Tag Archives: kkk

September 16, 2016 · 07:00

The Rollback and the Response: Jim Crow to Civil Rights

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Today I have a revised section of my Cicil War text “A Great War in an Age of Revolutionary Change.” I have being doing some final touches on it before I start working on final edits before seeking a publisher. I think it is important and timely in a day when state legislatures throughout the “Old South” are passing laws that seek to restrict voting rights against minorities and the elderly in order to diminish their political power, or to pass legislation designed to discriminate against LGBTQ people based solely on religious dogma.

In such a world it is important to remember what happened to African Americans after Southern Whites reclaimed power following the collapse of Reconstruction.

Have a great day.

Peace

Padre Steve+

The Supreme Court, Congress, the Presidents as well as state governments systematically rolled back the rights of African Americans after Reconstruction ended. The Courts were the first to do this and once they had set the precedent were followed by the now Democrat controlled Congress and President Grover Cleveland. In 1883 “the Civil Rights Act of 1875, outlawing discrimination against Negroes using public facilities, was nullified by the Supreme Court, which said: “individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of the amendment.” The Fourteenth Amendment, it said, was aimed at state action only. No state shall…” [1] Associate Justice Joseph Bradley who had so eviscerated the Enforcement Act again played his hand in overturning a law that he despised on principle. He had written when Grant first signed the act in 1875 “to deprive white people of the right of choosing their own company would be to introduce another kind of slavery…. It can never be endured that the white shall be compelled to lodge and eat and sit with the Negro. The latter can have his freedom and all legal and essential privileges without that. The antipathy of race cannot be crushed and annihilated by legal enactment.” [2] In writing to overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1875 Bradley wrote that such laws were made African Americans a “special favorite of laws” and ignored the fact that in most of the country blacks were indeed not a favorite and were in fact still the subject of discrimination, segregation, political disenfranchisement, systematized violence, murder and lynching.

The actions of the court and alliances between Northern corporations and Southern landowners led to even more discrimination and disenfranchisement for blacks, “From the 1880s onward, the post-Reconstruction white governments grew unwilling to rely just on intimidation at the ballot box and themselves in power, and turned instead to systematic legal disenfranchisement” [3] which furthered the black codes into what we now call the era of Jim Crow.

For years after the Supreme Court’s Cruikshank decision blacks throughout the South attempted to vote despite intense opposition from Southern whites and armed bands of thugs. But with White Democrats now in charge of local government and “in control of the state and local vote-counting apparatus, resistance to black voting increasingly took the form of fraud as well as overt violence and intimidation. Men of color who cast Republican votes often found later that they had been counted for the party of white supremacy.” [4]

In 1896 the Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the black codes and Jim Crow laws. That ruling established the “separate but equal” doctrine and ushered in an era of de jure segregation in almost all arenas of life including education, transportation, entertainment and health care. The limited social equity and privileges enjoyed by blacks, not only in the South, but in the entire nation were erased by the stroke of the judicial pen. The justices ruled on the concept that the Constitution only guaranteed or protected a people’s political rights in the social arena that African-Americans could not interact with whites and assumed their racial inferiority.

Not all on the Court agreed with these rulings. One of them was Associate Justice John Harlan, who was a former slaveholder. Harlan dissented in the Court’s majority decision to overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and also in Plessy v. Ferguson. In the case of the Civil Rights Act ruling Harlan insisted “our Constitution is color blind” [5] and wrote a strongly worded opinion:

“The destinies of two races, in this country are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all should not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law. What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments, which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens? That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation as was enacted in Louisiana.” [6]

As eloquent and as correct as Justice Harlan’s argument was, it was not sufficient to turn the tide of the new Court backed segregation laws. Harlan “was fighting a force greater than the logic of justice; the mood of the Court reflected a new coalition of northern industrialists and southern businessmen-planters.” [7] The “separate but equal” measures approved by the Court majority in Plessy v. Ferguson led to the widespread passage of Jim Crow laws, not only in the South but in other areas of the country. The Jim Crow era took nearly a century to reverse, and “only began to disappear with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.” [8]

