"I think it shows that this sort of false equivalence that Trump's been engaging in with Charlottesville is something we've seen before — and we've seen it before in almost this exact context," he said in a phone interview. "It's not identical in that those people in the '50s when they were talking about extremists on both sides, they were talking about NAACP activists asking that the South to comply with the Supreme Court's ruling of Brown v. Board of Education on the one hand and they equated that with Klan extremists and terrorists on the other hand. Whereas today, what Trump tried to do was say, 'Look, you've got the Klan but you've also got a few violent people in the anti-fascist movement and that's the totality of what the other side represents.'"