For almost a year now, I’ve been listening to tons of Trump supporters claim that there will be another civil war in the United States of America if Trump is impeached.
Some of the more famous Trump supporters we’ve heard make this threat include Jim Bakker, Roger Stone and James Woods.
The thing is, these threats would have a much greater fear-inducing, bone-chilling effect if America’s racists and right-wing thugs had ever STOPPED fighting the last Civil War.
I know that the Civil War OFFICIALLY ended in 1865, when Robert E Lee surrendered, however, that was mostly just a paperwork thing, for the official record. We didn’t disarm the Southerners that killed American troops. We didn’t have trials to convict, imprison and execute Southern troops that attacked American cities and killed citizens. We didn’t treat them like an enemy army that had just been defeated. We just let them all go back home, keep their weapons and we even allowed enemy soldiers to vote in our national elections.
And while the South CLAIMED to have surrendered, the surrender was a lie. They never had any intention of laying down their arms.
Need proof?
In Memphis, Tennessee in 1866, just one year after Robert E. Lee surrendered, a group of black soldiers were disarmed by local white residents. When tempers flared over their treatment, the black soldiers were attacked, and the Tennessee Attorney General led a posse to burn black neighborhoods. In total, nearly fifty black soldiers and civilians were killed.
In Colfax, Louisiana in 1873, a group of black militiamen were surrounded inside a courthouse by hundreds of ex-Confederates. Outnumbered, the black militiamen surrendered, however the ex-Confederates had no honor, and despite the surrender, the ex-Confederates proceeded to slaughter everyone inside the courthouse, and nearly two-hundred blacks were massacred.
A plaque now stands in Colfax, Louisiana honoring the ex-Confederates who slaughtered the unarmed black militiamen.
Sure, the South CLAIMED to have surrendered, however, they lied. They continued to attack and burn and slaughter. We even had federal troops stationed in the South to protect African-Americans from murder, arson and terror, but the Southerners engaged in murder, arson and terror anyway.
A mere eleven years after the Civil War officially ended there was a controversial national election between Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B Hayes. The election was so close that a Congressional Electoral Commission had to be formed to settle the dispute over contested electoral votes.
When a compromise between the Democrats and the Republicans in the commission was finally reached, things got much worse African-Americans living in the South. The compromise essentially stated that Southern Democrats would acknowledge Hayes as president, but only on the understanding that Republicans would remove all U.S. military forces from the former Confederate states and give the South the right to deal with blacks without northern interference.
After the Compromise, a few Democrats complained loudly that Tilden had been cheated. There was talk of forming armed units that would march on Washington, but President Grant was ready for that. He tightened military security, and nobody marched on Washington.
Hayes was peacefully inaugurated, however, the Compromise left African-Americans south of the Mason-Dixon line utterly vulnerable and undefended. Southern racists were basically placed on the honor system.
And a quick look at American history from 1877 onward gives us a wealth of evidence that Southern racists had absolutely no honor.
In Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, white supremacists seized armed control of that North Carolina town and killed at least 60 African-American residents, drove hundreds more out of town, burned down the local African-American newspaper and installed a former Confederate officer as the new mayor.
In Ocoee, Florida in 1920, a white mob attacked African-American residents. The riot started as a result of white attempts to suppress black voting. As many as sixty African-Americans were killed during the riot, and most African-American-owned buildings and residences in northern Ocoee were burned to the ground. Hundreds of African Americans living in southern Ocoee were later driven out on threat of more violence, leaving behind their homes and possessions and Ocoee essentially became an all-white town. .
In 1921, a white mob attacked residents and businesses of the African-American community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This attack, carried out on the ground and by air, destroyed more than 35 blocks of the district, at the time the wealthiest black community in the U.S.
Thousands of white people rampaged through the black community for two days straight, killing men and women, burning and looting stores and homes. About 10,000 black people were left homeless.
An estimated three-hundred African-Americans were killed, and more than eight-hundred were wounded. And even though the black resident were the victims of a violent white mob, the police didn’t arrest any of the white people who had committed acts of mass-murder and arson but arrested more than six-thousand black residents instead.
These are just some of the more memorable examples of how racists and right-wing thugs have been waging a war against African Americans and liberals AFTER the Civil War officially ended. There are thousands of additional examples that could be cited as well.
If you are a white man living in America, you could be fooled into believing that the civil war ended in 1865. But the racist thugs, sheriffs, mayors, legislators, judges, prosecutors and governors of the South never laid down their arms. For the most part they stopped killing American troops, however, they still engaged in violence against black people, kept the black population subjugated and punished black Americans in ways that might as well be called war.
Racists sheriffs and racist police officers have spent decades killing unarmed black men and getting away with it. They have likewise spent decades arresting innocent black men and women and sent them to prison for crimes that they didn’t commit. Meanwhile when black men are murdered on the streets of Southern cities, the murderers are rarely arrested or convicted.
The infamous “Stand Your Ground” laws in Florida were basically enacted to make it easier to kill black men and help the murderers to get away with it.
In addition to racist judges, juries, sheriffs and police oppressing blacks in the Southern states of the U.S.A., recent studies have shown that black voters were 10 times more likely to have their vote rejected than their white neighbors. Southern states have drastically scaled back early voting, which is disproportionately used by minorities. Republican states have tried to implement strict voter ID laws. A federal court rejected a North Carolina voter ID law, finding that it “targeted African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
Sadly, voter suppression has worked, as fewer black people are voting. Republicans have benefited, with GOP officials bragging that Trump won because of their voter suppression efforts. Disenfranchisement equals disempowerment. White supremacists knew this during Jim Crow, and their successors follow a similar strategy today.
Deprived of political power, black Americans have fought an uphill battle against institutional racism in the legal system and the economy. Blacks are arrested twice as often as whites for drug offenses, are more often jailed before trial, and receive harsher sentences for similar crimes.
John Ehrlichman (President Nixon’s Chief for Domestic Policy) actually admitted that this unjust behavior against black Americans was deliberate and premeditated. Here’s a quote from John Ehrlichman himself:
“We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did."
Ehrlichman’s confession actually helps to explain a lot. Although black Americans aren't more likely to use or sell drugs, they're much more likely to be arrested for them. And when black people are convicted of drug charges, they generally face longer prison sentences than their white counterparts for the same crimes.
And with a racist like Trump in the White House, things have actually gotten worse. Racists and White Supremacists have been energized by having one of their own in the White House. Despite the fact that Trump is a Northerner, Southern racists feel thrilled and validated by Trump. Hate crimes against blacks and other minorities have gone up by about 17 percent during Trump’s first year in office and Trump has given aid and comfort to the racists with his apparent kinship and pugilistic style, his refusal to condemn hate crimes committed in his name and his outrageous statements equating neo-Nazis and anti-racist activists after the deadly violence in Charlottesville.
So, I will not quake in my boots when right-wing thugs threaten me with a second Civil War if Trump is impeached. The first Civil War NEVER ENDED!!