Reply #323: So, you won't answer my question [View All]

[kwassa]

You need to duck and deflect, instead, and attempt to turn the argument back towards the North than accept the South's responsibilty for the terrorism inflicted upon it's black citizens..

There is NO parallel to Jim Crow and the relentless oppression of blacks in the South, and your attempts to divert the discussion by relatively minor parallets, excepting the treatment of Native Americans, is duly noted.

http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/creating2.htm

brief excerpt:

in general the Jim Crow era in American history dates from the late 1890s, when southern states began systematically to codify (or strengthen) in law and state constitutional provisions the subordinate position of African Americans in society. Most of these legal steps were aimed at separating the races in public spaces (public schools, parks, accommodations, and transportation) and preventing adult black males from exercising the right to vote. In every state of the former Confederacy, the system of legalized segregation and disfranchisement was fully in place by 1910. This system of white supremacy cut across class boundaries and re-enforced a cult of "whiteness" that predated the Civil War.

Segregation and disfranchisement laws were often supported, moreover, by brutal acts of ceremonial and ritualized mob violence (lynchings) against southern blacks. Indeed, from 1889 to 1930, over 3,700 men and women were reported lynched in the United States--most of whom were southern blacks. Hundreds of other lynchings and acts of mob terror aimed at brutalizing blacks occurred throughout the era but went unreported in the press. Numerous race riots erupted in the Jim Crow era, usually in towns and cities and almost always in defense of segregation and white supremacy. These riots engulfed the nation from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Houston, Texas; from East St. Louis and Chicago to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the years from 1865 to 1955. The riots usually erupted in urban areas to which southern, rural blacks had recently migrated. In the single year of 1919, at least twenty-five incidents were recorded, with numerous deaths and hundreds of people injured. So bloody was this summer of that year that it is known as the Red Summer of 1919.

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Waves of violence and vigilante terrorism swept over the South in the 1860s and 1870s (the Ku Klux Klan and Knights of the White Camellia), as organized bands of white vigilantes terrorized black voters who supported Republican candidates as well as many African Americans who defied (consciously or unconsciously) the "color line" inherited from the slave era. Such actions often accomplished in reality what could not be done in law. Depending upon the state (and the region within states--such as the gerrymandered Second Congressional District in North Carolina where blacks continued to hold power until after 1900), blacks found themselves exercising limited suffrage in the 1870s, principally because their votes were manipulated by white landlords and merchant suppliers, eliminated by vigilantism, stolen by fraud at the ballot boxes, and compromised at every turn.

When the Compromise of 1877 allowed the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes to assume the presidency of the nation after the disputed election of 1876, political power was essentially returned to southern, white Democrats in nearly every state of the former Confederacy.