “It’s demeaning to the countless times we took our protest to the streets to call for justice for our Black brothers and sisters taken from us at the hands of police,” she wrote in an email to her supporters.26
Cullors had a point. Black Lives Matter remained popular in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests. In fact, it was far more popular than Martin Luther King Jr. had ever been during his lifetime. The organization’s approval rating had declined in the months after the marches had ended, going from 67 percent to 55 percent support, but that was still a high number for any activist civil rights organization.27
Even so, the Biden team continued to keep Black Lives Matter at arm’s length. Biden stressed his concern that conservatives wanted to paint all Democrats as radicals who sought to eliminate police departments. “That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police. We’re not. We’re talking about holding them accountable,” Biden told civil rights leaders. “We’re talking about giving [the police] money to do the right things. We’re talking about putting more psychologists and psychiatrists on the telephones when the 911 calls [come] through. We’re talking about spending money to enable them to do their jobs better, not with more force, with less force and more understanding.”28
Biden had support from Black congressional leaders, some of whom were veterans of the First Civil Rights Movement. Like BLM, they were operating in an evolving social and political environment. Unlike BLM, however, these older elected officials were more cautious and open to compromise than the insistent, demanding younger generation. They’d learned tough lessons from errors made during the earlier movement.
“I think the Black Lives Matter today is where SNCC was in the 1960s,” said Representative Clyburn. The veteran South Carolina congressman recalled that before Georgia representative and civil rights icon John Lewis died in 2020, the two men sat in the back of the House chamber and discussed the new civil rights activists. Lewis warned him, “ ‘Defund the Police’ was going to do to Black Lives Matter what ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’ did to SNCC.” That slogan hurt the First Civil Rights Movement with Middle America when it was used by SNCC leaders during the riots of the 1960s. This hard-earned wisdom was one reason experienced Black leaders were more trusted by Biden; they counseled the president about the need to respond to BLM, but not necessarily meet every demand.29
The distance between the White House and Black Lives Matter leadership was about more than just the slogan “Defund the Police.” Black Lives Matter had also issued a seven-point “demand” agenda that was unrealistic in a country where Republicans held nearly half the seats in Congress. The organization wanted to expel many Republicans from Congress for trying to overturn the election and inciting “a white supremacist attack.” They also wanted to ban Donald Trump from all social media. The recent dip among Americans in their support of Black Lives Matter had been most noticeable among moderate whites, the politically potent group whose support Biden needed to pass his legislative agenda.30
While Black Lives Matter was on the defensive in Washington, it was also battling internal conflicts. In late 2020, a group of ten chapters, calling themselves the #BLM10, publicly criticized Cullors for her lack of transparency and her failure to get input from the chapters’ grassroots leaders. “Our chapters have consistently raised concerns about financial transparency, decision making, and accountability,” the statement read. “Despite years of effort, no acceptable internal process of accountability has ever been produced… and [recent] events have undermined the efforts of chapters seeking to democratize [Black Lives Matter’s] processes and resources.”31
The infighting was ironic. Ever since the founding of Black Lives Matter, Cullors had made a point of eschewing the hierarchical, “great man model” of the First Civil Rights Movement. Yet when it came to handling the huge new donations after the George Floyd protests, Cullors sought to consolidate power under her unchecked control.
Black Lives Matter had never been transparent about its donations, having delegated the management of its financial accounting to a larger foundation. The organization’s leadership resisted questions about money as unnecessary and obtrusive attacks by critics. But after the tremendous surge in donations in 2020, it filed tax forms under a new name: Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.
After reviewing the organization’s tax forms, the Associated Press reported that Black Lives Matter had taken in $90 million in donations after the Floyd protests, $60 million of which still sat in the bank the following year. The AP observed that “this marks the first time in the movement’s nearly eight-year history that BLM leaders have revealed a detailed look at their finances.” In what appeared to be an incredible conflict of interest, members of Cullors’s family and close personal friends were employed by the organization or received funding from them. Cullors paid nearly a million dollars to the father of her child for helping stage events. She also paid nearly another million to her brother for security work. And her deputy executive director’s consulting firm was paid $2 million by Black Lives Matter.32
These disclosures sparked a string of right-wing media attacks. Most of the previous criticisms had to do with Black Lives Matter’s leftist ideology and lack of a clear agenda, but now an all-star lineup of conservative media, led by the New York Post, Fox News, the Daily Mail, and National Review, ran a raft of harsh stories portraying Black Lives Matter not merely as an entitled, arrogant group of radical leftists, but corrupt as well.
