Today, because of the actions of one young man, we look back at many generations of American History over the issues of race elations, Southern pride, slavery its aftermath and attempt to come to grips with what it all means. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has asked for the battle flag of the Confederacy to be taken down from the Confederate memorial on the statehouse grounds.
Many have argued that the flag itself has nothing to do with slavery as did the Anne Robb owner of Dixie Outfitters in Branson, Missouri:
“When something like this happens, people are always looking for something to blame,” she explained. “It’s easy to grab a hold of the flag and say, ‘Oh, it’s the flag,’ or ‘Oh, it’s the gun.’ The guy [shooter Dylann Roof] was an idiot … He is to blame for this, not the flag.”
She added, “Our customers are hard-working, red-blooded Americans that understand the history of the Confederate flag. They are not haters or anything like that. They are proud of their country and proud of what the Confederate flag represents. It has nothing to do with the slavery issue.”
Right, Southern pride and slavery and Jim Crow and the KKK and the battle flag have absolutely nothing to do with each other. And mind you, I'm mildly sympathetic to that view, belief, delusion, self-deception, whatever, from some people.
Look, everyone who died in that war was an American. And as we should respect the sacrifices of all American veterans, we should at least leave some gracious forgiving openness in our hearts for those who lost their lives on the losing siding of that conflict.
We just need to stop listening to some of their supporters like Anne Robb when it turns out she has ties to the Klan.
Continued over the flip. [Note: Potential trigger warning as some of the images are unfiltered and graphic]
Tipped off by readers, the News-Leader checked into Robb’s background later and discovered her husband was involved with the Klan back in the '90s, and that her father-in-law is Thomas Robb, national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
An Associated Press report in 1990 showed that Robb’s husband, Nathan, applied to adopt one mile of U.S. 65 near the Arkansas-Missouri state line as part of a litter campaign. Robb was identified as “den commander” of a Klan group in Harrison, Arkansas, at the time.
Asked about her husband’s involvement, Anna Robb dismissed it, saying, “That was when he was very young.”
When confonted with this and the fact she herself had been present at a Klan gathering with her husband, she contended that these were "years ago," that they had "never been members of the Klan" and that all of this Klan nonsense had "
nothing to do with me, the store or this issue at hand."
Yes, right, nothing at all to do with it, except for things like this...
For some this is a very difficult issue to confront and deal with. Slavery itself is difficult to fully get your head around. It's fair to point out that America was not the only country with slavery. Slavery was common in many counties and its history goes back for centuries. But the United States was one of the few countries to go beyond the temporary forced servitude of captured enemy soldiers, debtors and criminals. Prior to 1662 in Virginia, anyone could have been held in indentured servitude. Everyone except Christians that is. Even whites were used
as indentured servants:
All were indentured servants. During their time as servants, they were fed and housed. Afterwards, they would be given what were known as "freedom dues," which usually included a piece of land and supplies, including a gun. Black-skinned or white-skinned, they became free.
Whether you were English, Irish, Dutch or African, you could be held for a period of years to pay off your debt or as punishment for a crime in servitude. When that period was complete you were free and you would be granted land and supplies of your own.
But gradually, this changed, as with all pyramid schemes, it had to. Not everyone could possibly get to the top of the pyramid, because it simply takes too many people to maintain. Something had to change, and it did.
In 1641, Massachusetts became the first colony to legally recognize slavery. Other states, such as Virginia, followed. In 1662, Virginia decided all children born in the colony to a slave mother would be enslaved. Slavery was not only a life-long condition; now it could be passed, like skin color, from generation to generation.
The moral argument, that a person was a slave because they
deserved it switched from that being linked to what they did, to
who and what they were. "Scientists" began to argue for the "obvious" genetic and mental inferiority of the African. Studies were done. The dead corpses of Africans were dissected and the results debated in scholarly journals, and designed to further rationalize and explain away the moral and financial decision to end the servitude of white, and implement the permenent slavery of Africans.
Such was the case with Sarah Baartman, the "HotenTot Venus," who was a highly sought after "oddity" in the scientific circles of the 1780s.
