Black History Month - Day 26
Black History Month - Day 26
White Supremacy Never Sleeps - It Adapts
With the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, Jim Crow was dismantled and legal protections were put in place to give Black people in the United States their birthright status as citizens. At least that was the hope. That was the Dream!
The Victories of the Second Reconstruction Movement (Civil Rights)
Between 1954 until 1968, there were many legal and moral victories. They are hallmarks of the success of this Second Reconstruction Period. Some of those legal victories include:
Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, outlawed segregated public schools.
Browder v. Gayle, in November 1956, affirmed that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional.
President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, the first major civil rights legislation since the First Reconstruction. It allowed federal prosecution of anyone who tried to prevent someone from voting.
December 1960 the Supreme Court ruled that interstate buses and bus terminals were required to integrate (giving rise to the Freedom Riders).
1962, The Supreme Court Orders Ole Miss to Integrate, James Meredith becomes the first black man to enter that University.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, barred discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in public facilities — such as restaurants, theaters, or hotels. Discrimination in hiring practices was also outlawed, and the act established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to help enforce the law.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, barred restrictions on voting that southern states had used to suppress Black voters (poll taxes, literacy tests, etc.).
The Fair Housing Act of 1968, prevented housing discrimination based on race, sex, national origin and religion. It was also the last legislation enacted during the civil rights era.
The 19th century Jim Crow structure was crumbling, but not without backlash. With every victory came violence in many cases and outright refusal to implement these new rules. Southerners found many and novel ways to work around integration.
For instance, in Virginia, the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties was chartered after the Brown decision to preserve “racial integrity”, “racial separateness” and “the precious heritage handed down to us by our forefathers.” This was part of Virginia’s “Massive Resistance”, a state policy to oppose school desegregation. Rather than desegregate public schools after the 1954 US supreme court decision in Brown v Board of Education, Virginia officials closed some of them. Private “Academies” were opened instead where white students could attend. White families were given subsidies to attend them.
It became apparent by the end of the 1960’s that white supremacy didn’t go away, it simply changed its tactics. It adapted to the new realities of court ordered desegregation and equal protection rights. White supremacists found novel ways to continue to promote their white ethno-state agenda in less overt ways.
Two key lessons that students should learn about the results of the Civil Rights Movement
First, the work of equality, inclusion and bringing Blacks into the mainstream of American citizenship was not finished with the Civil Rights Movement. This Second Reconstruction was a step forward, but it was incomplete.
One of the false and misleading arguments that conservatives and white nationalists use today is the idea that we “fixed those problems a long time ago, so there is nothing left to do.” They point back to the successes of the Civil Rights era and declare it was a complete success, and blacks are now equal. It is an excuse to turn a blind eye to the ever-persistent injustices that still exist.
This allows racists to blame black people for any inequities that still exist in our economic, political or educational system. They falsely and disingenuously declare that there is no racism, and we live is a “colorblind society” (here is a lesson on why “colorblindness” is a racist concept) so the inequities are the fault of black people who haven’t taken advantage of the opportunities. It is an underhanded way of inciting the old racist trope of the “lazy black person.”
Worse, this argument has been used to attack and attempt to end public policies such as affirmative action and the protection of voting rights by the federal government. Slowly, these rights and programs are continuing to be undermined and attacked, and because the underlying injustices within the system haven’t been corrected and real harm will be done if they succeed.
The second lesson in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement is that racists and white supremacists worked immediately to find new ways to undermine equal rights, sabotage desegregation, deny blacks economic opportunities, and develop a law enforcement infrastructure that would continue the patrolling and controlling of blacks through violence and intimidation.
From the 1960’s down to today, white supremacists have been working quietly, steadily and covertly to retake power within the federal government in order to roll back the rights that were so hard fought for in the 60s. In many ways these new “oligarchs” are the remnant of the old south’s elite. They carry the same racist ideology and disdain for not only blacks but for any government assistance to a poor person.
Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, they have been able to come out and work in the open. Donald Trump didn’t invent modern racism, he called it out and exploited it. It had been working to reassert itself for decades. Then Trump came on the scene and declared that “there were good people on both sides.” That was the clarion call of the new era of white supremacy! Now, the Republican party asserts racism openly and proudly.
