So who am I to tag Sen. Lindsey Graham with the epithet of “Lyncher”? Who am I to place such a vile label on an elected member of the US Senate? How dare I?
Well to put it plain, while Graham and I are leagues apart politically, we are both white boys of roughly the same age from the Deep South. I from Georgia and he from neighboring South Carolina. Make a note of that last, I’ll be coming back to it.
What this means is that I know, just as he knows, that with his recent barely veiled threat of “riots in the streets” if Donald Trump should be prosecuted, he is taking a bloodstained page from the darkest and most depraved chapters of the Southern politician’s playbook.
Most people with a passing knowledge of post Civil War Southern history are aware that for the better part of the next century lynching and mob violence were a recurrent feature of life here. What isn’t so generally appreciated is how intrinsic this regime of terror was to the political structures of the southern states. Entire election campaigns and political careers were erected on a foundation of such atrocities. Office holders high and low had no compunction about inciting such violence or excusing it after the fact.
In my own state of Georgia the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot took place during a gubernatorial race where the candidates vied with one another in a race baiting campaign focused on eliminating the Black vote. This stoked the virulent racism already endemic to the state. In 1915 failed ex-populist but still influential politician Tom Watson publicly called for the lynching of Leo Frank. After Frank’s subsequent murder by vigilantes, Watson was elected to the US Senate in 1920.
The history in Lynch Mob Lindsey’s home state is even starker. From 1890 to 1918 the politics of South Carolina were dominated the figure of Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman. Tillman began his political career as a self confessed white supremacist terrorist and openly campaigned for office on the fact. He was a member of the racist terrorist Red Shirts and in 1876 participated in the Hamburg Massacre. This was part of a larger campaign of violence and intimidation aimed at overthrowing the existing Reconstruction State Government suppressing the Black vote through terror. In this they succeeded though narrowly.
In 1890 Tillman ran for Governor, making much of his terrorist record. He won and served two terms. In 1895, having been elected Senator by the State Legislature, he spearheaded a drive for a state constitutional convention with the specific goal of disenfranchising Black voters. He was successful. Speaking to the convention, he again cited his terrorist bona fides.
How did we recover our liberty? By fraud and violence. We tried to overcome the thirty thousand majority by honest methods, which was a mathematical impossibility. After we had borne these indignities for eight years life became worthless under such conditions. Under the leadership and inspiration of Mart[in] Gary ... we won the fight.[117]
Nor did Tillman limit his advocacy of terrorism and mob violence to his own state. In 1898 he campaigned widely in the North Carolina state elections inciting a wave of terrorism that culminated in the Wilmington Massacre.
On October 20, 1898, Tillman was the featured speaker at the Democratic Party's Great White Man's Rally and Basket Picnic in Fayetteville. Tillman spoke furiously to the crowd of white men, asking them why North Carolina had not rid itself of black office holders as South Carolina had in 1876. He chastized the audience for not lynching Alex Manly, the black editor of the Wilmington Daily Record.[145] Tillman was one of many prominent Democrats advocating use of violence to win the 1898 election. The resulting coup expelled opposition black and white political leaders from Wilmington, destroyed the property and businesses of black citizens built up since the Civil War, including the only black newspaper in the city, and killed an estimated 60 to more than 300 people.[146]
As the above makes clear, there’s nothing new or unprecedented in Lynch Mob Lindsey’s incitement of violence for political ends. In this he’s just wading through the same filthy mire previously tread by Tillman.
Now some may think this is a bit of a reach. After all, this is over a hundred years in the past. I could quote William Faulkner’s line about the past not being dead in the South, or even being the past, but I can put it more concretely.
When Lynch Mob Lindsey first ran for Congress in 1992, he did so as a protege of then Rep. Senator Strom Thurmond. This is the same Strom Thurmond who bolted the Democratic Party in 1948 to run for President as the candidate of the white supremacist Dixiecrat ticket. The same Strom Thurmond who turned his coat in 1964 to support the GOP in opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The very same Strom Thurmond who liked to brag that his first political act had been to shake the hand of Pitchfork Ben Tillman when he was a mere 6 years old. The same Strom Thurmond who practically bequeathed his Senate seat to Lynch Mob Lindsey upon his retirement.
I spose Lynch Mob Lindsey could plead ignorance of all of this and that might fly with some folks who don’t know better, but this is one southern boy who does.