On Aug. 27, 1960, a mob of 200 white people in Jacksonville, Fla. – organized by the Ku Klux Klan and joined by some of the city’s police officers – chased and beat peaceful civil rights protesters who were trying to integrate downtown lunch counters. The bloody carnage that followed – in which ax handles and baseball bats were used to club African Americans, who sought sanctuary in a church – is remembered as “Ax Handle Saturday.”
A permit had already been approved for the 60th anniversary commemoration of those events when Republican National Committee officials tentatively decided to move their convention festivities from Charlotte to the northern Florida city. This happened because North Carolina public health officials resisted President Trump’s demand that they commit to allowing him to speak before a packed indoor arena amid the novel coronavirus outbreak.
The optics are messy against the backdrop of the nationwide protests and the larger cultural reckoning sparked by the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
It’s part of a pattern. Trump told reporters on Wednesday that his first campaign rally since the start of the coronavirus pandemic will take place next Friday in Tulsa. In 1921, that city was the site of one of the worst race massacres in U.S. history. A white mob descended on an affluent black neighborhood. As many as 300 people died. The June 19 rally also happens to coincide with Juneteenth, a holiday widely celebrated in the black community to mark the day that the last American slaves were freed. Oklahoma is not a battleground in the general election, and the county that includes Tulsa has seen an uptick in new cases since the start of June, but the state’s relaxed restrictions mean the Trump reelection campaign can assemble the big crowd that the president has been craving.