On the eve of the one year anniversary of the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol, WYPR/NPR’s Sheilah Kast interviewed the Mitchell Program’s Dr. Charles L. Chavis, Jr. regarding his forthcoming book, The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State. Later in the interview, Samson and Katrina Binutu joined Dr. Chavis to discuss their joint film project Hidden in Full View, a companion to The Silent Shore and the first in a series of documentary shorts that will uncover lesser-known episodes of racial terror in Black communities throughout the United States.
Dr. Chavis also explained how past cases of racial terror lynching should inform our understanding of—and response to—contemporary instances of white supremacist violence, such as the January 6th insurrection, and the ongoing backlash against civil rights movements writ large.