Conservative attention focused on four houses purchased between 2016 and 2020 under Cullors’s name. The houses, in California and Georgia, were valued collectively at $3.2 million. But the biggest story was about the group’s purchase of a $6 million “luxury property” in Los Angeles. The six-bedroom house also had a swimming pool and soundstage. Black Lives Matter claimed it was to be used as a retreat for Black artists and to hold events.33
The right-wing press went into a frenzy of attacks. It had long wanted to defeat Black Lives Matter because the organization pushed a powerful counterpoint to Trump’s narrative about the threat of Black criminals and dangerous big cities. With these revelations of financial mismanagement, criticism became blistering, moving beyond right-wing outlets and into mainstream coverage.
The condemnation came closer to the heart of their cause when two mothers of young Black people killed by police released a public letter critical of Black Lives Matter. The mother of Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old who had been killed by Cleveland police in 2014, and the mother of Richard Risher, who had been killed by Los Angeles police in 2016, accused the group of raising money off the deaths of their children: “The ‘activists’ have events in our cities and have not given us anything substantial for using our loved ones’ images and names on their flyers…. We don’t want or need y’all parading in the streets accumulating donations, platforms, movie deals, etc. off the death of our loved ones, while the families and communities are left clueless and broken. Don’t say our loved ones’ names period! That’s our truth!”34 The torrent of denunciations continued when Tamika Palmer, the mother of Breonna Taylor, also posted emotional, angry comments on Facebook calling out Black Lives Matter as a “fraud.”35
With news about their confused finances and airing of dirty laundry in the press, Cullors resigned from the Black Lives Matter board. Making no mention of the growing critiques now overshadowing the group and her personally, she said, “I’ve created the infrastructure and the support, and the necessary bones and foundation, so that I can leave. It feels like the time is right.”36 When news of Cullors’s resignation became public, Risher’s mother told the New York Post, “Now she doesn’t have to show her accountability. She can just take the money and run.”37
Cullors appeared on an MSNBC podcast to admit to “mistakes.” She said that she was overwhelmed as someone who had created a group in response to a social injustice. She defended herself as a novice who was given no grace and not allowed to “learn from those mistakes.”38 She later posted a denial of wrongdoing on Instagram, saying that she “never misappropriated funds.”39
Sean Campbell, a Black writer whose investigations of Black Lives Matter’s finances appeared in New York magazine, later tweeted that the revelations had been “heartbreaking.”40 He told NPR, “It hurts me that some people might try and twist this in ways that this organization is somehow standing in for the movement as a whole, which is absolutely false…. That is not the movement.”41
These scandals ensured that Black Lives Matter would remain on the outside as the power of the Second Civil Rights Movement shifted from street protests to the halls of power in Washington. The Biden White House may have abandoned Black Lives Matter, but it did not want to abandon the Black voters who had put the president in office. Administration officials began to push two legislative issues to cement President Biden’s support with Black voters—police reform and voting rights.
Police reform, the issue that had taken Black Lives Matter to the heights of public awareness and came to define the Second Civil Rights Movement, remained on the front burner for the new administration. Despite the change in the White House, the number of police killings in America continued to rise, according to the Washington Post database. In 2021, a record high 1,050 people would die at the hands of police.42
At the urging of the liberals in the House, the Democratic majority passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. More than one hundred civil rights groups supported the bill, which banned chokeholds and required that law enforcement keep track of the use of force and officers found guilty of misconduct. The groundbreaking bill required that police use body cameras and prohibited no-knock warrants. It also restricted the transfer of federal military equipment to local police departments. The bill even contained money for training police to stop the use of racial profiling.
