
By Victor Luckerson— For most of the hundred and fifty-six years since the Civil War, white mobs have had free rein over American society. They burned Black schools during Reconstruction, strung Black bodies from trees during the lynching era, and harassed Black students during the civil-rights movement. These were acts of racism, but they were also flexes of political power—murderous demands that the legal and cultural norms of the rioters’…