HOUSTON _ Bystander and victim videos of racist attacks have gone viral this month, particularly after President Donald Trump's Fourth of July address at Mount Rushmore.
Some of the perpetrators _ including a Silicon Valley CEO _ cited Trump, while others appeared emboldened by the president's rhetoric and tweets, which included his retweet of a supporter chanting "white power" and his own condemnation of Black Lives Matter as "a symbol of hate."
Several of the videos showed attackers driving cars into crowds of protesters, resulting in memes that circulated widely online among opponents of the protests. The videos were an eerie reminder of a fatal attack by a driver on counterprotesters at a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
One of the recent incidents followed the attempted lynching of a Black man near Bloomington, Indiana, which is being investigated by the FBI as a hate crime.
We're in the midst of a historical moment akin to the backlash by white supremacists following desegregation and emancipation, said Alexis Hoag, inaugural practitioner-in-residence at the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University in New York.
"It's being filmed; it's happening more often. Given the outspoken protests across the country and around the world in support of Black Lives Matter, what we're witnessing is this very violent backlash by people who harbor white supremacist views," said Hoag, a lecturer at Columbia Law School who has spent more than a decade as a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer.
Hoag said it was "no coincidence that these incidents are clustered around July Fourth." She quoted a speech delivered on the holiday in 1852 by Frederick Douglass _ the famed author, abolitionist and former slave _ about the relative significance of the holiday to white citizens versus Black people.
"The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me," Douglass said. "This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn."
For Black Americans, true independence only came with emancipation. In some states like Texas, even that took years, leading to the celebration of a separate holiday: Juneteenth.
Hoag said it's also not a coincidence that the incidents followed Trump's appearance at Mount Rushmore, noting he also chose to stage his first campaign rally the day after Juneteenth in Tulsa, Oklahoma, site of a 1921 racist massacre in the once thriving "Black Wall Street."
"So much of what's happening in 2020 is reminiscent of the past," said Hoag, a Southern California native who has also lived in Tennessee. "It's happening across the country with equal force. These are definitely not isolated to the 'flyover states.'"
Josh Lipowsky, a senior researcher at the New York-based nonprofit Counter Extremism Project, has focused on vehicular attacks on protesters in recent months.
"These vehicle rammings have become a more common tactic being used against protesters in general," he said, including those attributed to the far right. "There has been quite a bit of online propaganda over the past few years and increasing over the past few months targeting protesters _ and Black Lives Matter in particular _ and really seeking to dehumanize the protesters and delegitimize their causes."
Lipowsky said the motives for some of the incidents have been unclear: Perhaps a driver accelerated at protesters accidentally, or was confronted by protesters. But he said the message is clear in memes of such rammings that he's collected, dating back to anti-police brutality protests in Ferguson, Mo., following the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014.
"The message being put forward with a lot of these memes is that the protesters are inconveniencing your lives," he said, and that "you have the right then to remove that impediment."
Here are a few examples from the last few days of people lashing out, verbally or physically attacking others.
Vauhxx Booker, 35, a Bloomington, Indiana, civil rights activist, posted cellphone video he said showed a group of white men who had assaulted him and threatened to "get a noose" at a nearby lake over the Fourth of July weekend.
The incident led dozens of supporters to peacefully protest in front of the Bloomington courthouse July 6, where video showed a car striking and injuring two demonstrators. On Wednesday, police charged Christi Bennett, 66, of Greenfield, Indiana, with criminal recklessness and leaving the scene of an accident in connection with the attack.
The FBI is investigating the attack on Booker as a potential hate crime. Through his attorney Katharine Liell, Booker said Tuesday, "We welcome this inquiry and feel we are one step closer to justice."
