Law enforcement agencies were on full alert recently as high profile murder trials brought the eyes of the world to Brunswick and Kenosha, WI. Authorities worried that the verdicts in the racially and politically charged trials could spur riots like those that spread across the U.S. last summer.
Meanwhile, in Washington, investigations continue into the deadly Capitol Hill riot that made Jan. 6, 2021 a date of infamy alongside other sad dates in our history like Dec. 7, 1941 and Sept. 11, 2001. On Nov. 15 in Washington, Trump henchman Steve Bannon was booked and hauled into court for contempt of Congress after he refused to provide information to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol.
On his radio show the night before the Jan. 6 insurrection, Bannon had said “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” The next day, the MAGA mob of Trump troops rioted at the Capitol, injuring more than 140 police officers and desecrating the historic building with millions of dollars worth of damages to be paid for by American taxpayers.
Bannon was defiant and unrepentant to the point of “subpoenas envy” when he growled to reporters outside the courthouse, “We’re going to go on the offensive on this… This is going to be the misdemeanor from hell.” The two misdemeanors in Bannon’s indictment each carry prison sentences of up to a year in confinement and maximum fines of $100,000.
Bannon is the big fish caught in the government’s net, but a few prison sentences have already been meted out to Trump supporters who participated in the invasion of the Capitol Building to stop the certification of the electoral votes from the 2020 election that made Joe Biden president. Early this month, Jenna Ryan, a Trumper from Texas who was in the Jan. 6 mob that stormed the Capitol, was given 60 days in federal prison. With an entitled arrogance that oozed smugness, Ryan had said on Twitter before her trial that she was “Definitely not going to jail… I have blonde hair, white skin, a great job, a great future and I’m not going to jail.” The judge said Ryan was wrong. Her next residence will be a federal prison.
Though the Capitol Hill insurrection of Jan. 6 was a unique and execrable event in American history, riots and vigilante violence are nothing new to this nation. In New York City in 1863, riots against the Civil War draft were called “a carnival of violence” that lasted for five days and resulted in hundreds of deaths. Raging white men angered over the possibility of being conscripted into the Union military attacked Black people in the city, burning their homes and stores. Lynch mobs of white New Yorkers killed Black citizens with impunity until federal troops were called in to restore order to the burned and beleaguered city. In East St. Louis, IL in 1917, bloody race riots began after white workers became angry over an influx of Black laborers who had migrated from the South in search of better wages and living conditions. The white mob raided the city’s Black community, shooting into houses and setting homes ablaze. At least 39 Blacks and eight whites were killed in the carnage, which came nearly a century before the 2014 riots after the police shooting of a Black man in Ferguson, MO—just a few miles from where East St. Louis burned in 1917. Four years later, in 1921, Tulsa, OK, was the scene of a horrific race riot that destroyed a thriving African American community, resulting in an untold number of deaths.
In 1967, a year before he died by violence, Martin Luther King Jr. warned that the riots then plaguing America would continue until this nation ensured racial justice. Just before his death last year, civil rights icon John Lewis left sage advice to all Americans: “Destruction doesn’t work. Rioting isn’t a movement. We must be constructive and not destructive. Chaos is sowing more division and discord.”
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