In order to get around the Fifteenth Amendment state governments in the South employed a strategy of subterfuges to suppress the African American vote. Along with the ever present threats of voter intimidation from armed White Supremacist groups, the states complicated the processes of voter registration and voting in order to make it nearly impossible for blacks to vote and into political oblivion. “Redeemer” governments in the post-Reconstruction South through the use of literary tests and poll taxes, the later which required people to pay in order to vote. The literacy and educational requirements mandated that “perspective registrants to “interpret” a section of the state constitution, and enacted standards which few blacks could fulfill, such as limiting registration to those whose grandfathers had voted.” Of course few blacks could meet the latter requirement as their grandfathers had been slaves and ineligible to vote. The laws were so devious that “when a journalist asked an Alabama lawmaker could pass his state’s understanding” test, the legislator replied, That would depend on entirely on which way he was going to vote.” [9]

For decades future courts would cite Plessy and Cruikshank as well as other decisions as precedent in deny rights to blacks. It would not be until 1954 when the Supreme Court overturned Plessy and the “Separate but Equal” Jim Crow laws in Brown v. Board of Education. Brown was a watershed for it deemed that separate schools were “inherently unequal.” The reaction across the South, especially Mississippi was stunned shock, disbelief and anger. “A Mississippi judge bemoaned “black Monday” and across the South “Citizen’s Councils” sprung up to fight the ruling. [12]

Mississippi led the way in disenfranchising black voters through the use of voter qualifications that would eliminate most blacks from the rolls of voters. In 1895 the state legislature passed a measure that would “technically apply to everybody but actually eliminate the Negro without touching the white.” [13] The move was in open defiance of the Fifteenth Amendment and resulted in tens of thousands of black voters being dropped from the rolls, in most cases under 5% of black voters who had been eligible to vote in 1885 remained eligible in 1896. Mississippi was rewarded in 1898 when the Supreme Court in Williams v. Mississippi that “there was no reason to suppose that the state’s new voting qualification were aimed specifically at Negroes.” [14] “In 1900 blacks comprised 62 percent of Mississippi, the highest percentage in the nation. Yet the state had not one black elected official.” [15]

Violence was used with great effect and between 1880 and 1968 approximately 3,500 people were murdered or lynched throughout the South. In 1892 alone 235 blacks were lynched “and throughout the decade, whites lynched an average of 150 southern blacks per year.” [16] This had become a far easier task and far less dangerous for the perpetrators of violence against blacks as Supreme Court “interpreted black people’s other constitutional rights almost out of existence.” [17] Since the court had “limited the federal government’s role in punishing violations of Negro rights” this duty fell to the states, which seldom occurred, and when “those officials refused to act, blacks were left unprotected.” [18]

The effects of these actions were shown in the number of African Americans in elected office. In 1869 there were two African American United States Senators and twenty black members of the House of Representatives. After Reconstruction ended these numbers dwindled and “the last black left Congress in 1901.” [19]

One of these was the case of United States v. Harris where the federal prosecutors had indicted “twenty members of a Tennessee lynch mob for violating section two of the enforcement Act, which outlawed conspiracies to deprive anyone of “equal protection of the laws.” However the Court struck down section 2 because the “lynching was not a federal matter, the Court said, because the mob consisted only of private individuals.” [20]

Many Southern states, especially Mississippi continued to tighten Jim Crow throughout the first half of the twentieth century. “In 1922 a new Jim Crow law kept up with the times by segregating taxis. In 1930 another new law prohibited “publishing, printing, or circulating any literature in favor of or urging inter-racial marriage or social equality.” [21] Not only were physical barriers being erected, but thought and free speech was now illegal if one supported equal rights.