According to popular history, Saartjie Baartman (more commonly known as Sarah or Sara Baartman) was born in 1789 in the Gamtoos Valley of South Africa. When she was barely in her 20s, she was sold to London by an enterprising Scottish doctor named Alexander Dunlop, accompanied by a showman named Hendrik Cesars. She spent four years in Britain being exhibited for her large buttocks (steatopygia). Her treatment caught the attention of British abolitionists, who tried to rescue her, but she claimed that she had come to London on her own accord. In 1814, after Dunlop's death, she traveled to Paris. With two consecutive showmen, Henry Taylor and S. Reaux, she amused onlookers who frequented the Palais-Royal. She was subjected to examination by Georges Cuvier, a professor of comparative anatomy at the Museum of Natural History. In post-Napoleonic France, sideshows like the Hottentot Venus lost their appeal. Baartman lived on in poverty, and died in Paris of an undetermined inflammatory disease in December 1815. After her death, Cuvier dissected her body, then displayed her remains. For more than a century and a half, visitors to the Museum of Man in Paris could view her brain, skeleton and genitalia until she was buried.[4]
To those who did these studies Africans weren't people, they were
objects to be analyzed, cut into pieces, to be
used and exploited until they dropped of old age or exhaustion, chattel to be used for the profit and perverse curiosity of others. It's easier to abridge the human rights of another person, when you don't fully believe they're actually human in the first place. So we see that "racism" arises not so much our of hatred or even fear, but as a way to erase guilt and obliterate sympathy for those
whose degradation is required to protect profits.
This new slavery wasn't based on something a person did. It was based on who and what a person was. And it was now tied, inexorably to race, money, power and maintenance of both. So, naturally, this money and this power had to be protected, and hence were formed the slave patrols:
Slave patrols (called patrollers, pattyrollers or paddy rollers by the slaves) were organized groups of white men who monitored and enforced discipline upon black slaves in the antebellum U.S. southern states. Slave patrols' function was to police slaves, especially runaways and defiant slaves. They also formed river patrols to prevent escape by boat. Slave patrols were first established in South Carolina in 1704, and the idea spread throughout the colonies. [...]
Their biggest concern were slaves on the plantations since that is where slave populations were highest. At first, incentives such as tobacco and money were offered to urge whites to be more vigilant in the capture of runaway slaves. When this approach failed, slave patrols were formally established.[1] Laws were put into place to regulate the activities of both blacks and whites. Slaves who were encountered without passes were expected to be returned to their owners, as stated in the slave code. Punishment for runaway slaves could be expected. Black persons were subjected to questioning, searches, and other forms of harassment. Oftentimes, whippings and beatings for non-compliant, and even compliant slaves, could be expected. [...]
Slave owners feared slave gatherings would allow them to trade or steal goods and the potential for a rebellion. South Carolina and Virginia selected patrols from state militias. Slave patrols were often equipped with guns and whips and would exert brutal and racially motivated control.
So now not only were slave owners themselves and their white, and sometimes African, workmen enforcing and maintaining the slaves in a state of subservience via brutality and torture, we also had bands of roving, armed, militia-trained white men
policing the activities of slaves, who were mostly black and visually easy to identify. Many members of the slave patrols were not slave owners, as some states required all able-bodied white men to serve time "on patrol."
Eventually these patrolmen became the backbone of our early individual police forces.
The birth and development of the American police can be traced to a multitude of historical, legal and political-economic conditions. The institution of slavery and the control of minorities, however, were two of the more formidable historic features of American society shaping early policing. Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities. For example, New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans (National Constable Association, 1995), the St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city, and many southern police departments began as slave patrols. In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation's first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.
So you can see that from the very beginning many police agencies in America were
designed to put much of their focus on the black man/slave, who would nearly automatically be considered a "threat" to the non-slave populace as they became increasingly fearful of a mass slave escape, revolt or rebellion. Current-day law enforcement's hard-nosed dealings with black persons is thus not a new phenomenon, it's been a part of how law enforcement has been
designed to function for more than 300 years.
