Kidada Williams

They told me to shut the door and take my children and go to bed.

I shut the door but didn't go to bed.

I looked out of the crack after them until they got under the shadows of the trees.

For all of the people who are arrested, hardly anyone does time.

And a lot of that is because of the local communities and ongoing resistance to Black people being free, equal, and secure, and resistance to the federal government presuming that it should be doing anything in order to stop white Southerners from attacking Black Southerners.

A lot of people, they never surrender themselves to the government.

They just leave and go to another community.

A lot of people are pardoned.

right, for their activities.

And so that's why hardly anyone does any time, and they just go back into the communities doing some of the exact same things they had done before.

So you don't have as many Klan raids after all of the arrests, but you still have lynchings.

You still have massacres.

You still have a lot of targeted violence around elections through the end of the 19th century.

And that's how they're able to get Jim Crow installed, through violence and by seizing political power.

By the 1880s.

These are not the abolitionists they've styled themselves as.

Northerners and Westerners create this abolitionist cause, this mythology that they're all abolitionists.

And the reality is that they were not.

They only accept emancipation as a way to end the war quickly.

And they can get away with that because white Northerners and white Westerners are willing to turn deaf ear and blind eye to the violence in order to move on with the American experiment.