Source: Courtesy of ABC
Updated Jan. 6, 2023
Two years ago on Jan. 6, incoming ABC News Congressional correspondent Rachel Scott witnessed one of the darkest days in American history. This young Black reporter had no idea that her first big assignment on Capitol Hill would be covering a bloody insurrection that Donald Trump had promised, “will be wild.”
The day started with Scott boarding the first flight out of Atlanta to Washington, D.C. She had barely gotten any sleep the night before after covering the historic runoff election which sent Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff—both Democrats and Georgia’s first Jewish and Black senators—to Congress.
“When I boarded my flight, I saw rows and rows of Trump supporters. People in red hats. People with MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’) T-shirts. I thought okay, we’re all heading to Washington, D.C., together. This is the first flight out and my plane was packed with Trump supporters,” Scott recalled during a Zoom interview.
A couple of hours later, Scott made it to her apartment, changed quickly and headed to the Capitol. The scene initially seemed like one of Trump’s usual campaign rallies which she had previously covered.
“People were in the streets, they brought their children, and were listening to the President speak on boom boxes that they brought with them. It felt so much like a Trump rally,” she said. “And then things took a dramatic turn.”
Police officers who struggled for hours to hold back the mob said they faced what looked like a barbaric Medieval battle as Trump’s supporters, some in Kevlar vests and helmets, knocked down barricades, scaled walls, broke windows, looted offices, beat cops, smeared feces, and urinated on the floors, built a guillotine, erected a hanging gallows with a noose and carried Confederate flags through the halls of Congress.
Scott stood, a lone Black woman in a sea of hostile whiteness, at the foot of the Capitol watching Trump supporters storm the building. The crowd around her grew so thick that she couldn’t get a signal out to go live to report that the Capitol had been breached.
“It was unbelievable to witness firsthand then and it’s still pretty surreal one year later to look back at the things I saw and covered that day,” Scott said.
Source: SAUL LOEB / Getty
The mob made it clear to Scott and other members of the press that they were not welcomed. “There was hostility towards the press and the camera was a target. They cursed at us and shouted, ‘fake news, enemy of the press!’” People yelled racial and sexist epithets at her. A white man tried to tackle her but fortunately Scott’s security intervened. He tried to tackle her again but failed.
Jan. 6, wasn’t the first time Scott had experienced that kind of hostility or racial aggression from Trump supporters. Covering Trump’s campaign rallies for two years, she had already had her fair share of inflammatory racist comments launched at her.
“I’ve been told to go back to where I came from. I’ve been called colored, articulate. I can go down a laundry list of things that have been said to me by some people at the rallies,” she said.
Scott recalled covering a campaign rally in North Carolina after Trump had tweeted that four congresswomen of color should go back to the countries they came from. On her way back to her car, she was told to go back to where shehad come from.
She faced another incident in Tulsa, Oklahoma when Trump held a rally on the heels of the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history. While the Black community was grieving, Trump supporters showed up to inflame tensions. Still, Scott stayed professional and interviewed Trump supporters alongside her producer, another Black woman. People in a pickup truck drove by and called them “stupid Black bitches.”
“Twenty minutes later, I was live on national television,” she said. “Being a Black woman covering political events at a time where the partisan divides are deep and fraught, at a time when we were in the aftermath of George Floyd, and having discussions about Black Lives Matter, I was on the receiving end of inflammatory comments.”
Source: SAUL LOEB / Getty
But Jan. 6, was different.
“People had said mean and racist things to my face but that was the first time in which people were physically trying to harm myself and my crew. They were more aggressive that day.”
While covering the siege, there was a moment when Scott thought back to the Black Lives Matter protests she had covered. Those protestors were met with tear gas, helicopters, and huge law enforcement presence.
“People had taken to the streets and demanded justice and racial equity in this country. I was outside the White House night after night as people marched. The White House was surrounded by a gate that separated the people from the people’s house. The sizes of the demonstrations were similar, but the response was very different from January 6.”
When those images emerged of protestors storming the Capitol, a man putting his feet on the desk of the Speaker of the House, a lot of Black Americans asked: “What would have happened if they were Black? Would they have been treated in the same way? Would the law enforcement presence have been different?”
We all know the answers to those rhetorical questions.
Scott says she heard some pundits watching the insurrection in real-time saying, “’this is not America. This is not who we are. This is not what this country represents.’” Yet many people of color knew better. “This is the culmination of decades of animosity and racial divides,” Scott said. “The racism and white supremacy that we saw on that day was no surprise.”
Scott arrived at noon that day and did not leave until after midnight. She and her crew had to keep moving to different positions around the Capitol because it was unsafe.
