— by Christopher Chavis, The Daily Yonder —
Recent political events have sparked renewed discussion around American democracy and what it means to be an “American.” The mainstream media and academia have been studying every move of President Trump and trying to find parallels that explain our political moment, which has been dominated by the consolidation of executive power and the expansion of the police state to target certain groups of people.
It is concerning, however, that these conversations are excluding and inadvertently erasing the experiences of rural Black and Indigenous people of color in the United States, who still bear the scars of having experienced this kind of tyranny in their own backyards.
It has become common to draw comparisons to foreign historical figures like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, or contemporary leaders like Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. These foreign strongmen are often treated as blueprints for predicting the moment when American democracy might collapse, an effort to pinpoint the exact threshold at which tyranny takes hold.
If we are to protect and strengthen democracy now, we must stop treating its collapse as theoretical. It has happened here before. It is still happening. And those of us whose families carry the memory of resistance, survival, and loss have a critical role to play in reminding the country that democracy’s most important battleground has always been here at home.
Nothing new under the sun
Pundits frequently describe acts like detaining immigrants without due process as fundamentally “un-American,” a betrayal of the nation’s proclaimed values. They frame the idea of voting rights being stripped away as “unthinkable” in the United States.
But this framing is not only dangerously naïve, it whitewashes our history. In the rural South, we have already witnessed the fall of a diverse and multiracial democracy, replaced by Jim Crow regimes and enforced through state-sanctioned violence. The use of the police state to control and silence certain groups is not new, it’s woven into our national DNA.
And this history is not confined to the rural South. Every corner of this country lives in the shadow of the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the erasure of Native cultures. Yet, these histories, and the voices of those who lived and remember them, remain largely absent from today’s national conversation about democracy.
Saying “it can’t happen here” is dishonest because it has already happened here, and our communities are still struggling with the aftermath.
I have written before about the effects of colonization on the Lumbee Tribe, my Tribe, and how we had to flee to impassable swamps in order to evade the encroaching early American colonists. History is rife with examples of groups of Indigenous people either being relocated or outright murdered because Americans (and their colonial predecessors) saw Indigenous land as more valuable than Indigenous lives and cultures. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Indigenous children were taken from their homes and forced into government-funded boarding schools as a means of erasing Indigenous culture. Many of them never returned home and were buried in mass graves on the grounds of these schools.
The late 19th century also saw the backsliding of American democracy across the South. After the Civil War and the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, people of color in the South began to make actual political progress. In 1870, the Mississippi legislature elected Hiram Revels, of Black and Indigenous descent, to the United States Senate, making him the first Black person to serve in that body. Black people held elected office across the South, much to the chagrin of white supremacist politicians. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, Black progress in the South was almost entirely eliminated, and the flame of democracy was extinguished.
There are stories in every Southern state of how this came to be. I wrote a detailed piece in Legal Ruralism about how my home state of North Carolina went from a multiracial democracy with multiple competitive parties to a single-party ethnostate. The election of Daniel Russell to the North Carolina governor’s office in 1896 on a Republican/Populist fusion ticket was the flashpoint that pushed the white supremacists to move to dismantle democracy.
It is important to note here that the white supremacists did not openly state their intent to dismantle democracy. They appealed to the pro-democratic senses of the electorate. Mainstream media reports in North Carolina at the time said that white supremacy was necessary for democracy. In Robeson County, where I grew up, The Robesonian printed an article saying that white supremacy was the “child of necessity.” These media outlets, often the only news source that rural people had, hammered home the point that white supremacy was the only thing that could save democracy.
This rhetoric was extremely powerful. It led to a fracture in the Populist/Republican fusion as many white Populists were persuaded by the white supremacist ideology. South Carolina governor Ben Tillman even used his Red Shirt militia to intimidate voters, prompting a denied request by U.S. Senator Jeter Pritchard for the deployment of federal troops to North Carolina to ensure access to the ballot. In 1898, the Democrats, then the party of white supremacy, took control of the state legislature. Since the governor of North Carolina had no veto power at the time, this essentially led to them having unchecked power over the state government.
