The Emancipation of black slaves and the adoption of the 13th amendment to the Constitution did not, sadly, end the problems for the black population of America, particularly those in the South. Many southern states had made it illegal to educate slaves, leaving the suddenly freed slaves with limited resources for finding jobs. The government had promised up to 40 acres and a mule to each freed male slave, but with the assassination of President Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, who was sympathetic to the South, rescinded the order in 1865. In addition, despite the passage of the 14th amendment which guaranteed equality for black Americans and the 15th which gave voting rights to male ex-slaves, discrimination was difficult to root out of the defeated Confederacy.
Still, during Reconstruction, life became much better for black Americans. Some of them became members of Congress and of state legislatures. Blacks were able to ride in the first-class section on trains, chat with white people on the street, and even serve as policemen arresting white criminals. Sadly, many Southerners, however, were not willing to accept freed Blacks as their equals and when federal troops withdrew from the South ten years after the close of the Civil War, blacks began to lose almost all that they had gained. Democrats regained the White House in 1885 and by the recession of the 1890s, poor whites were easy to convince that blacks might take their jobs. Newspapers began to play up and even make up black crime to frighten the white citizens and Jim Crow laws were born. (Jim Crow was a derogatory term for a black man.) In an 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, the court voted 7 to 2 that public facilities and schools could be separate for blacks and whites as long as they were equal. But they seldom were really equal. Looking for jobs and opportunity, many blacks moved to the north, but there again, throughout the recession, the exclusion of blacks from jobs and even housing spread into some Northern cities as well.
Over 360,000 blacks served in World War I, but they were not welcomed back to the U.S. Once again, many whites thought they would steal their jobs. But with World War II, things changed again. There was an obvious link between the white supremacy that promoted the Southern Jim Crow laws and Hitler’s “master race,” and public opinion, especially in the North, swung against segregation. In 1948 President Harry Truman acted to promote racial equality by urging Congress to ban the poll tax that had been instituted in the South and to enforce fair voting and hiring practices. He also ordered the complete integration of the armed forces. In 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held 9 to 0 that racial segregation in public schools hurt minority children and violated the 14th amendment of the Constitution. Even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Democrat Governor George Wallace of Alabama stood at the door to a white school to prevent two young black students from entering.
The fight for equality to go with freedom had begun.
In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking a long bus boycott and mass protests elsewhere. Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr. was chosen to head up the Montgomery protestors, and two years later he and his followers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to support their desegregation movements. Four students in Greensboro, North Carolina staged a sit-in at a whites only drugstore in 1960 and so-called “Freedom Rides” in 1961 forced the intervention of the federal government on the side of the protestors. Despite the nonviolence of the protestors, Democrat authorities were quick to use force against the protests. Televised news clips of Birmingham police chief Bull Conner turning water hoses and attack dogs on peaceful marchers turned sentiment in the North firmly to the side of the protestors. Countless numbers of young white students traveled south to join the protests, and the nation was stunned and angered when James Chaney, a young black man and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, young white men from New York were tortured and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) with the help of Neshoba County’s deputy sheriff. In 1965 a white female civil rights worker was murdered by the Klan in Alabama and public opinion, even in the South began to shift away from them.
The Klan had been established in 1865 and had spread into nearly every southern state by 1870. Their job was to wage an underground campaign of intimidation and violence to resist the Republican Party’s Reconstruction-era policies and to keep freed blacks “in their place.” The Klan sought to solidify its power through Democratic victories in southern state elections, but it also lynched black men who they felt had gotten out of line, and burned crosses at night on black families’ front lawns. At its peak, the Klan included around four million people nationwide. Democratic leaders later tried to attribute the Klan to poor white people, but the Klan was in fact made up of everyone from poor white farmers to lawyers and judges, and, served as the military wing of the Democrat Party in the South. Many Klansmen became governors of states or held other political offices. They were virtually all Democrats. Klan members of note include Senator Robert Byrd (a senator until his death in 2010), Senator John Brown Gordon, Senator John Tyler Morgan, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Democrat President Harry Truman (supposedly paid his dues to the Klan but was never really active), and recently declassified documents purport that the KKK has proof that Democrat President Lyndon Johnson was also a Klan member. Once they achieved high public office, however, most of these gentlemen found it impolitic to admit to their former affiliation with an organization that was becoming more and more vilified around the country.
In the aftermath of the violence against protestors in the South, President John F. Kennedy had proposed the passage of a Civil Rights Bill. After his assassination, President Lyndon Johnson gathered a few Congressmen from both sides of the aisle to draft and push through legislation ending segregation. Despite some Democrat opposition, the bill passed the house with bipartisan
support. In the Senate, however, Southern Democrats fiercely fought passage of the bill. Senator Byrd, for instance filibustered for 75 hours in an attempt to derail the bill. In the end, Republicans were able to push it through and President Johnson signed it into law, famously quipping, “I”ll have those n*****s voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” Did he really say that? We can’t be sure, but other racist comments he made have been verified such as when he responded to his black chauffeur who suggested he would rather be called by his name than “boy.” Johnson responded, “As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, n****r, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”
The road to equality as well as freedom has been a long and arduous one for black Americans, and now that they have actually achieved it, Democrats are telling them that they are hopelessly buried under the weight of “white privilege,” “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.” The Democrat Party, whose way of garnering votes is to tell others that they are hated by Republicans and that only Democrats can protect them, keep minority groups feeling victimized and beholding to them. Unfortunately, the Democrats never do anything after elections that really benefit them. For example, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stopped an Amazon headquarters going into Queens which would have brought between 24,000 and 40,000 jobs to her constituents. And the mayors of many Democratic-run cities have let rioters and looters run wild, destroying the stores of many minority businessmen. One major company has already announced plans to pull out of Minneapolis since the police there were kept from protecting their property from looters.
Are the Democrats correct? Do we suffer from “systemic racism?” Do all whites suffer from “white privilege?” Certainly blacks have had a hard time fighting for their freedom, but all along the way white people have been there helping them. It is not a black fight. It is an American fight. And it is one, that contrary to what the media tells us, the good are winning! See my final blog in this series for the conclusion to this matter.