Today’s quote is really more of an excerpt from Rev. William J. Barber II’s book THE THIRD RECONSTRUCTION: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement:
Between 1865 and 1900, interracial alliances in every Southern state arose to advance public education, protect the right to vote, and curb corporate power by reaching across the color line. These fusion coalitions outraged white Democrats because they led to raising taxes for public education. The fusion coalitions attacked the divisive rhetoric of white solidarity and pointed out the common interests of most black and white Southerners. As the fusion coalitions gained traction, more than a quarter of white voters in the South cast their ballots for interracial coalitions and the coalitions started to take political power. In the 1890s, a fusion coalition of Republicans and Populists in North Carolina swept the state legislature, won both U.S. Senate seats, and took the governorship. Together with their counterparts in other Southern states, these blacks and whites working together in the South passed some of the most progressive educational and labor laws in our nation’s history.
But fusion politics in the South were met with a violent backlash. As these coalitions began to emerge, extremists who called themselves Redeemers started a campaign to “redeem” America from the influence of black political power and progress. They immediately sought to deny the vote to blacks through violence, intimidation, and the passage of laws that, together, came to be called Jim Crow—a systematic, de jure denial of equality and rights, often achieved via the concept of “separate but equal.” From 1890 to 1908, ten Southern states wrote new constitutions with provisions that included literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses that denied black people the franchise not because they were black but because their enslaved grandfathers had not been able to vote. As early as 1875, restrictive state provisions had been upheld by an ultraconservative, radical Supreme Court. Later, in the twentieth century, when the Supreme Court began to find a few of the provisions unconstitutional, states devised new legislation to continue the disenfranchisement of most blacks.
Everywhere and always, the Redeemers howled about the use of tax money to support public education, especially for black children, and sought to suppress the African American vote. Driven by fear, they incited “race riots” in New Orleans, Wilmington, Atlanta, Springfield, and other cities, arming poor whites and playing on old fears in order to destroy interracial democracy and create a Jim Crow political economy rooted in low taxes, low wages, and fewer and fewer voters.
When we pay attention to this long history, a pattern emerges: first, the Redeemers attacked voting rights. Then they attacked public education, labor, fair tax policies, and progressive leaders. Then they took over the state and federal courts, so they could be used to render rulings that would undermine the hope of a new America.
We need to keep retelling the forgotten history of America, and Rev. Barber does it very well.
“…more than a quarter of white voters in the South cast their ballots for interracial coalitions and the coalitions started to take political power.”
Is that number roughly the same today? What percentage of white voters in the South cast their ballots for Obama and Clinton?
This dissects Obama’s 2012 white vote in the “south”:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/upshot/rebutting-claim-that-obama-had-wider-support-among-souther
n-whites.html
That link did not work for me, but I did find this:
“NYT Upshot“
Maybe this might work:
“more Upshot“
Yeah, it depends on where you are, but in the Deep South, whites typically give about 15% of their vote to the Democrat, especially on the national level. It can go up or down, and if you were to subtract people in metro areas and around universities, the number is probably less than 1 in 10.
This is what is beginning to happen everywhere else.
What is beginning to happen everywhere else?
Non-university town, or urban/suburban whites are beginning to vote for the Democratic party at vastly reduced rates in most counties in the country. It’s starting to approach Deep South numbers.
I have some family living in rural Ohio and saying democrats are an endangered species around them is rather kind. They They’d they
Oops!
That may be, but the reasons for it are somewhat different, aren’t they? You seem to be saying that it’s all about a revival of the “Redeemer” mentality. Can’t exclude that, since the rise of the KKK in the north was very significant in the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries. Remember posting this?
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2016/11/21/215537/68
But surely what’s going on now has something to do with the failure of the Clintonist Democratic Party to represent the interests of the working class, and their deep support of neoliberal policies?
Or are you buying into the narrative that all Trump voters, and non-voters, were motivated by racism? Even though of course some were. But not enough to have won him the election.
You’re the one who has bought into a narrative, and there isn’t any way of getting you off it.
Tom Sullivan
.
People mad about Obama making speech money are like redeemers, or something.
Can’t get me off of it? I didn’t say anything about it. I wasn’t even thinking about it.
I just wrote a 5,000 word article on this exact subject, coming to the conclusion that not only has the Democratic Party failed to represent them, but they’re running away from them with their hair on fire.
Link please?