When the bill was sent to the Senate, it ran into opposition from Republicans, who objected to a provision that would have ended “qualified immunity,” the legal doctrine that protected police officers from personal liability if they committed violent acts while on duty.
Mitch McConnell assigned Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate, to negotiate a compromise. He reached agreement on no-knock warrants, limiting transfer of military equipment to police, and banning chokeholds. But he could not reach a deal on qualified immunity. The key factor was that Republicans relied on support from police unions, who lobbied vigorously to ensure that qualified immunity remain untouched.
Scott pronounced the bill dead, falsely pointing a finger at Democrats, who he said “could not let go of their push to defund our law enforcement.”43 Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who led the Democrats’ negotiating team in the Senate, said the deal they were pushing was not about defunding the police, but about raising professional standards.44 Still, a Republican filibuster prevented any further movement on creating the new law.
In the absence of congressional action, President Biden had no legal power to create new practices for local police departments. The best he could do was to order the Justice Department to resume work with local police by agreeing on consent decrees to limit the use of violent police tactics and to review patterns of abusive, often racist, police behavior. Most of the existing consent decrees under Obama had been undone by the Trump administration.
Biden also ordered the Justice Department to ban federal law enforcement—from the FBI to the Park Police—from using chokeholds and restrict no-knock warrants. The Justice Department also required that federal agents use body cameras when executing search warrants or planning arrests.45
The stumbles on police reform were deflating, given the extent of the protests the previous year and the tsunami of public support from people of all colors. As difficult as it was to find a way forward on police reform, there was an even steeper hill to climb when it came to another point of agreement between the Biden administration and the Second Civil Rights Movement—how to combat Republican voter suppression.
Initially the Biden administration put its support behind the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which sought to maintain laws allowing mail-in voting, extending early voting, and preventing more stringent voter ID requirements in Republican-controlled states. Though the bill passed the House, Republicans once again blocked passage in the Senate.
The administration then pushed for a larger bill—the Freedom to Vote Act—that would have enacted national voting standards and ended a patchwork system that allowed some states to suppress the vote. But Senator McConnell defeated the federal standards bill with a filibuster. He said that the nationwide rules would have “the federal government take over how elections are conducted all over America.”46 Coming on the heels of the failure to pass police reform, Biden came out swinging against his Republican opponents.
“Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?” Biden asked rhetorically of Republican leadership in Congress. Speaking before an audience from several historically Black colleges and universities (HCBUs) in Atlanta, he said, “Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”47
Republicans acted as if they were deeply wounded for being compared to defenders of slavery and segregationists. Senator Mitt Romney, who had voted to impeach Trump after the insurrection, said that Biden had unfairly accused “good and principled colleagues in the Senate of having sinister, even racist inclinations….
“He charged that voting against his bill allies us with Bull Connor, George Wallace, and Jefferson Davis. So much for unifying the country and working across the aisle,” said Romney.48 McConnell said that Biden was unfairly invoking the Civil War “to demonize Americans who disagree with him. He compared a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors.”49 Still, for all of their indignation over the comparisons to infamous racists, Republicans did nothing to prevent states from suppressing the votes of the young and minorities.
Al Sharpton met with Biden after his address, saying, “I told the president he gave a monumental speech and, though I have been challenging him for months to be forthcoming, it was better late than never.”50 Despite the strength of Biden’s remarks and his willingness to be combative with Republicans, he was unable to convince them to act on the bills in the Senate.
The highly charged political environment of Washington allowed for no middle ground. In the First Movement’s era, there was a moderate faction in Congress that could be persuaded by passionate, well-reasoned argument; in 2021, due to the polarization created by Trump and the January 6 insurrection, there was no such group of legislators. Republicans dug their heels in and continued to deny the significance of the violence on Capitol Hill. Instead they focused on condemning what they said were violent protests led by antifa and BLM that had destroyed American cities.
Despite this yawning political divide, the Biden administration remained under tremendous pressure to prove that it could deliver concrete results for its political base of white progressives and Black communities. What followed was a series of small victories that could be advertised to the president’s supporters.