This situation with the slave patrols and the continued dehumanizing of Africans for profit continued through and after the American Revolution when the Northern states were building an industrial rather than agrarian economy and had less and less of need for the masses of manual labor required on plantations. To solidify the Union and fight together for independence from England, concessions to the slave states had to be made. These concessions made their way into the Constitution in the form of the 3/5ths clause for representation and taxes, the fugitive slave clause and a prohibition on the Congress changing the immigration laws for 20 years and banning the importation of slaves, something which Congress actually did in 1808, once those 20 years expired.
The fugitive slave clause presented a more complex problem, as it required the non-slave states to work on their own to capture and return slaves to the states they had escaped from. As the abolition movement, driven by a Christian evangelicals, gained momentum, fewer and fewer of the Northern states were willing to honor the fugitive slave deal that had been struck in the Constitution. Some states passed "personal liberty laws" requiring a jury trial for suspected escapees.
Congress ultimately passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This penalized any law enforcement official who did not act to apprehend any suspected escaped slaves as well as bringing in federal marshals to help enforce the requirement.
The conflict over fugitive slaves and the Underground Railroad increasingly frustrated the Southern slave states. The law led eventually to the apprehension of suspected "escapee" Dred Scott in the North. He contended that he had been freed by his previous owner many years previously. His case ultimatley went to the Supreme Court, which produced the infamous decision by Southern-born Chief Justice Roger B. Taney that declared, based on the various compromises in the Constitution specifically excluding African slaves from full rights that ...
[T]he authors of the Constitution had viewed all blacks as "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
At this point 42 years after Congress had banned the continued importation of slaves from Africa, an increasing number of slaves in America were, in fact,
American born. Yet with Taney's decision none—whether born free, or born slave—were to be
recognized as having ANY RIGHTS WHATSOEVER under the Constitution.
Even if they may have been technically free, they really weren't free at a all.
Conservatives have long railed that this was a hateful, wrongful decision. But Taney had a point. By specifically including the 3/5th language and the fugitive slave clause the Constitutional Congress did clearly carve out a bright clear exception to the core ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence that "All men are created equal." Clearly some men were more equal than others, and Taney was simply pointing out that this view was rather clearly delineated in the original Constitution, Twenty-five of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention owned or managed slaves.
Three years after the Dred Scott decision, Abraham Lincoln of the Republican Party, which at that time had strong ties to the abolitionist movement and even included abolition in its platform, was elected president. Yet before he was even sworn in and had a chance to take the oath of office, South Carolina had fled from the Union, arguing that it was largely because of Lincoln's threat to slavery:
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign [take away] the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms [emphasis in the original] of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself.
A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
As you can see, even with their victory in
Scott the fugitive slave issue loomed large in the Southern consciousness. It was not enough that they had retained the right to own people and call them "slaves," they need the non-slave-owning states to
acquiesce and actively support slavery by bringing any and all potential escapees back to them without delay, protest, muss, fuss, or due process of law. They who had been deathly afraid of their own slaves revolting against them were now in deathly fear that the North would rail against them in outrage of their immoral practice of chattel slavery.
But those fears were greatly overblown, at least in regards to Lincoln.
Lincoln himself at his first inaugural belied many of these fears.
Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern states that by the accession of a Republican administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that—
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations and had never recanted them;
It was not Lincoln's intention to end slavery, for he saw—at that time—no legal means to do so.
People like Judge Anthony Napolitano have argued that Lincoln began the war himself when slavery was "already dying a natural death," when instead he could have simply bought the slaves [at an estimated cost of $3.5 billion for the then-4 million persons who were held as a captive labor force]. But as Jon Stewart points out, he tried this approach with the border states that had not yet seceded and was rejected. Napolitano argued that Lincoln should have abolished Fugitive Slave Act despite the fact that it was constitutionally founded on the fugitive slave clause.
Yet, as Stewart points out, Lincoln did not secede from the South, the South seceded from the country, and then attacked at Fort Sumter and took the choice out of Lincoln's hands.