The problem thus far with this history is that the public schools and the universities, even the elite universities, until about 25 years ago were telling this history from the press releases of those who were out to destroy the Fusion movement. Barber focuses on this because one of the things that made North Carolina seem so moderate-to-progressive during the 1960s-2000s was the fact that so many North Carolinians had ancestors who were in the Fusion movement. It got much stronger in North Carolina than in some other Southern states and thus was dealt with more violently.
Now is an excellent time for progressives to get a better sense of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras in the South, starting with the works of Eric Foner and including Stephen Budansky’s The Bloody Shirt: Terrorism after Appomattox.
In South Carolina in 1895, Pitchfork Ben Tillman, the “hero” of the “battle of Hamburg” in 1875 won the governorship on a promise of segregation and regulated booze. “The current constitution took effect on December 4, 1895.”
But the 1895 Constitution was frequently amended:
Bonded debt limits had to do with reining in counties that might want to extend the infrastructure inordinately. Roads, public schools, hospitals, that sort of thing.
There isn’t much doubt that the long-term agenda of the Republican Party is to eventually impose Jim Crow across the entire country. Every Republican Administration advances that agenda steadily.
Precisely. It’s always wonderful to know the history of one thing or another, but here the diagnosis of our current state of affairs has been quite clear for over a decade: the “conservative” movement and its captured party and Supreme Court (as funded by the plutocrat/billionaire class) are seeking to reduce voting by racial minorities and young people in order to favor the Repub party. It’s a nationwide “conservative” scheme, running hand-in-hand with comprehensive gerrymandering in every Repub-controlled state.
The strategy has a (very) long pedigree, the data is inarguable and the motivations have even been accidentally explained by several of the Repub strategists and players. It’s crystal clear.
The difficulty is that the failed white electorate does not view this as an injurious diagnosis; instead, they apparently hear it as the Doc telling them their high cholesterol numbers are going down. The prognosis seems excellent!
Because the story is purely one of Repub perfidy, it cannot be consistently discussed by the corporate media because it cannot be presented in the mandatory Both-Sides-Do-It fashion. And given the level of intellectual dishonesty the useless journalists will stoop to in telling any political story, that’s saying something, ha-ha. Hell, the Dems appear afraid to use the ongoing vote suppression as a centerpiece of their argument against Repubs (let alone the “conservative” movement, which is hardly ever mentioned).
The refusal of the media to address the issue is largely meaningless, however, for the reason that suppressing voting by Dem-leaning demographics is now broadly popular with white voters and especially the WWC. Of course the same white electorate is certain that America is the bestest democracy on earth with the mostest democratic values. This should produce cognitive dissonance, but doesn’t.
And there isn’t much doubt that what spooked Republicans in 2016 was some demographic studies that their majority was slowly ending.
Arbitrary deportation and voter registration purges are not about the economic threat of immigrants and non-whites. They are aimed at forestalling the threat that demographics could again upset the permanent Republican majority, the seizure of power by Nixon’s “silent majority” at last.
You might find the parallels drawn in this book between the history of that Populist period and the early 90s challenging to your diagnosis. It’s not that simple to say Republicans did it/do it.
This is a review of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman
“Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of colour `criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind … Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination – employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service – are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
And the numbers are mind-boggling.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
His was the best speech of the convention – the only one to truly transcend the divide in the hall.
He spoke to the heart from heart.
That honesty commanded the room.
Barber’s speech at the Convention was persuasive to me. It wasn’t persuasive to enough Americans, though. It’s a strong indictment not just of the American people, but the political, cultural and media atmospheres which drove the American people to elect Trump.
One thing I’m preoccupied these days is how Trump has retreated from many of his campaign positions and is unsuccessfully pursuing others, but one campaign promise he is succeeding in keeping is that he would oppress, terrorize and incarcerate brown and black people. That promise has also been hacked into by the Judiciary and others, but he’s managing to execute major portions of a oppressing/terrorizing campaign nonetheless, and most importantly he is creating the perception that he is delivering on that promise.
However, Trump strongly linked to this his promise that terrorizing brown and black people would save hundreds of billions of dollars in welfare programs and would help all lower-income white people gain full-time jobs with middle-class pay. These were lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies and lies, vicious, racist lies, lies meant to delude and to con. I am beyond furious that the coverage of the campaign failed to reveal these lies to the American people.
It is a factual statement to say that forcing out all undocumented immigrants and even more aggressively incarcerating black people would damage our society without improving our public budgets, our economy, or the job market. Much of the American public has been propagandized over decades to believe these lies, and Trump bashed open that unlocked door while segments of the media supported his lies, looked on indifferently, or “reported the controversy”.
Yes. Thank you for this.