When I work on the paper, I always keep an eye on my email because it is my news source where I am informed about stories and get press information fro The White House and other sources. And I first saw a story that said Trump had been injured at a Pennsylvania campaign rally. And then it began to trickle in — everyone was being careful — that it had been an assassination attempt, that Trump had been nicked in his upper ear, that one person behind him at been killed and two others wounded.

It appears that a 20-year-old man who Registered Republican, but had made a donation to a Democratic PAC, shot at Trump with an A-R 15 — purchased by his father six months prior — from an adjoining rooftop. He was shot dead by Secret Service snipers also on a rooftop.

I was sickened by this. While I am no fan of Trump, political violence against anyone is intolerable and against the norms of our Democratic society. America has experienced political violence against people from the left and the right of American politics, from President John F. Kennedy to Alabama Governor George Wallace to President Ronald Reagan.

In our political discourse, we have increasingly been exposed to the threat of political violence by some politicians and political pundits. In my experience, it has been old men who have never experienced the horrors of armed conflict or political violence who often send young men to their deaths while the old men sit back in the safety of their own homes.

And while we seem to pay attention to the political violence that has been perpetrated on national figures or in assaults like the January 6^th attack on the U.S. Capitol, we must always remember that political violence has been used in all sectors of our political world.

The rise of the KKK in the late 1860s ushered in an era of violence against the newly freed African American slaves. African Americans were in the majority at that time and in exercising their democratic right to vote, had elected majority African American legislatures, which approved Hiram Revels to be one of the U.S. Senators representing Mississippi. U.S. Senators were not popularly elected in those days. Revels — who later became Alcorn State University’s president by the way — was the first African American U.S. Senator.

Similarly to the response of right-wing folks in Wisconsin after Wisconsin helped push Barack Obama over the top as America’s first African American president, right-wing forces in Mississippi back in the 1870s were not going to allow Mississippi to be represented by an African American. And so we had the rise of the KKK whose political violence denied Black Mississippians their political voice. Coupled with the Compromise of 1877, which ensured that federal troops would be removed from the South, political violence allowed white minority rule in Mississippi.

I experienced a touch of that political violence when I worked on the Congressional campaign of independent Black candidate Evan Doss back in 1978. The Fourth District at the time encompassed most of the district that Congressman Bennie Thompson represents today.

While I began my work in Port Gibson, not far from Alcorn State, it was determined that the campaign needed a presence in Jackson, the state capitol, if it was going to have a chance to win. And so I lived in an RV parked on J.R. Lynch Drive a couple of blocks from Jackson State University and worked out of a store front we had rented on Lynch Drive. The RV was borrowed from a Detroit Lions player who had graduated from Alcorn.

One night, I started dreaming of leaking radiator and as I awoke, I realized the RV didn’t have a radiator. I looked out of the window and saw a young man slashing the tires of the RV. He had slashed all four and then proceeded to throw the bottle he had been using through the large plate-glass window of the campaign headquarters.

While I kept my cool, I was scared. While I had made some friends while I was there, I had no “people” there. When I thought the coast was clear, I locked myself into the campaign headquarters and hid under the desk until life returned to the streets of Lynch Drive.

The police were called and the news stations came to do a story. The police were more interested in what I was doing there — a speck of slat in a shaker of pepper — and the perpetrator was never caught. I finished out the campaign in Jackson on Lynch Drive. I was a young, naive person back then. And in hind sight, I don’t think I was in danger of being injured or killed. They could have done that easily enough.

But political violence can be chilling and suppress the democratic voice of all Americans and cannot be tolerated. I hope this incident has had a sobering impact on politicians and their supporters. The use of violence in political rhetoric cannot be tolerated by everyone for it can beget the Law of Unintended Consequences, which happened on Saturday. Violence begets violence. Let the violent rhetoric end NOW!