Before the far right was floating conspiracy theories about “crisis actors” pretending to be survivors of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, there were similar claims about civil rights activists. And before that, the people who were supposedly fakes being paid to spread a politically motivated story were former slaves testifying to Congress about what they’d suffered. There’s a history here, in other words. A long, ugly history of attempts to delegitimize people whose stories are too powerful to take on honestly.
Sound familiar?
Sixty-one years before teens at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., would survive a mass shooting only to be labeled “crisis actors,” the nine African American teens who braved racist crowds to enroll in Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas were also accused of being impostors.
False rumors that the Little Rock Nine were paid protesters even forced the NAACP to issue a statement condemning the stories as “pure propaganda.” The students were not, in fact, “imported” from the North, said the NAACP’s Clarence A. Laws, but rather the children of local residents, including veterans.
Or what about this?
The same thing happened in the 1870s when African Americans again testified before Congress about the Ku Klux Klan.
“Hundreds of black women and men played a remarkable role, coming forward to testify during the hearings,” Kansas University history professor Shawn Leigh Alexander wrote. “Democratic committee members attempted to discredit their testimony, equating the two-dollar-a-day allowance that witnesses received to bribery and accusing local Republicans of coaching them.”
And today, while race isn’t at the center of this particular political fight about guns:
“It’s a theme that crops up throughout civil rights history,” said Kruse. “Back then, it was an assumption that African Americans in the South couldn’t possibly be upset. They must have been stirred up from the outside, either paid to do this or inspired to do this by propaganda. They couldn’t have come up with this on their own.
“I think this is what we see in the Parkland case today,” he added. “There’s a belief that somehow these 17- or 18-year-olds who witnessed a school shooting … who saw their friends die, somehow could not have been motivated to respond to that on their own, that they would need some sort of outside direction for that protest to take shape.”
When what people have to say is so painful, so brutal, that for you to accept it as authentic and still reject what it says about the world and about the need for change would show you to be a monster, you fight to discredit it, to say it’s not real so that you can safely continue to fight to keep things the same old awful way. That’s what Republicans are doing here. That’s what the MSD survivors are puncturing every time they keep speaking out.