Confederate memorial statue, Statesboro, Georgia, U.S. Photo by Jud McCranie via Creative Commons.
The fight continues
by Tom Sullivan
Confederate memorial statue, Statesboro, Georgia, U.S. Photo by Jud McCranie via Creative Commons.
A small "free speech" rally scheduled for Boston Common yesterday by men wearing Trump hats and flags drowned in a sea of as many as 40,000 peaceful counterprotesters:
As the crowd grew, Superintendent in Chief Willie Gross of the Boston Police Department worked the crowd. He thanked marcher after marcher, individually, for coming out to make their voices heard. He complimented people on their creative signs. He took dozens of pictures with marchers who looked relieved to discover that the police weren’t there to give them a hard time.
“This is how we do it in Boston,” he said. “We exercise our right to free speech, but we do it peacefully. If anyone starts anything [at the Common] we’ll get them right out.”
The guy who starts talking halfway through this video gets America so much better than our president. https://t.co/xHcIKDVFtn
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) August 20, 2017
But white nationalism and Confederate statuary at the center of the violence last week in Charlottesville are distractions. The Washington Post Editorial Board this morning cautions that voter suppression is this era's civil rights issue:
Yet even if all 1,500 Confederate symbols across the country were removed overnight by some sudden supernatural force, the pernicious crusade to roll back voting rights would continue apace, with voters of color suffering its effects disproportionately. Pushing back hard against those who would purge voter rolls, demand forms of voter ID that many Americans don’t possess, and limit times and venues for voting — this should be a paramount cause for the Trump era.Coming in for well-deserved criticism is of course the president's voter fraud commission led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, described as "the nation’s most determined, litigious and resourceful champion of voter suppression." A close second might be Republicans in control of North Carolina's statehouse.
In statehouse after statehouse where Republicans hold majorities, the playbook is well established, and the tactics are becoming increasingly aggressive.
After the war came Reconstruction. Disgruntled ex-Confederates, assisted by the deeply racist President Andrew Johnson, attempted to return their states to a condition as close to slavery as possible — in essence overturning the result of the war (in which some 200,000 black Union soldiers had constituted one key to victory) through terrorism. Enraged Radical Republicans, with the strong support of President Ulysses S. Grant after he was elected, occupied the South with federal troops and enforced protection of black suffrage. From 1867-1876, while ex-slaves did not get meaningful economic help, their voting rights were protected.But a financial crisis and a return of racist Democrats to power ended Reconstruction and ushered in the myth of The Lost Cause. The South's effort to rewrite its history succeeded, and the Jim Crow of racial oppression continued until the 1960s. The Civil Rights era merely drove white supremacist culture underground. Cooper concludes:
If the federal government had beaten ex-Confederate terrorists into submission for as long as it took — particularly in the crucial two years after the war, when Johnson's stubborn racism allowed them to regroup and regain some initiative, we would not be having this crisis. Instead tyranny displaced democracy in the American South, white Americans swallowed a lot of comforting lies to cover up that fact, and open racism continued to thrive — only partly beaten back by the civil rights advances of the 1960s. Violent white supremacy lives today, as does political racism from conservative Southern politicians, who are to this day working feverishly to disenfranchise as many black Americans as possible, because of that moral failure.Like kudzu, another southern bane, efforts to keep power in the right hands, white hands, are harder to eradicate for not having been yanked up by the roots a century and a half ago.
Let us remember this the next time some conservative argues, as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts did when he gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, that measures to protect American democracy from racist tyranny are "based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day." White terror today grows up the frame of a historical trellis well over 150 years old. Perhaps someday America's history of racism can truly be buried. But first, it must be killed.
