The Heritage of American Terror (Charles M. Blow, October 8, 2025, Bitter Southerner)
Peter H. Wood, a history professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that what he finds striking is the “longevity” and “gestational period” of America’s appetite and tolerance for the forcible control of bodies — then Black, now brown — and “a lot of the things we’re seeing now resonate with that [pre-Civil War period.]”
Out of this period came the slave patrol, official local law enforcement, and slave catchers, bounty hunters often prowling the streets of cities in non-slave states or monitoring known routes to freedom.
The lust for control didn’t end with slavery. In a way, it was amplified. As Wood put it, during Reconstruction the Ku Klux Klan picked up on the tradition of slave patrols and night riders, “but they intensified it partly because they had lost control, you know, that the country had become woke.”
That battle against liberalism and multi-racialism, a form of wokeness, keeps resurfacing and has now done so again in the Trump era.