This remained the case until the 1960s when during the Freedom Rides when Mississippi again became a battleground in the Civil Rights movement. In 1961 James Meredith, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, became the first black to ever be admitted to the University of Mississippi. His admission was fought by the university, Mississippi politicians including U.S. Senator James Eastland, Governor Ross Barnett, numerous congressmen and state representatives, and a populace that threatened violence and even war if the Federal government or courts order them to comply. Governor Barnett spoke for many when he made a statewide television address in September 1961 “We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them ‘NEVER!’” [22] He then called for the arrest of any federal officials who attempted to hold a state official for defying federal court orders. Backed by federal court orders to admit Meredith, and by the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy called Barnett on September 24^th.

“Governor,” Kennedy observed, “you a part of the United States.”

“We have been a part of the United States, but I don’t know whether we are or not.”

Are you getting out of the Union?”

“It looks like we are being kicked around – like we don’t belong to it.”

Back to specifics again, Kennedy ended the talk with a typical crisp wrap-up. “My job is to enforce the laws of the United States.” [23]

The resultant conflict nearly came to violence as thousands of Mississippians, whipped into an anti-black and anti-federal government frenzy by their elected leaders, radio, and television and newspaper commentators and supported by the KKK, the John Birch Society and other groups mobilized to fight the “invasion.” Eventually a deal was reached to admit Meredith on September 30^th. As Meredith entered the campus he was protected by Federal Marshals and Border Patrol officers, as well as the State Police, which had just a few hours before been deployed to keep Meredith and the federals out. Despite this thousands of people ringed the campus, and the Confederate Battle Flag was raised over the Civil War memorial on campus. The rioters uttered death threats and assaulted anyone who supported Meredith. Members of the press, even southerners, faculty members and civilian supporters were beaten, bricks, stones and bottles thrown, tires of federal vehicles slashed. Finally the marshals themselves were attacked and eight injured, forcing them to deploy tear gas to protect themselves and the State police withdrew.

James Meredith being escorted to Ole Miss

Eventually U.S. Army MPs and mobilized National Guard units were called up and battled Molotov cocktails that were being thrown by the anti-integration protests to relieve the beleaguered marshals and border patrolmen. The troops finally cleared the campus and ended the riot. During the riot 160 marshals were hurt, some 28 of who were wounded by bullets fired by the protestors. The next morning with Meredith admitted to the university a local clergyman saw the Confederate flag still flying and “with firm step, he strode out to the pole, loosened the halyard and lowered the Confederate flag.” [24]

The battle to integrate Ole’ Miss was over. Meredith graduated peacefully in August of 1963 and by then Mississippi abandoned its defiance of Federal authority, but many in the state still protested the admission as well as the later passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Violence still occurred and even intensified at times as the Civil Rights movement, now led by Dr. Martin Luther King Junior made headway. King wrote in the Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

“One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” [25]

In South Carolina, which had fought integration in the courts outgoing Governor Ernest F. Hollings read King’s letter and knew that he had been on the wrong side of history. The Democrat Governor realized that the handwriting was on the wall, and that South Carolina was different than Mississippi. Hollings knew that South Carolina’s racism was the old aristocratic type, which gave more value to an orderly society. As such Hollings told the legislature:

“As we meet, South Carolina is running out of courts. If and when every legal remedy has been exhausted, the General Assembly must make clear South Carolina’s choice, a government of laws rather than a government of men. As determined as we are, we of today must realize the lesson of once hundred years ago, and move on for the good of South Carolina and our United States. This should be done with dignity. It must be done with law and order.” [26] When Clemson University admitted its first student later in the year, there was no violence.

Hollings later remembered that for years he had supported and enforced the Jim Crow laws in his state. However, King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail changed him, it was for him a moment like the Apostle Paul on the Road to Damascus. He admitted, “as governor, for four years, I enforced those Jim Crow laws. I did not understand, I did not appreciate what King had in mind… until he wrote that letter. He opened my eyes and set me free.” [27]

More violence would occur in Mississippi and other states during the 1960s. During the Freedom Rides, students and educators came from around the nation to the state to help register blacks to vote in 1964. This brought generations of barely concealed hatred to the surface. Bruce Watson in his book Freedom Summer wrote:

