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For white, middle-and upper-class Americans such as myself, the acute threat of terrorism right here at home is something new. Indeed, the media we run and predominantly staff routinely described the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building as the first significant case of terrorism in the nation's history. Of course, the horrifying events of a year ago—all the more shocking because they were played out on live national television—even more decisively made terrorism in the homeland a clear, present, and ongoing danger. Suddenly, we all believe it can happen here.
Black Americans are no less threatened by and no more enamored with the likes of Osama Bin Laden than other Americans are. But there is a difference. For blacks, homeland insecurity and the all too palpable danger of terrorism are nothing new.
As opposed to acts of war, meant to directly subdue and conquer an enemy, acts of terrorism are more immediately symbolic and even theatrical. Terrorists may dream of someday seeing an enemy under their boot. But their more proximate aim is intimidation of the spirit and toxic pollution of the imagination. They will settle for emotional and spiritual subjugation, short of a more comprehensive and physical subjugation by outright war. So the diabolically spectacular events of September 11 struck at the heart of American faith in this nation's global economic and technological superiority. It was a superiority we tended to think of as invulnerable. But now the skyscrapers and airplanes that so vividly embodied this superiority are also signs of our vulnerability; they indicate not so much the armor of the national self-image as its exposed underbelly.
Similarly, African Americans know the period after Reconstruction and into the early 20th century as one marked by virulent terrorism. Whites who would officially and wholly subjugate blacks were militarily defeated in 1865. But in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee. It was originally nothing more than a diversionary social club. Not for long, though. From its intuitively haunting name to its ghostly robes and hoods, with burning crosses and menacing midnight raids, the Klan soon developed into a homegrown terrorist organization. Its threatening theatricality turned especially deadly with public lynchings, often preceded by highly symbolic torture involving blinding or castration. Between 1890 and 1930, nearly 3,000 Americans (mostly blacks) were lynched—if not always by the Klan, usually in the tradition of its cruel theater of intimidation. Bodies were frequently left hanging for days. Hanging ropes were cut into pieces and sold. Even more gruesome "souvenirs" included victims' fingers or knuckles. A market developed for postcards of satisfied executioners (and their wives and children) posed with hanging or burned black corpses. All this was meant to spiritually subjugate "uppity Negroes" and keep them "in their place."
Such instances of terrorism are readily found in American history books. But there are others more effectively buried and hidden from public consciousness. Like every Oklahoma schoolchild, I had my share of lessons in state history and civics. And as an undergraduate at Oklahoma State University in the late 1970s, one of my most memorable courses was in black American history. But I never heard of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot before stumbling across it in some readings of "radical" history in the early 1990s. More recently, the worldwide trend toward consideration of reparations for past wrongs against ethnic groups, and the tenacity of Oklahoma's blacks, have decisively disinterred Tulsa's shame.
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