And thus began the Civil War. [And yes, Lincoln did enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, as he was Constitutionally and legally required to so, even during the war.] Southeners and Northerners rallied to the defense of their now separate countries. It could be argued that not that many Northeners were inspired to fight and die over the fate of "dumb niggers," but the were inspired and angered by the attack on Fort Sumter.
[There is a convoluted theory that Lincoln himself provoked the South to attack by sending the U.S.S. Powhatan to resupply the fort, which was located on an island in the middle of Charleston Harbor, because it would only be such a surprise attack—like the later ones on the U.S.S. Maine and Pearl Harbor and 9-11—that would inspire the proper rage in the North to support a war, but frankly it makes very little sense. Why would Lincoln seek to start a war when the Southern states who had already chosen to secede before he even began his first term? Lincoln had as yet made no overt threats against the practice of slavery as I noted above and continued to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. So how is it he also wants a war with the South—for what exactly?]
Similar to the reluctance of Northerners to fight to free slaves, Southern soldiers, many of whom had been required to participate in the slave patrols, did not rise to the call to protect the power of the aristocrat to drive "niggers"—instead many of them did do it for honor and "country" as did Officer John S. Moody as he later wrote in 1904 railing against the revisionism that the war had not been about slavery as opposed to "states' rights":
I wrote you about my disgust at reading the Reunion speeches: It has since been increased by reading Christian['s] report. I am certainly glad I wasn’t there. According to Christian the Virginia people were the abolitionists & the Northern people were pro-slavery. He says slavery was “a patriarchal” institution—So were polygamy & circumcision. Ask Hugh if he has been circumcised. Christian quotes what the Old Virginians said against slavery. True; but why didn’t he quote what the modern Virginians said in favor of it—Mason, Hunter, Wise &c. Why didn’t he state that a Virginia Senator (Mason) was the author of the Fugitive Slave law—& why didn’t he quote The Virginia Code (1860) that made it a crime to speak against slavery, or to teach a negro to read the Lord’s prayer.
Now while I think as badly of slavery as Horace Greeley did I am not ashamed that my family were slaveholders. It was our inheritance—Neither am I ashamed that my ancestors were pirates & cattle thieves. People must be judged by the standard of their own age. If it was right to own slaves as property it was right to fight for it. The South went to war on account of Slavery. South Carolina went to war—as she said in her Secession proclamation—because slavery wd. not be secure under Lincoln. South Carolina ought to know what was the cause for her seceding. ... I am not ashamed of having fought on the side of slavery—a soldier fights for his country—right or wrong—he is not responsible for the political merits of the cause he fights in. The South was my country.
When we think about our soldiers today who fought and died in Afghanistan, in Iraq or decades ago in Vietnam—it seems quite obvious that the political decisions that led them to those battlefields
should not fall on their backs. They were doing their duty, for honor and for country.
So on this ground, I do at least see the legitimacy of the argument that these soldiers deserve to be honored as Americans—not necessarily Confederates—who served their country. I can see that the battle flag, was originally the flag of soldiers such as Officer John S Mosby. And if that were all there was to the story, that would be that. However, it isn't. Not hardly.
As the South attempted to develop its own diplomatic relations, it found that their cause of maintaining slavery an impediment, so they began to massage their message. Rather being about continuing the liberty to deny the humanity and liberty of others, the Southern diplomats began to talk of "freedom from the tyranny of Lincoln."
But not even some Southern newspapers were buying that one.
‘The people of the South,’ says a contemporary, ‘are not fighting for slavery but for independence.’ Let us look into this matter. It is an easy task, we think, to show up this new-fangled heresy—a heresy calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland. ... Our doctrine is this: WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the groundwork.