“There were multiple times when I kept asking, how is the U.S. Capitol so vulnerable? Where was law enforcement? It took hours to get the situation under control. And I kept watching people who had just broken into the Capitol just leave and walk away. They walked past policeofficers in some cases. There were reports of gunfire inside the Capitol. We saw a group of paramedics rush a woman out on a gurney. She was shot and bloodied. Her eyes were staring back up at this building that she just broken into. It was panic and complete and utter chaos.”
Her reporter notes from that day detail how protestors at Black Lives Matter protests feared the presence of law enforcement. She did not sense that same fear from the Jan. 6 protestors. “Someone asked me what is privilege in this country? That is privilege, to not feel fear. That’s what I felt from those protestors who showed up on January 6. No fear.”
In the aftermath of covering that event, Scott said she couldn’t sleep for days and weeks that followed. “I was awake, and I didn’t really know what was keeping me awake. I had not come to grips with the amount of trauma that I saw that day and that I experienced. It still boggles my mind one year later.”
Scott says that many of the people who work on Capitol Hill — custodians, police officers, legislative aids, reporters—are forced to return to a building every day where they experienced so much trauma. “The weight of that is really heavy.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DYJIxRB3tSg%5D
One of the things Scott struggles with most is that she doesn’t have very strong memories of the U.S. Capitol prior to January 6. “It was my first big assignment on Capitol Hill.” And now, “Every entrance and window that I pass, exits, the cafeteria, they all trigger memories from that day. That has been difficult to process. Every day I enter through those same doors that I saw that woman being carried out and rushed out of a gurney,” she said.
Despite the traumas and the triggers, Scott and other reporters have continued to cover and follow every thread of the story, the aftermath, the investigations into how the insurrection happened, the prosecutions, and the narratives that try to rewrite and reframe the events of that day.
Scott says there have been some efforts to just move on, to move forward. “One year later there still very stark disagreements about what happened, who is responsible, who should be held responsible and what the legacy should be from January 6. Caught in the middle of all that are people still dealing with the traumatic events of that day. There were police who were brutally beaten and now their pain, bravery is caught in the middle of the politicization.”
She has held onto words from one police officer who told her, “For a lot of people Jan. 6, was just a few hours. But for the people who were there January 6 hasn’t really ended. It’s ever present. The emotions are still raw and the memories – it feels just like yesterday,” Scott said.
Fortunately, her news team at ABC has helped her mitigate the trauma by providing lots of support and space to talk about what happened. “My ABC News team is a family,” she said. She has found even wider support across the news outlets that cover Capitol Hill. “There’s a common understanding of what we experiencedeven if we weren’t in the same room or standing on the same block. We were there together. We have confided in one another and talked about the things we still struggle with. I’ve had deep conversations with officers. Even amid all the trauma, there is a sense that you are welcome to talk about it. You aren’t made to feel bad for being triggered by an image or event. We have become kinder in the press corps and more compassionate.”
Still, one year later, “it’s hard to talk about,” Scott said. “As a reporter, we are so used to not making ourselves part of the story. But we borewitness to something that was unprecedented – a deadly insurrection. It is something that I still think about every day. It is still something I still lose sleep over.”
She is always wondering what if “it” happens again? “When I go into rooms, I always look for the nearest exits. When we get alerts on our phones about potential threats and suspiciouspackages my stomach drops. I feel the anxiety coming in.”
What are her thoughts about what it means for a journalist like her to put her Black body on the line?
“People saw me, a Black woman, out there on a split screen with images of Confederate, racial epithets being yelled, a noose on the Capitol ground – and they saw my Black face reporting on an insurrection. So many people reached out to see if I was okay, to tell me they were thinking of me,” she said.
What would she advise young Black women journalists about being in our skin while covering dangerous situations like Jan. 6?
“That’s a really hard question. I don’t have a recipe for getting through an event like that. What I do know is that I love my job. It is important we have diversity in these roles. It is important to have my perspective at the level that I am at. To be able to draw the parallels on white vs. Black protests,” she said.
Ultimately, she draws on the wisdom of her grandfather who told her to “’Take up space.’ He told me, ‘You are meant to exist anywhere you want to be, regardless if you see yourself represented there or not. You need to stretch, to become bigger, larger.’ I try to personally push past those feelings of uncomfortability. I try to lean into the core of who I am and what I represent and where I come from to focus on doing my job. That would be my advice to young Black female journalists,” Scott said.
It is often said that journalists write the first draft of history. Rachel Scott’s courageous professionalism is a powerful example of the need for truly diverse news coverage on all platforms. Her experiences during the Jan. 6 insurrection and the lingering trauma from that day also remind us that journalists can face very real dangers when doing their jobs. Is it reasonable to expect protection from the dangers presented by rabid and hostile crowds?
Scott’s experience raises questions that need to be examined and answered in newsrooms across our country, not just about how news is gathered and reported, but about the human cost of providing coverage amid threats and uncertainty. How do interpreters of some of the darkest hours of American life balance telling the news story with the conversations going on in your head as a journalist of color?
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