The first such move was to declare Juneteenth a federal holiday. Juneteenth had long been a celebration in Texas, but never nationwide. The history was compelling. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had freed the slaves in the Confederate states in January 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, but it took more than two years for news of emancipation to reach the southeastern part of Texas. It wasn’t until General Gordon Granger and his Union troops entered the port city of Galveston in June 1865 that the enslaved population finally learned the war had ended two months earlier and that they were free.
Texas made June 19, the anniversary of Granger’s proclamation, a statewide holiday in 1980. Now, more than forty years later, after George Floyd’s death and Biden’s election, this was a neatly packaged symbol for Democrats who wanted to act on behalf of Black America. The bill passed overwhelmingly in Congress, with only minor objections from Republicans.
At the White House signing ceremony, Vice President Harris spoke to the importance of the holiday and its meaning: “We are gathered here in a house built by enslaved people,” Harris told the gathering, which included members of the Congressional Black Caucus and civil rights leaders. “We are footsteps away from where President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. We have come far, and we have far to go. But today is a day of celebration. It is not only a day of pride. It’s also a day for us to reaffirm and rededicate ourselves to action.”51
Next, Biden rewarded progressive voters by changing the names of several U.S. military bases. This had been a controversial topic, with strong racial overtones going back to the 1920s, when segregationists in Congress named many military installations in the South to honor Confederate generals. In Biden’s first year in office, he established a Pentagon commission to review nine bases that had been named for Confederate leaders.
Historians had long noted that several of these bases were named during a period when Southerners were celebrating the “Lost Cause” of the Confederate army’s defeat in the Civil War. The push to remove these Confederate names gained new traction in 2015, after Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine Black people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and after Governor Nikki Haley had taken the controversial step of removing the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol. In the aftermath of the Floyd killing, NASCAR had even responded by banning the display of Confederate flags at its races.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, refused to deal with calls to rename the military bases. Dodging the racial implications of bases named for Confederates, he instead turned the debate to the issue of patriotism by tweeting, “My Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations. Our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not be tampered with. Respect our Military!”52
Trump’s opposition notwithstanding, the mostly white and male military leadership did support changing the names. David Petraeus, the retired general who had been head of U.S. Central Command and later director of the CIA, wrote soon after the Floyd protests began: “The irony of training at bases named for those who took up arms against the United States, and for the right to enslave others, is inescapable to anyone paying attention. Now, belatedly, is the moment for us to pay such attention.”53 Still, nothing changed until Trump left the White House.
President Biden’s secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, a Black man and a retired general himself, quickly agreed to change the names of the nine military installations. Among the notable examples was Fort Lee in Virginia, named after Robert E. Lee, the general who led the Confederate army. The Pentagon renamed this base Fort Gregg-Adams, after two Black soldiers from the World War II era. Fort Hood in Texas (named for John Bell Hood) became Fort Cavazos, named for a Latino leader. Fort Bragg, the country’s largest base, located in North Carolina (and named for Braxton Bragg), became Fort Liberty.
The Biden administration knew that in order to have a real impact on the lives of Black Americans, it had to move beyond the symbolism of new names for bases and a new federal holiday. The continued spotlight on police violence against Blacks reignited the nation’s memory of its troubled history of lynching. For centuries, Black people were at risk of being grabbed on the street for any reason and hanged from trees or tortured. Lynching was a constant, visible, and vile example of a long line of racial violence used by segregationists to intimidate racial minorities. This practice was especially prevalent in the South, often taking place on hidden back roads and sometimes perpetrated by racist sheriff’s departments. Efforts to declare lynching a federal crime had been stuck in Congress, where such bills had failed 250 times in more than 120 years.
Even during the height of the First Civil Rights Movement, Congress would not pass a federal anti-lynching law, despite the efforts of the NAACP, Martin Luther King Jr., and other activists. A little over a year after the 2017 Charlottesville rally, when the Democrats gained majority control of the House of Representatives, an anti-lynching bill was reintroduced, but again the effort went nowhere.
Racial violence—whether by police, hate groups, or lone gunmen—was not a thing of the past. With Trump in office, hate crimes had spiked, with an additional 450 incidents taking place from 2019 to 2020. And yet much of American society remained intent on denying the depths of the brutal problem.
