ICYMI: White Supremacy Is on the March

Charlie Kirk’s tragic assassination stopped the news cycle in its tracks. Cameras have stayed fixed on that story for days. But while the focus stayed there, other things happened that are harder to dismiss once you line them up. These aren’t unrelated headlines. Taken together, they paint a picture of white supremacy stepping further into the open.

The very next day, multiple historically Black colleges received bomb threats. For students, it meant evacuations, lockdowns, and the gnawing fear that safety on campus can’t be taken for granted. For anyone paying attention to history, it echoed a long line of intimidation campaigns against Black schools and Black excellence. Even when a bomb isn’t found, the intimidating message is sent: your education is not safe, your community is not safe, YOU are not safe.

Not long after, Demartravion “Trey” Reed was found hanging from a tree at Delta State University in Mississippi. Authorities called it a suicide. But history is full of cases where lynchings were officially labeled suicides to shield the truth. The image of a young man hanging in Mississippi carries its own weight, no matter what the paperwork says. The location matters too. A tree near the pickleball courts does not suggest a private choice to end a life. It looks like a statement to anyone who walks by. Reed’s family has brought in Ben Crump, demanding an independent autopsy and full transparency. The community doesn’t just mourn the loss. They feel the terror that such a sight carries, and they remember how often lynchings have been explained away.

While Black communities were reeling, Trump’s defense secretary reinstated a Robert E. Lee portrait at West Point. The 1952 painting doesn’t just show Lee. It shows an enslaved man leading his horse. That choice matters. It elevates the Confederate general as a figure of honor and reduces Black presence to servitude. Putting that portrait of a Confederate traitor, with an enslaved man doing his bidding, back on display is an intentional choice to depict a hierarchy and order.

And then came the orders to strip depictions of slavery from national parks and museums. The photograph known as The Scourged Back, showing the scars on a man who escaped enslavement, has already been taken down. Signs at Harpers Ferry and the President’s House in Philadelphia, once used to tell the story of enslavement, have been removed. That’s not objective, neutral curation. It’s deliberate erasure, the same kind of whitewashing that marked the Jim Crow era when textbooks described slavery as a benign labor system, or saying that “many slaves were treated well by their masters.” By pulling these stories out of public view, the brutality of slavery gets blurred, and white supremacy looks less violent in the telling.

At the same time, extremist groups are seizing the moment. Neo-Nazi “active clubs” are using Kirk’s assassination as a recruitment tool. They frame his death as part of a campaign against white men and push it as proof that it’s time to organize. Their pitch is gaining traction, and their rallies are louder. What the state is doing with symbols and erasure, these groups are doing with anger and violence. Both move the same project forward.

Put it all together: bomb threats against Black colleges, a young man found hanging from a tree in Mississippi, Confederate imagery placed at West Point, slavery scrubbed from public history, and white supremacists recruiting in the open. White supremacy is advancing, not at the margins, but at the center of American life.