On August 26, 2023, as thousands gathered in Washington, D.C. to renew the nation’s commitment to racial justice on the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, a white gunman took the lives of three Black people named Angela Michelle Carr, 52, Jarrald Gallion, 29, and Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr., 19, at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida. The killer, 21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmeter, who was known for his deep hatred toward Black people, first attempted to enter Edward Waters University, a historically Black college, but was denied access. He then drove to the Dollar General store with an assault weapon adorned with swastikas to take the lives of Black people.

Six decades after Black people marched on Washington to demand that America fulfill its promissory note of full and equal citizenship, we know that hate and prejudice still threatenhttps://www.aapf.org/donate to take away our lives while shopping, praying, and simply existing while Black. Like the massacres at Buffalo and Charleston, this deplorable act makes plain the horrifying reality that we must once again live under the threat that racial terrorism can take our lives at any place, at any time. These atrocities were committed by young white men born into a post-civil rights and supposedly post-racial world, yet determined to enact ideologies with deep and odious roots in American history. 

It is crucial to resist the ‘lone wolf’ framing that absolves local, state, and national accountability for anti-Black hate violence. This is modern-day lynching, an all-too-common phenomenon produced by a culture in which tolerance of anti-Black racism is mounting and the commitment to antiracist thinking is weakening. While states like Florida attempt to suppress the history of racist violence and the valuable antiracist lessons to be gleaned from our shared past, white supremacist ideologies continue to circulate, maim, and murder in our present.
 

 

We cannot sit idly by and “pray” or “hope” that these racist atrocities will stop happening. Our history and this latest attack demonstrate the danger of white supremacy and the existential threat it poses to our future. Neutralizing it requires truthful education, critical thinking about its contemporary manifestations, and  dedication to multiracial democracy. Yet, it is this precise education that is now branded as “woke,” divisive, and “un-American.” It is not an accident that history is now repeating itself. When we let down the fortifications and pretend the threat is no longer there, or worse still, when we allow efforts to fight racism to be framed as racism itself, loss of life is not far behind. 

AAPF condemns the racist murders in Jacksonville, the violent ideologies that motivated them, and the complicity of those who demonize current efforts to confront white supremacy. Justice demands an urgent reckoning with the ideas, histories and policies that sustain the genocidal belief that Black lives don’t matter. To honor the victims of anti-Black violence, we must tend to the vital work of rooting out white supremacy from a society that has been too ready to imagine that it is not already there, already violent, in plain sight.