We don’t like to think about it. In fact, we DON’T think about it. We know all the history, because we make it our business to know the history. What we don’t think about, any more than a frog thinks about how the water is getting hotter in that pot it’s swimming in, is that the South Won The War.
AND, As Bryan Stevenson says, “Slavery didn’t end. It just evolved.”
The South lost the battle of 1861-1865, but they played the long game and won.
The Equal Justice Initiative reports that over 2000 racial terror lynchings of Black people by white mobs in America, during Reconstruction. While the North “Carpetbaggers” were still there. And still, 80% of blacks were registered to vote in 1868.
You can read about this in the EJI’s report, which I cite above: "Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1866-1876." You can read it to find all the gory details. And after Reconstruction, after the North and the Lincoln Republicans left, it was just a matter of time. It was a matter of attrition.
We know the history. We know that Reconstruction ended in 1877. We know that up until close to the end of the 19th century there were blacks elected in local, state and national elections. We are “woke” enough to know of the rising of the Klan in its various iterations. We know the terror that ensued over those years, as the South won a decades-long war of attrition and the North gave up. The North stopped enforcing its victory, the way the allies stopped enforcing the Treaty of Versailles, until the next thing we knew, the South won.
I’m not going to tediously recount every piece of evidence to document this.
No, slaves were no longer bought and sold, but as sharecroppers they were often de facto indentured servants.
We know how Republicans and free blacks were intimidated, terrorized, and worse. We know that State Houses were taken over, and how poll taxes and literacy tests took away the right to vote. We know how Jim Crow began, and slowly yet suddenly became the law of the land. By the turn of the 20th century, the South won the war, by attrition.
The random, and not-so random lynchings, the terror, were designed to maintain their victory. By the EJI’s count, over 6,500 were lynched through 1950. We know what happened in Wilmington, NC, in 1898, which was both a massacre and a coup D’Etat. We know what happened in East St. Louis in 1917, in Tulsa in 1921. These battles were simply to maintain the victory.
We note that these statues went up in the 1950’s. Yes, the south started losing some battles, so they erected these monuments to their heroes not of “The Lost Cause,” but to remind themselves that they won, and that they did not want to give any of it back. And we know what happened to Freedom Riders in the 1960’s, and the fire hoses, and the assassinations — these were battles in a desperate attempt to keep the victory that they had won.
The South lost some major battles 50-60 years ago. But these monuments remind them, to this day, that they won the war.
Now they are losing, even with a President determined that their victory remains intact.
And they cling to the Confederate flag, and to their monuments, because they are reminders of their victory.
And, like frogs in heating water, we don’t even realize that the North lost the war.
It’s time to win it back….