In a radio interview, Princeton historian Kevin Kruse explained on Wednesday the history and significance of Donald Trump placing blame on "both sides" for violence at a white supremacist and neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The "extremists" on "both sides" refrain that Donald Trump focused his remarks around was, he notes, a commonplace cry of those that opposed desegregation and the toppling of Jim Crow laws.
What they meant there were, first of all, African American activists who were calling for compliance with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs Board of Education. And on the other hand, they equated those people with racial terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan, who were doing anything they could to stop it. In their eyes, these were both extremists. [...]
What southern politicians would do in this period, and we're talking here about school board members all the way up to governors, is they would insist they were trying to navigate this issue and there were "hotheads" on both sides who needed to be condemned equally. And again, they would point to the Ku Klux Klan or the more respectable racists of the White Citizens Councils, in some cases, but then always single out the NAACP as the real enemy here. We have to remember this was an era in which the NAACP was actually outlawed, in Alabama, as a threat to public safety.
In a Twitter thread, Kruse shared news articles of the time in which figures from Huey Long to Eisenhower himself decried the "extremists" on both sides.
Kruse also had little sympathy for Trump's notion that taking down statues of Confederate military leaders would be a slippery path toward taking down similar monuments to George Washington or Thomas Jefferson:
I don't know of major campaigns to take down Washington or Jefferson, but I think you would find most historians don't buy that equivalency. Yes, Washington owned slaves but that's not why we praise him. We praise him despite that. We praise him for founding the nation. Lee and these other Confederates committed armed treason against that nation. So I think there's quite a difference there.
Kruse is far from the only historian to note the similarities in Trump's rhetoric to that of past civil rights opponents—and the differences between them.
Civil rights advocates leading [the desegregation] charge, including Martin Luther King Jr., and the NAACP, were branded “outside agitators” at the same time that “people in the KKK or in the segregated South engaged in extremist behaviors that cost the lives of people who were simply trying to assert their constitutional and legal rights,” said Theodore M. Shaw, director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Shaw added in an email segregationists at the time were not “compelled to argue moral equivalency with those arguing for civil rights. They were openly and unapologetically racist, and they felt no need to defensively argue morality on their part.
“It is only now, when racism is widely considered to be immoral, that racists argue moral equivalency in opposition to civil rights advocates.”
It is not likely that Donald Trump is a bright enough man to even notice that he has willingly repeated the precise arguments used by past southern racists in past attempts to block the civil rights of non-white Americans. It has become evident, since his speech, that he cribbed the majority of his “both sides” talking points from either his own advisers or, most identifiably, from Fox News programs.
What that says about Fox News is probably another point worth pondering.