“When myself and my colleagues shall leave these halls and turn our footsteps toward our Southern homes, we know not that the assassin may await our coming, as marked for his vengeance.”
That’s a quote from Joseph H. Rainey, who in 1870 became the first African American to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. It comes from a speech Rainey gave in 1871, in which he called for the federal government to protect Black lawmakers like himself from the newly formed Ku Klux Klan.
The quote came to mind over the weekend as I read reports about an alleged attack on Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.
Frost wrote on X that his assailant punched him after saying he was going to be deported, and then was heard shouting racist remarks while running away:
Last night, I was assaulted by a man at Sundance Festival who told me that Trump was going to deport me before he punched me in the face. He was heard screaming racist remarks as he drunkenly ran off. The individual was arrested and I am okay.
Thank you to the venue security and Park City PD for assistance on this incident.
Citing court records, media outlets reported that the suspect was arrested and charged with aggravated burglary, assaulting an elected official and assault.
I think it’s prudent — particularly mere weeks after the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection — to note how pervasive racist violence has become in U.S. politics. How useful and brazen a tool it has become for its users to try to scare Black people with power.
It’s a reality that Black people at varying levels of government have known all too well for far too long. Joseph Rainey felt it. So have Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two Black election workers in Georgia who were targeted with racist attacks — and death threats — after the 2020 presidential election. And the Black officers with the U.S. Capitol Police who were subjected to racist epithets as they fended off the horde of pro-Trump rioters on Jan. 6 know the feeling, too. So Frost isn’t the first to face racist threats intent on undermining or outright usurping his power; he’s the latest in a sordid saga. I think those who are invested in democracy must highlight this trend. Black people who have experienced it have done well to note that such violent threats are foreboding signs for the future of the democratic project. One of those people was John Roy Lynch, a Black congressman in the Reconstruction era and the first Black speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives. His 1876 call to action for lawmakers to recognize and fight the scourge of white supremacist violence was prescient at the time, and it’s instructive for the period we’re living in today. Per Lynch’s official House biography: Lynch directly connected White League attacks on African Americans and their allies with the Democratic Party’s efforts to strengthen its hold on the state. He called the White League “an organization which has been brought into existence by the bad men of the Democratic Party for the purpose of securing position by the power of the bullet and not by the power of the ballot.” For Lynch, the nation as a whole had to “crush out mobocracy at the South,” and preserve individual freedoms by eliminating the prevailing violence and intimidation from organizations like the White League. “Otherwise,” he warned, “you will lay the foundation for the dissolution of this Republic.”
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