Just two days after the 1898 election, white supremacists forcibly overthrew the democratically elected black majority government in Wilmington, providing us with the only successful coup in American history. In 1900, white supremacists cemented their control of state government by using these same tactics to pass constitutional amendments that ushered in the era of Jim Crow and cemented the fall of North Carolina’s democracy. For the next 60-70 years, much of North Carolina existed as a single-party ethnostate where the interests of white voters dominated and a single party, the Democratic Party, dominated elected office.
Despite telling voters that they wanted to “save democracy,” the white supremacists ultimately destroyed it.
As you analyze the words of contemporary politicians, consider that this kind of false altruistic rhetoric is not uncommon throughout American history. When attempting to justify sending Indigenous children to boarding schools, Captain Richard Henry Pratt said in 1892 that his goal was to “kill the Indian, save the man.”
Just as in North Carolina, this rhetoric cloaked brutality in the language of salvation. It was not only a lie, it was a blueprint for systemic cultural and political erasure.
From words to actions
This kind of rhetoric didn’t just pave the way for cultural erasure, it also justified physical violence. The language of salvation and necessity often masked brutality, giving cover to acts of terror that were meant to enforce racial hierarchies and suppress resistance.
For Black and Indigenous people, particularly in the rural South, public acts of violence served as brutal warnings against civic participation, economic independence, and perceived social mobility. Between the end of Reconstruction and the mid-20th century, thousands of Black Americans were lynched, often with the tacit approval, or direct involvement, of local law enforcement and local white citizenry. One famous case was the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, where an all-white jury acquitted the perpetrators, who later admitted to their crimes. These acts were not random, they were orchestrated to uphold white supremacy and dismantle the very idea of multiracial democracy.
This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the atrocities that befell black and Indigenous populations around the country. But these examples show the depravity of American history and the attempts by American politicians to suppress democracy and use violence to do so.
This also is not ancient history. There are people still alive today who attended segregated public schools, attended Indigenous boarding schools, knew people who were victims of political violence, or were victims themselves, and have a firsthand memory of these atrocities.
In 2019, I wrote about how the remnants of the Jim Crow power structure and the violence it fuels still affect people where I grew up. These are not isolated incidents but are indicative of broad trends.
Even before Donald Trump, we were already beginning to see a new erosion of democracy. States around the country started passing restrictive voter ID laws that disproportionately affected people of color, the elderly, students, and rural voters, communities that often lacked access to the specific forms of identification deemed acceptable.
These laws were frequently justified under the guise of preventing voter fraud, despite there being little to no evidence that such fraud existed on any meaningful scale. In 2013, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by eliminating the preclearance requirement for jurisdictions with histories of voter discrimination. Almost immediately, several Southern states including Texas, Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina rushed to enforce laws that had previously been blocked or enact new laws that would have been blocked. These laws included a myriad of restrictions, including strict ID requirements, reductions in early voting, and polling place closures in minority neighborhoods.
The fall of democracy and use of state-sanctioned violence are not a distant threat or foreign concept, they are a lived reality for many communities in this country, especially rural Black and Indigenous communities. What’s most troubling is not just that this history is often forgotten, but that it is actively ignored by those shaping the dominant narratives of today’s political moment.
By failing to reckon with how democracy was already dismantled in places like North Carolina and how the American government (and its predecessor colonial powers) actively committed genocide against Indigenous people, we are missing crucial lessons about the present. The language may have changed, but the tactics, moral panic, false altruism, scapegoating, voter suppression, and violence remain eerily familiar.
The question is not whether it can happen. The question is whether we are finally ready to listen to those who know that it already did.
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Christopher Chavis grew up in rural Robeson County, North Carolina, and is a frequent writer and speaker on baseball history and rural access-to-justice issues. He is a citizen of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