This timeline of increasing resistance, and behind the scenes work of white supremacists begins with a political strategy that political scientists call:
The Southern Strategy - Republican Strategy to Gain Dominance
When President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he told an aide that Democrats had “lost the South for a generation,” anticipating a white backlash in the South. Since the end of Reconstruction, the South had been dominated by the Democratic Party which at the time supported Jim Crow.
Richard Nixon and other Republican party leaders saw an opening to appeal to the racist southern voters. Nixon campaign advisor Kevin Phillips and RNC Chairman Lee Atwater admitted appealing to white resentment to civil rights and even white racism.
Listen to this short audio of Lee Atwater admitting that the Republican party has deliberately co-opted racism in order to gain southern voters.
They did so not only by criticizing federal civil rights legislation and impugning federal desegregation orders, but by bemoaning busing, government dependency, and welfare, or by espousing such seemingly race-neutral ideas as “states rights” and “local control” as signals to preserve Jim Crow from federal intrusion. These phrases were not overtly racist, but they were dog-whistles to foment white resentment. The racists knew what these terms meant or implied very well. White supremacists had adapted their language to fit the new circumstances.
Republican operatives continued this strategy for over a decade from the election of 1968 until the ascension of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In 1976, Jimmy Carter the Democrat still carried many southern states because he was considered a “home-boy” from Georgia. But by 1980, the south was solidly Republican and has been since.
The Republican strategy matured into a broader attack on the federal government that was accused of pursuing the issue of inclusion and equality in support of taxes that were seen as taking from “good, hard-working Americans” (note: white people) to support the “undeserving” (note: black people).
President Reagan amplified this racist trope by focusing attention on the “welfare queen.” The welfare queen stood for the idea that black people were too lazy to work, instead relying on public benefits to get by, paid for by the rest of us upstanding citizens. She was promiscuous, having as many children as possible to beef up her benefit take. It was all a lie based on false and misleading information.
Here is a short video explaining how Reagan exploited this image of the “welfare queen.”
It was always a myth—white people have always made up the majority of those receiving government checks, and if anything, benefits are too small to allow anyone to live like royalty. But it rallied public opinion against welfare in general, and by implication, black people that “abused” the system.
These images and tropes were music to southern racist ears. Reagan won a landslide re-election victory in 1984 winning all but one state.
The New Economic Jim Crow
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan fundamentally changed the economic rules of the game as well, with devastating effects on black families. Since the New Deal of the 1930’s and the Great Society programs of the 1960’s, the federal government was viewed as an instrument to provide a social safety net and support for the economically needy. Taxes on the wealthy in this period were very high. The middle class flourished during those years, even though blacks were usually shut out.
Reagan implemented what was famously called “supply side economics.” What this did in terms of policy was to reduce the marginal tax rates of the elite, ended overbearing regulation on corporations, and provided wide loopholes for companies to avoid paying taxes at all in some cases. It enriched the elite and began a straight line of increase in the wealth of the top classes, and a stagnation of wages for the middle and lower classes.
These policies had a devastating effect on the incomes of blacks, and lower-class working whites. Another way to describe “supply side economics” is that it was deliberately racist, and disadvantaged an already marginalized group of people. That is why today, White Americans hold 84 percent of total U.S. wealth but make up only 60 percent of the population—while Black Americans hold 4 percent of the wealth and make up 13 percent of the population. This was deliberate racism baked into the federal government’s fiscal policy of the 1980’s and it has extended to the 21st century. Additionally, the median white worker made 25 percent more than the typical Black worker. (3rd quarter 2022)
By 1980, with the conservative-southern ascendancy, a new Jim Crow was coming into being. Even though overt types of racism was no longer acceptable, systems of economic oppression, inequality and workplace discrimination instituted a new economic order that can be called “The New Jim Crow.”
Along with a strategy of using mass incarceration of black people starting in the 1980s, this new Jim Crow sought some of the same goals as its 19th century predecessor. Economic exploitation and social control of black bodies and lives.
Tomorrow’s entry will include a discussion of the recent mass incarceration program and it’s ties to earlier Jim Crow black codes and convict leasing.