The Weight That Traveled: Minnesota Voices on Patriot Front's July 4 March
Editor Jasmine McBride talks with therapist Dr. Resmaa Menakem, retired Judge LaJune Thomas Lange, ADL researcher Carla Hill and State Rep. Esther Agbaje about Patriot Front's largest-recorded July 4 march in Washington, D.C., and what it means for Black Minnesotans watching from home. The conversation traces a line from the Klan's 1865 founding to today's voter ID efforts, unresolved lynchings in Duluth, and the generational toll of what Menakem calls white body supremacy.
The masked column that marched through Washington, D.C. on July 4 did not walk through Minneapolis or St. Paul. But for many in Minnesota’s Black community, the images traveled here anyway, landing in a body already carrying generations of the same story.
“That is a reminder that these things are constant and consistent,” said Dr. Resmaa Menakem, therapist and author of “My Grandmother’s Hands,” of the images of white nationalists marching in formation. “It is only when something is so egregious, because we’ve been overriding for so long, that we go, wait a minute, that just happened. But it’s always happening.”
Menakem said the danger isn’t only in the visible, “feral” moments, the marches, the viral images, but in what he calls the “seductive” pieces of white body supremacy: the daily conditioning that teaches Black people to scan a room for exits, to keep their hands visible in a store, to survive by overriding rather than processing. Left untended, he said, that weathering shows up in the body for generations. He traced his own understanding of it back to his grandmother’s hands, thick and calloused from a childhood picking cotton, a story she carried silently for decades before ever telling him why.
“This is how this stuff gets transferred down,” Menakem said. “We don’t tend to it, so we just override it and get through it, and then it shows up in these ways.”
That through line, from enslavement to the present, is also what retired Judge LaJune Thomas Lange points to in a written statement on the march. Lange noted that the Ku Klux Klan was founded in December 1865 by Confederate veterans under Nathan Bedford Forrest with the explicit goal of preserving white supremacy, and that Independence Day itself has been “exploited by White Supremacist groups for more than 100 years.”
Lange connected the march directly to present-day politics, arriving “only weeks before the midterms” alongside new voter ID and redistricting efforts she described as a continuation of the Klan’s historical playbook of voter suppression. She also pointed to unresolved local history, including the lynching of three Black circus workers in Duluth and a case of a young Black man found hanging from a tree there in more recent years, as evidence that the reckoning has never fully happened.
“We must learn about the predictive nature of history,” Lange wrote, tracing a line “from Dred and Harriet Scott to the present.”
Carla Hill, vice president of research and investigations at the ADL’s Center on Extremism, said Patriot Front’s July 4 demonstration appeared to be its largest on record. The Texas-based group, responsible for the majority of white supremacist flash demonstrations nationally since 2019, relies on speed and secrecy, marching a short route and disappearing before law enforcement or counter-protesters can respond, she said.
“The goal is a clean, intimidating visual spectacle, one built for social media, not for dialogue,” Hill said. She noted the group deliberately packages its ideology in “patriotic” red, white and blue branding, with slogans like “Reclaim America” alongside more explicit rhetoric like “American Spirit, European Blood.” Hill said ADL has documented Patriot Front propaganda distributions in Minnesota and urged journalists to report not just what happened, but who the group is and what it believes.
State Rep. Esther Agbaje said the march lands amid a broader rollback she’s tracking closely, from the Supreme Court’s May ruling on the Voting Rights Act to reports that the U.S. Department of Justice wants to send observers to state primary polls, including Minnesota’s in August. She pointed to a Trump administration social media post targeting an image of immigrant kindergartners as part of the same pattern.
“We continue to see this attack on communities of color, especially Black communities, especially Black immigrant communities,” Agbaje said. “But our communities are resilient. We find safety and power within each other.”
Agbaje said the state continues to monitor Minneapolis’s police reform agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights and to invest in housing, healthcare and education as underpinnings of safety. But she was direct about the limits of state power when federal institutions stay silent. “We kind of do the most that we can to backfill the federal government,” she said. “At the end of the day, we just have a federal government that is on a very different trajectory than where most Minnesotans are.”
For Menakem, the work ahead isn’t remedy, it’s tending. “So often we look for remedy. Remedy is not our job,” he said. “Our role is to create the conditions.” That means practicing the small, repetitive acts of noticing: orienting to a room, breathing, touching the places in the body that carry tension, not to fix the harm, but to keep from carrying it silently, the way his grandmother once did.
“I think my work is becoming more and more important for this time,” Menakem said. “We know the patterns of white body supremacy. What we have to begin to do is examine and tend to what it is that we already know, as opposed to acting like we don’t know.”
Jasmine McBride welcomes reader responses at jmcbride@spokesman-recorder.com.