The war for some time went very badly for the North considering the wealth of military know-how that the South held. That was until the battle of
Antitam in 1862:
The Army of the Potomac, under the command of George McClellan, mounted a series of powerful assaults against Robert E. Lee’s forces near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862. The morning assault and vicious Confederate counterattacks swept back and forth through Miller’s Cornfield and the West Woods. Later, towards the center of the battlefield, Union assaults against the Sunken Road pierced the Confederate center after a terrible struggle. Late in the day, the third and final major assault by the Union army pushed over a bullet-strewn stone bridge at Antietam Creek. Just as the Federal forces began to collapse the Confederate right, the timely arrival of A.P. Hill’s division from Harpers Ferry helped to drive the Army of the Potomac back once more. The bloodiest single day in American military history ended in a draw, but the Confederate retreat gave Abraham Lincoln the “victory” he desired before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.
Seizing the initiative, Lincoln engaged in a battle of psychological warfare with the South. As president he did not possess the ability to change slavery without the support of Congress, and now with half the states divorced from Congress there was even less he could do, except for the fact that he held special war powers as commander-in-chief to confiscate the property of an enemy purely via executive. So that's what he did. He
confiscated the slaves from the South as a consequence of the war. As a result the Emancipation Proclamation did not actually "free the slaves," it only
threatened to grant freedom in those specific counties of the states that remained in rebellion.
It was, in short, blackmail.
"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
Now, therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States [...]
The proclamation goes on to list the specific counties that remained in rebellion and would be affected by the order. This meant two key things: Any county that was not in rebellion yet had slaves,
could keep them. Any county or states that ceased hostilities by the deadline could also
keep their slaves without interruption.
How exactly Lincoln expected to enforce this measure in a country he was, at least in Southern minds, no longer president of—was obviously problematic. Theoretically the Army and Navy were now entrusted to implement and enforce it. But Lincoln went one step further in his effort to push the South into capitulation, he threatened to take those soon to be former slaves into the Union Army:
And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.
And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.
When I first actually read the proclamation in its entirety, I was greatly disappointed and felt the great legacy of Lincoln as the president who "freed the slaves" was massively overblown. This was not a humanitarian document. He was using slaves as bargaining chips in the war.
Eventually though, as the war waged on, Lincoln grew more and more sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, thus he began to lobby for a 13th Amendment to fully end slavery and indentured servitude as the Emancipation Proclamation had left much of the practice intact in the non-rebelling states and counties.
In the film Lincoln, one of the fairly early scene depicts Lincoln explaining his rationale of proclamation and admits its obvious imperfections, the 13th Amendment was his attempt to correct the mess left behind by the limitations of the proclamation and although the amendment did pass Congress he did not live to see it ratified by the states as he was stuck down by John Wilkes Booth.
Yet the 13th Amendment itself still presents a complication. It reads as thus:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Here you see Slavery is ended, except that is for the "duly convicted." All you need to continue to gain the financial benefits of modern slavery is to contract with the state for inmate services, once they have been apprehended by the former slave patrol police forces, then "duly convicted" by judges and juries who have only had centuries of fear of the savage and uncivilized African inculcated into the culture.
Following the 13th Amendment came the 14th, which reversed and eliminated the 3/5ths clause and the fugitive slave clause from the Constitution as well as granting full citizenship to all persons born on U.S. soil [thereby reversing the Scott decision] as well as granted "all persons within the jurisdiction of the state, the equal protection of the law." With the 15th Amendment then granting the vote to these new African citizens, that should have been—as they say—that. But it wasn't.
The war victory may have belonged to the North, the battle flag of the Confederacy was put away, only to be shown at war memorials. But the South—in it's own way— still fought on. Rather than using the tactics of standard war, they turn to the methods of the guerrilla and the terrorist. The North, enraged by the rebellion, was brutal on the South during Reconstruction and in retaliation former Confederate soldiers such at Lt. General Nathan Bedford Forrest found a new path by becoming the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan:
After the war, Forrest returned to a devastated Tennessee and publicly advocated for peaceful submission to the victorious Union. But he was not the beneficiary of a sudden racial enlightenment, nor did he submit entirely to the new world order, one characterized by the societal tumult of Reconstruction and the removal of the Southern economy's cornerstone. Perhaps blacks were no longer slaves, but, Forrest believed, they had to remain the South's docile workforce, for their own good as well as his. "I am not an enemy of the negro," Forrest said. "We want him here among us; he is the only laboring class we have."
