So true, the vigilance must remain strong as this new wave is loud and obnoxious in their vile and putrid hatred and supremacy. Thank you for pointing out this “ugly” history. It is not ugly for black Americans though, but for their brutal white torturers. You can in the phot you linked to how passive and normalized the lynchings of innocent black Americans was by 1930, even a decade before that when these lynching postcards starting happening. The whites in town started turning out to watch decades before, and placidly posed as though they were at a family reunion.
You don’t even find such pictures like this in the Nazi Holocaust as Hitler tried to hide the racially motivated killings of innocent people from the general population. In these 30 years of pictures taken before the start of WWII, we see in this white American faces a calm normalcy that belies the real atrocity: the absence of horror when witnessing the murder of innocent black Americans. One newspaper story of a lynching I read said the white spectators were “gleeful” even. That seven decades before that picture was taken in 1930 and the two decades of lynchings and massacres of innocent blacks after, conditioned a response of acceptance and even promotion of this white male terror consistently used against black men and women citizens across that 15 state region in particular.
Against that backdrop, how can we expect it to go away so quickly? There was at least admittance and deep shame in Germany at their relatively brief ethnic cleansing, and a reconciliation committee in South Africa. In America there’s never been any of that, only reparations and an apology to the interned Japanese Americans from WWII, with the apology made 6 decades later. My mother told me last year that I was also born in a sundown town, even further north, along the Niagara River near Niagara Falls. These buried histories are on purpose. What DeSantos is doing is, from his perspective, normal and expected: burying the truth and the narrative of Americas past. Don’t let it happen. Stay active and vocal. Great work here.
