There's a painful Black History Month lesson in Trump's acquittal

Diane Nash was talking about President Donald Trump's impeachment trial one evening when she began experiencing sickening flashbacks.
As a civil rights leader who worked in the Jim Crow South, Nash saw white mobs tearing into young civil rights activists with baseball bats and poor black families kicked off their land for trying to vote.
But justice in a courtroom -- with white judges and all-white juries -- proved elusive. Nash says she saw one sham trial after another.
"If there was a trial of a white person who had done something against a black person, whites with integrity had better not convict because they would be ostracized," says Nash, now 81. "Their business would be boycotted, and in some instances their physical safety was compromised."
Nash says she's seen a similar type of fear in the nation's capital, where President Trump's Senate impeachment acquittal resurrected some of the same memories that once convinced blacks they'd never find justice in a courtroom.
"You don't have a real trial -- you just have the appearance of a trial," Nash says. "A lot of the jurors in the South made their decision based on fear rather than the merits of the case. That's true now of some of these senators."