By Joseph Bonica

The week of March 15, thousands of Tea Party activists from across the country descended on Capitol Hill for one last coordinated surge against “Obamacare” and to voice opposition against big government.

Of course on Sunday March 21 President Obama achieved a landmark victory when his sweeping health care legislation was passed by the House by a vote of 219-212. l On Tuesday, March 23, President Obama signed The Affordable Health Care for America Act.

Though the bill has been passed, it is still important to consider the dynamics of the Tea Party movement and what it says about race in America today. As an historian, I’m intrigued by how recent Tea Party protests echo some of the dynamics of the Tea Act of 1773.

As has been the case since the current ad hoc movement first appeared, the latest demonstrations were marked by the absence of virtually any people of color among its proponents. In other words, the Tea Party coalition continues, as it did hundreds of years ago, to show itself to be a lily-white movement.

The current round of organized protests marketed as “Tea Parties” are meant to evoke the past. Calling to mind rebel Bostonians’ famous destruction of taxed tea in 1773, the twenty-first century’s Tea Parties revel in the symbolism of “the founders,” taking their stand for “the core founding principles of our nation,” even dressing up in period garb, all to mobilize tens of thousands to take to the streets. Their grievances are in many ways quite traditional–not the warnings of a potential government takeover of Medicare, perhaps, but the general critique that Federal power might be located within a larger Anti-Federalist tradition that grew up in opposition to the Constitution and to the Constitutional republic.

However, there is another protest tradition reflected in the various incarnations of the Tea Party movement that is far less respectable: that of white protest against the potential of African-American competition.

For two centuries in American public life, the possibility of black political, economic, and social inclusion has often generated massive, often violent protests by white men and women.

When African Americans celebrated July 4th in the earliest years of the Republic, white men often disrupted the ceremonies, hooting that blacks couldn’t consider themselves American citizens. When black and white abolitionists in the antebellum North spoke against slavery, white men frequently, at the least, threatened them with violence.

When President Lincoln instituted a military draft during the Civil War, a furious protest erupted in New York, with white men waving placards that claimed “Lincoln wants to enslave us all,” as they plundered African-American businesses, burned a black orphanage, and lynched black men from the city’s lamp posts. After World War I, when blacks demanded greater economic and political opportunities, whites rioted in dozens of cities and towns.

In 1944 when the federal government supported black Philadelphia transit workers’ demands that they had a right to the jobs they were qualified for, white transit workers staged a wildcat strike that shut down one of the nation’s most important defense-industry centers for three days. Last but not least, Southern blacks’ concerted push for full civil rights provoked a white-hot region-wide campaign of “massive resistance” that needed the full force of the federal government to defeat.

The most obvious connection between those protests of the past and today’s, of course, is that today’s is against an alleged out-of-control-government (though similarly statist and expensive policies of earlier administrations, like No Child Left Behind or the Prescription Drugs Bill, incited no similar protests) and didn’t begin until the election of a man of African descent as the 44th president of the United States. This is not to suggest that the modern-day Tea Party movement continues the tradition of massed street violence that was so critical to the emergence of a self-consciously white working-class. Nevertheless, the timing, the organization, and the anger fit the pattern.

Within days of Obama’s inauguration, the fledgling idea was past the talking stage. By the summer Tea Party activists were holding mass rallies and street demonstrations to warn, as did one early mass-produced sign, that “Obama’s Plan=White Slavery.” Calls for an “armed and dangerous” resistance were commonplace.

It’s not likely today’s Tea Party movement of disaffected whites will lead to any significant show of violence. For one reason, the legal and political backlash in this era of instantaneous news coverage and of concerns about domestic terrorism would destroy any legitimacy it now has. As it is, the coalition’s internal fissures over who are its leaders and what is its relationship to the Republican Party have become more and more apparent. At the least, the meager turnout in Washington raises questions about its structural coherence and resiliency. Now that the Obama administration has succeeded in passing its health care reform package, those questions about the viability of the tea party movement will become more urgent.

Joseph Bonica teaches history at Middle Teneessee State University.