Meanwhile, in Pulaski, Tennessee, six Confederate veterans had formed, as a lark, a secret society that they whimsically dubbed the Ku Klux Klan (from the Greek word for circle, kuklos—they evidently liked the mystical ring of the alliterated K's.) At first, the six men and their recruits undertook non-violent, theatrical stunts to frighten back into line the freed slaves just beginning to assert their new rights. But soon enough, more men joined the KKK and, as Republican efforts to rehabilitate Southern society grew more concerted, the KKK became a violent, marauding organization whose individual "dens" answered to no centralized authority. Society was changing quickly, and the KKK was trying to slow the pace. Bodies of freedmen, their white supporters, and Republicans began to litter the roadside.
It was at about this time that Forrest, learning of the KKK, expressed a desire to join. The eminent recruit was elected grand wizard, the Klan's highest official, and tried to bring the rapidly multiplying dens under a centralized authority—his own. Forrest probably did not object to the violence, per se, as a means of restoring the pre-war hierarchy, but as a military man, he deplored the lack of discipline and structure that defined the growing KKK. In its methods and aims, the KKK was merely the avenging ghost of the Confederate Army. To Forrest's dismay, though, it was not an army that he could command.
As Forrest notes, his concerns are not driven by hatred or even fear of Negroes and Africans—his concerns were
financial and economic.
"We want [the Negro] here among us; he is the only laboring class we have."
The Klan terrorized the South to protect whites and their wealth derived from decades of labor of blacks. Its members joined the police forces, the judiciary, the legislature. Although Africans were technically "free" they were forced into menial labor jobs and continued to be financially exploited as share-croppers. They may have "equal protection of the law" under the 14th Amendment, but the protection mplemented under the Klan was far from equal. Blacks had the right to vote under the 15th Amendment, but the actual ability to vote was soon stymied by literacy tests and poll taxes. Although their rights were constitutionally protected, the ability to enforce that protection under law was stymied as Congress floundered to implement an effective civil rights act without which the Klan could act with impunity.
If you dared to defy the Klan, threatened a white man on woman, or it was simply thought you had, the judgment and punishment was swift and final.
Segregation became common in both the North, South and the emerging West. And rather than push back in support of constitutional principles, the courts further gave in to this tide with decisions such as
Plessy v Ferguson which established the doctrine of Separate but "Equal" in 1896.
In reaction to this and the ongoing scourge of lynching, African American scholars such as W.E.B. Debois and white Republicans came together in 1909 to form the NAACP. But their fight was to be long and difficult.
Here is how the Confederate Veteran praised the efforts of Forrest and his Klan in 1917:
Great and trying times always produce great leaders, and one was at hand—Nathan Bedford Forrest. His plan, the only course left open. The organization of a secret government. A terrible government; a government that would govern in spite of black majorities and Federal bayonets. This secret government was organized in every community in the South, and this government is known in history as the Klu Klux Clan [sic] ...
Here in all ages to come the Southern romancer and poet can find the inspiration for fiction and song. No nobler or grander spirits ever assembled on this earth than gathered in these clans. No human hearts were ever moved with nobler impulses or higher aims and purposes …. Order was restored, property safe; because the negro feared the Klu Klux Clan more than he feared the devil. Even the Federal bayonets could not give him confidence in the black government which had been established for him, and the negro voluntarily surrendered to the Klu Klux Clan, and the very moment he did, the “Invisible Army” vanished in a night. Its purpose had been fulfilled.
Bedford Forrest should always be held in reverence by every son and daughter of the South as long as memory holds dear the noble deeds and service of men for the good of others on, this earth. What mind is base enough to think of what might have happened but for Bedford Forrest and his “Invisible” but victorious army
.
It is yet another 50 years before NAACP Lawyers, led by Thurgood Marshall, are finally able to strike down Plessy with Brown V Board of Education in 1955.
Yet that victory began its own swift and harsh backlash. And guess what returns?