With Biden in office, the effort gained new life. The bill, called the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, finally recognized the damage done by racial terrorism. Many of these murderous episodes remained lost to history. One that did not was the notorious murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was lynched in 1955 while visiting Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman. He was beaten, tied to a cotton gin, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. His mother took his remains home to Chicago for the funeral. With the casket open, showing her son’s mutilated body, mourners lined the streets of the city, and news photos of the cadaver were prominently featured in the Black press, especially Jet magazine.
The publicity around the Till case was extraordinary. Rarely was there such visible proof of the daily terror inflicted on racial minorities during that time—4,745 confirmed lynchings between 1882 and 1968. These killings occurred after the Civil War and do not include the violent efforts to subjugate slaves. Some of the untold stories were uncovered by the journalist Ida B. Wells, an early crusader in the 1890s, when she published her Southern Horrors pamphlets. Her findings suggested the larger magnitude of the fear and violence felt by minority communities, especially among Black people in the South.
The Emmett Till Antilynching Act passed the House with almost unanimous support, 422–3. The three Republicans who voted against the bill argued that it was either unnecessary or, in the words of Representative Chip Roy of Texas, that it was part of an effort by Democrats to “advance a woke agenda under the guise of correcting racial injustice.” In the Senate, the bill passed by unanimous consent, which allowed Republicans to have it become law without each individual senator having to cast a vote in support of it.
It was notable that at the signing ceremony, much like the Juneteenth event, President Biden asked Vice President Harris to speak. In her remarks, she noted that the first anti-lynching proposal had reached Congress in 1900, and it failed. “Lynching is not a relic of the past,” Harris said. “Racial acts of terror still occur in our nation. And when they do, we must all have the courage to name them and hold the perpetrators to account.”54
Civil rights groups celebrated the new law. “The most transformative civil rights legislation that we have has been paid for by the blood of Black people,” said Damon Hewitt, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “When people talk about Black Lives Matter, that’s what it means.”55
But some members of the Second Civil Rights Movement were less effusive. Rashad Robinson noted that while Color of Change celebrated passage of the act, it had little to do with the kind of violence that had ended George Floyd’s life. “While we celebrate this historic moment, we cannot pretend that the passage of this bill is an end to the ongoing violence Black people face,” he said. “Seeing Congress condemn a tool of political oppression from the last century does not let them off the hook when it comes to addressing the tools of anti-Black political oppression in this century.”
A year later, the history-making law had not been used to prosecute anyone, despite continued racial violence. Robinson said that the bill should be just the start of efforts to protect voting rights and urged an end to filibuster rules in the Senate, which had made it impossible to enact police reform and voting rights protection. “We must keep pushing Congress and the White House to deliver real justice for Black people,” he said.56
It was notable that Black Lives Matter was not involved with the anti-lynching bill and had nothing to say about it once it passed. The organization became insular after the Cullors scandals and her departure, and it continued to be on the defensive, responding to lawsuits and only occasionally raising the cause of police shootings of Black people.
President Biden still faced criticism for lacking a major accomplishment that spoke for Black life in America. The moment arrived when Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court in January 2022.
During the South Carolina primary in 2020, Representative Clyburn had pulled Biden aside during a break in a candidates debate to insist that when he went back onstage, he should promise to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Biden, in dire need of Black support to win the nomination, did just that. “And [in response to] the very last question that was asked that night,” Clyburn recalled, “he made the commitment to put a Black woman on the Supreme Court. It got the loudest applause overnight. And that’s what it took to solidify support among Black women for that election.”57
Two years later, following Justice Breyer’s retirement, the question was, Would Biden follow through? He didn’t hesitate. With Breyer by his side at the White House to announce his departure from the court, Biden immediately affirmed his pledge, saying that the nominee “will be someone with extraordinary qualifications, character, experience, and integrity—and that person will be the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court. It’s long overdue, in my view.”58
The court that Biden’s nominee would join had a six-to-three majority of conservative justices, including three appointed by Trump. That court had issued rulings that most civil rights groups criticized, including judgments to restrict voting rights. And at the time of Breyer’s departure, this conservative court was poised to overturn decades-long legal precedent on cases ranging from abortion rights to affirmative action.
