Jason Zengerle has written a really important piece for The New Republic about what has happened politically in the Deep South over the past decade, and particularly since the 2010 elections. It mainly focuses on the state legislature in Alabama, but it’s relevant to our national politics. Here’s a basic summary of its importance:
The Southern historian C. Vann Woodward famously described the civil rights movement as the Second Reconstruction. The First Reconstruction, of course, began at the conclusion of the Civil War and led to the election of hundreds of black politicians across the South. One of those black politicians, a South Carolina legislator named Thomas Miller, later described the era with great pride: “We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb … rebuilt the bridges and reestablished the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road to prosperity.”
But in 1877, the Republican Party agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in exchange for putting its presidential candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, in the White House, and the period of biracial democratic government came to an end. White “Redeemers,” as they were known, undid all the Reconstruction-era reforms they could. They shuttered the new schools and charities; they stopped building bridges and funding ferries. “Spend nothing unless absolutely necessary,” Florida’s new Democratic governor instructed his legislature in 1877. Most crucially, they designed laws to eliminate the black vote and enforced those laws with waves of vigilante violence. A mere dozen years after it began, the First Reconstruction was over.
The end of the Second Reconstruction will not be so dramatic. But the systematic way in which Republican majorities in Southern statehouses are undoing so many of the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement suggests that the end is nigh. Whether it’s by imposing new voter-ID laws, slashing public assistance, refusing Medicaid expansion, or repealing progressive legislation like North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act, the GOP-controlled governments of Southern states are behaving in ways that are at times as hostile to the interests of their African American citizens as Jim Crow Democrats were half a century ago. As David Bositis told me, “Black people in the South have less political power now than at any time since the start of the civil rights movement.”
It makes for some pretty bleak reading, and it makes me wonder if the reverse black migration back to the south is going to continue. Because, on the local level at least, I don’t think things are going to get better any time soon.