So that flag that was of Officer John Mosby, became the flag of Bedford Forrest, and then the flag of George Wallace. The Heritage of Mosby, is also the Heritage of Forrest and of Wallace, and of Byron de la Beckwith who as a then-member of the White Citizens Counsel, which was formed in retaliation to
Brown [now known as the Counsel of Conservative Citizens], murdered NAACP Leader Medger Evers in cold blood in 1963. Yet de la Beckwith was not convicted of the crime for
another 31 years.
In the year Evers died, the Civil Rights Act was passed, just 95 years after the 14th Amendment supposedly granted "all persons the equal protection of the law." Then in 1965 the Voting Rights Act passed, also a mere 95 years after the 15th Amendment had "allegedly" granted African Americans the vote.
Now this year, another man inspired by the bitter, hateful and bigoted rhetoric of the CCC, [whom Thurgood Marshall called the "Uptown Klan"], which was in turn merely an update and rehash of the financially self-serving rhetoric formed to rationalize the racialization of indentured servitude into slavery 353 Years Ago, has taken innocent lives.
This is the Heritage that so many of our Southern Brothers cling. It's isn't all bad, yet it isn't all good either. Some might still want to believe that Lincoln "pulled a fast one" on South Carolina and tricked them into the war like David Blaine doing street magic.
Fine. That's your right if you feel that way. But how do you explain Forrest? How do you explain Jim Crow? How do you explain lynchings and bombings, and gerrymandering and red-lining and police terrorism all in the name of fear of the savage African?
Did Lincoln trick you into that one too? That, all of that, is our American—not just Southern —American "heritage."
We still have "slave patrols" as the U.S. Department of Justice documented on the streets of Ferguson and Cleveland and Baltimore, and Staten Island.
In Cleveland, the DOJ found:
Our investigation concluded that there is reasonable cause to believe that CDP engages in a pattern or practice of using unreasonable force in violation of the Fourth Amendment. That
pattern manifested in a range of ways, including:
The unnecessary and excessive use of deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons;
The unnecessary, excessive or retaliatory use of less lethal force including tasers, chemical spray and fists;
Excessive force against persons who are mentally ill or in crisis, including in cases where the officers were called exclusively for a welfare check; and
The employment of poor and dangerous tactics that place officers in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk.
In other words, the department fails in just about every possible measurable way. And it goes on like that:
We still have racial bias in lending, and hiring, and in our education system. It's far better than it was in 1963, or than it was in 1863, but it's
still there. It's still with us no matter how hard Bill O'Reilly
screams at people to deny it.
There are still people more than willing to distort facts, statistics and reality to justify that it continues.
If those who want to claim that the Confederate battle flag is only a symbol of "honor and sacrifice" then you have to ask yourself what did they sacrifice themselves for exactly? Even John S. Mosby knew better than to proclaim it was "for liberty." Will they stand at the side of those who wish to see us move toward a racial heritage appropriate to 2063 or stand still frozen or move backward to darker times?
Which shall it be? Will we honor the sacrifices of our forebears not just with symbols, but with action and conviction, or will we sit on the sidelines and cry that we're being "blamed and defamed" for what our nation did for centuries and our Congress has still yet to openly admit was even wrong, let alone apologize because the House and Senate couldn't come to an agreement
... over opening the door to reparations.
No need to repair anything, right, not if we just keep waiting for all the people, and all the families who suffered through the generational trauma of slavery and its aftermath, the terrorism of Jim Crow, and our slave police patrols to just all die off.
Nothing need be "fixed" here. Not a thing.
Right?
All of this is our heritage, every bit of it. And we need not "look away" from it nor wallow in it. We need to acknowledge not just the parts we like, but every bit of it, for it is only by recognizing the truth of it all, not the South was "evil" but that it comprised imperfect people who were at the time convinced they were doing what was best of themselves and their family, even at the expense of others. It's only by realizing this that we can reconcile ourselves with it all, the good and bad alike, rather than rationalize, excuse or ignore it that we realize how to avoid the path of continuing and repeating those same mistakes for the next century, and the next after that.
It's only been 350 years, we're going to figure this out, eventually. Sooner would be better I think.