Critics on right-wing cable and radio immediately complained that Biden was unfairly excluding better-qualified candidates. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas did not try to give his argument any veil of decorum, complaining that Biden was simply discriminating against white men: “He’s saying, if you’re a white guy, tough luck.”59 But Biden didn’t budge.
Speculation immediately centered on three judges: Ketanji Brown Jackson, Leondra Kruger, and J. Michelle Childs. In some ways this was a replay of Biden’s search for a Black woman to be his vice president. Harris was a U.S. senator and clearly well qualified. But she had to compete with other Black women on a short list of nominees, including two members of Congress, Val Demings and Karen Bass, not to mention the formidable Stacey Abrams.
There was an abundance of qualified candidates in the search for a Supreme Court nominee, too. But this competition unfolded at an even more elevated level. It wasn’t just about having a strong résumé and political charisma. It also required judicial experience. This would be a lifetime appointment, and Biden needed a nominee who could immediately jump into the fray against the court’s conservative majority.
There were also politics involved. Representative Clyburn, the man who’d thrown Biden a political lifeline with Black voters in South Carolina, backed Judge Childs, a federal district court judge from his state. Meanwhile, Kruger drew support from having served in the Obama Justice Department and the fact that she’d served in the nation’s biggest state as an associate justice on the California Supreme Court.
But Jackson was the front-runner. She already sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is regarded as the second most important court in the country. A Harvard graduate and a former Supreme Court clerk, she had served on President Obama’s Sentencing Commission and had been Obama’s selection for a seat on the U.S. District Court. In fact, she had been considered for an earlier vacancy on the Supreme Court in 2016, after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
“For too long our government, our courts, haven’t looked like America,” Biden said while nominating Jackson. “I believe it is time that we have a court that reflects the full talents and greatness of our nation.”60 Even Black Lives Matter could not dismiss her nomination as symbolic, writing in a statement, “This is huge—because this takes us on the road to finally ending the 230 years of Black women’s exclusion from the Supreme Court.”61
The hearings were quick and uneventful, with the notable exception of Jackson being constantly interrupted by Republican white men. There was one memorable exchange with Senator Ted Cruz. He questioned her role as a board member of a private school in Washington that allowed books on racial issues into its curriculum. Holding up a copy of Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi, he asked Jackson: “Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist?”
In front of the cameras and microphones in the Senate hearing room, she smirked and sighed loudly. “Senator, I do not believe that any child should be made to feel as though they are racist, or though they are not valued, or though they are less than, that they are victims, that they are oppressors. I do not believe in any of that.”62
Despite the conservative attempts to portray her as less qualified and pursuing a left-wing agenda, she was confirmed by a vote of 53–47. Only three Republicans supported her.
Unlike anything else Biden had done since the election, putting Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court was celebrated across Black America, with her appointment resonating especially among Black women. Their power within the Democratic Party as the most reliable bloc of voters had garnered a major victory.
Jackson’s appointment was also widely hailed among civil rights groups and activists of all ages and races. Stacey Abrams captured the historic moment in a euphoric response: “Representation matters. We dismiss it when it feels too obvious…. But it matters, it matters to have a black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.”63
Jackson cheerfully exalted after her confirmation as well, saying, “It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, but we’ve made it! We’ve made it—all of us.”64
Getting Justice Jackson on the court was a real victory for the Second Civil Rights Movement, just as getting Thurgood Marshall on the court was a victory for the First Civil Rights Movement. It was also the logical next chapter after the victory that triggered the Second Civil Rights Movement—the election of Barack Obama.
Despite the protestations of Trump’s rearguard defenders still in Congress, Biden had succeeded in enacting a number of changes, both symbolic and substantive. But while things were moving ahead on the federal level, a new fight was under way, mostly in Republican-controlled red states and cities. Their “anti-woke” grassroots revolution was the new phase of the battle over shifting racial demographics in a growing culture war.