Morning Joe Guest: There’s a ‘Perfect Parallel’ Between Jim Crow and Trump’s Presidency

While being interviewed on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said there are parallels to Donald Trump’s presidency and the rise of Jim Crow after the American Civil War.

“Voter suppression and the Supreme Court in 1883 declared it unconstitutional. 12 years of black freedom followed by a rollback and a president who refused to renounce white supremacy, Andrew Johnson. Does this sound familiar?” he asked.

“I was going to bring up that what parallels do you see to today’s climate, where we’re seeing acts of white nationalism, white supremacy violence, those numbers are rising according to statistics. What roles did the election of Barack Obama play to this and then now, is President Trump stoking those fears and that violence,” fellow panelist Jonathan Lemire asked.

“It’s the perfect parallel. The reason that Dylan McGee and I decided to do this series now was because eight years of black freedom as it were under Barack Obama, basically drove a lot of people crazy. And we saw this rise of white supremacy that I don’t know about you, but I thought had been long buried. This is like a bad Dracula movie,” Gates explained. “You thought, damn, aren’t you dead? Didn’t we put a stake in your heart? And then it comes back. So the closest historical parallel to what we’re seeing today with the rise of white supremacy is a backlash to the Obama administration is the collapse of reconstruction. That’s why I wrote the book and why we did this series.”

Watch above, via MSNBC.