White Allies of Racial Justice Movements Have Long Been Targets

Last month, a nearly all-White jury found Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty of murdering two White men — Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber — at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wis., in the summer of 2020. Rittenhouse killed these men and injured a third as they protested the police shooting of a Black man named Jacob Blake.

In his first post-verdict interview on Fox News with Tucker Carlson (Carlson has a sympathetic documentary on Rittenhouse forthcoming), Rittenhouse said he is not a racist and in fact supports the Black Lives Matter movement. He also claimed he was tricked into posing for a photo with the Proud Boys, a far-right militant organization, and flashing a hand signal favored among white supremacists. Conservatives — including Carlson — have argued further that Rittenhouse cannot be a white supremacist because the people he killed were White.

But here’s the thing. White supremacists have long singled out White allies of civil rights and racial justice movements — and the state has failed to defend them when they’ve sided with Black activists.

Consider the 1870 lynching of William Luke, an Irish immigrant and Methodist pastor from Ontario, who helped found Talladega College in Alabama to educate freed Black people. Luke, who also taught at the college, broke the rules of White Southern society in more ways than one. In addition to supporting Black education, he advocated for equal pay for Black railroad workers and taught that Black women and White women were equal before God. For a time, he lived with a Black family, a violation of Southern anti-miscegenation codes.

Furthermore, Luke sold pistols to Black people seeking protection from White violence. Black men patrolled the streets in response to the beating of a Black man by a gang of White men, and shots were exchanged. White people spread rumors of Black insurrection — the greatest fear for White Southerners — and accused Northerners and Republicans of inciting it.

The Ku Klux Klan threatened Luke and planned his assassination. Then, when authorities assisted by a posse of White citizens arrested him and four Black men, the Klan removed them from the sheriff’s custody and lynched them. According to newspaper reports at the time, the sheriff and his deputies were overpowered by the armed and disguised Klansmen and had no choice but to surrender them to the mob.

Before they hanged him, Luke wrote a letter to his wife in Canada telling her: “I die tonight. It has been determined by those who think that I deserve it. God only knows I feel myself entirely innocent of the charge. I have only sought to educate the negro.” A grand jury refused to indict the White men accused of murdering Luke, despite 800 pages of evidence and testimony from 140 witnesses. Alabama Gov. William Hugh Smith failed to understand that local officials were unable and unwilling to stop Klan violence and were complicit, and federal troops rarely did anything to intervene.