“In Mississippi’s most remote hamlets, small “klaverns” of ruthless men met in secret to discuss the “nigger-communist invasion of Mississippi.” They stockpiled kerosene, shotguns, and dynamite, then singled out targets – niggers, Jews, “nigger-lovers.” One warm April night, their secret burst into flames. In some sixty counties, blazing crosses lit up courthouse lawns, town squares, and open fields. The Klan was rising again in Mississippi. Like “White Knights” as their splinter group was named, the Klan planned a holy war against the “dedicated agents of Satan…determined to destroy Christian civilization.” The Klan would take care of your business, a recruiting poster said. “Get you Bible out and PRAY! You will hear from us.” [28]

Eventual the violence of these people led to the killings of three of the organizers, Michael Schwerner, James Cheney and Andrew Goldman were killed by a group of Klansmen led by members of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Department on June 21^st 1964. The resultant search for their bodies and the subsequent investigation transfixed the nation and led to the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.

After he left office, Ulysses Grant gave an interviewer a sober assessment of Reconstruction’s failure. Grant concluded that at the end of the war what the South really needed was a benevolent dictatorship until it could be fully reintegrated into the Union. Instead the South remained defiant and using subterfuge mixed with targeted violence wore down the will northerners to fully pursue and implement Reconstruction. He told the interviewer:

“Military rule would have been just to all… the Negro who wanted freedom, the white man who wanted protection, the Northern man who wanted Union. As state after state showed a willingness to come into the Union, not on their terms but upon ours, I would have admitted them. The trouble about the military rule in the South was that our people did not like it. It was not in accordance with our institutions. I am clear now that it would have been better to suffrage, reconstruction, State governments, for ten year, and held the South in a territorial condition. But we made our scheme, and we must do what we must with it.” [29]

Grant was correct in his analysis. The policies enacted by the North in 1865 that were considered benevolent were seized upon as signs of weakness in the defeated South. The leaders of the South knew that the Republican Party was a coalition and worked to push the fault lines of the Republicans until they broke, and they were successful. The Confederacy may have lost the war in a military and economic sense, but in the “ways that mattered most to white Southerners – socially, politically, and ideologically – the South itself did not.” [30] Grant died in 1885 hailed throughout the nation, but knowing that he was unable to secure the new birth of freedom, that he and his friend Abraham Lincoln and so many others had fought for in the Civil War.

The example of Reconstruction’s failure shows that in order to secure peace that military victory must be accompanied by the political will to ensure that the avowed goals of that victory are secured after the war in ensuring a just peace. In retrospect, a harsh peace and a long period of nation building may have benefited the nation more than botched reconstruction, but as Grant noted “our people did not like it.”

Southerners may have lost the shooting war, but they could not and would not accept the peace. By successfully wearing down the will of the people of the North and exploiting the fissures in varying components of the Republican Party, they succeeded in winning the things most important to them in regard to race relations and White Supremacy.

After the war, White Southerners resorted to all means to reverse their military defeat through political, social, economic and judicial means and “justice was sacrificed for the unjust peace ushered in by “redemption” of the South, a peace marred by Jim Crow, poverty and lynching.” [31] Most Northern leaders, politicians, the media and the clergy failed to appreciate this until it was far too late, and hindered by President Johnson’s opposition failed to win the peace in the South when they had the best chance. They failed to appreciate that even after the shooting is often that “there is a need for further threats, and indeed action, because postwar disorder and even chaos will have to be address, and victorious allies are always likely to squabble over the spoils of victory” [32] as certain was the case in the divided Republican Party of the Reconstruction era. By the time Ulysses S. Grant was elected President many in the North were already tiring of Reconstruction and African Americans and when he resorted to harsh yet effective means of quelling violence and enforcing the laws many, even in his own Republican Party rebelled, ensuring the former Confederates of a political and social victory that took nearly another hundred years to end, if indeed it is truly ended, a proposition that I think is ludicrous as for many the Civil War is not over.

Notes

[1] Ibid. Zinn The Other Civil War p.57

[2] Ibid. Lane The day Freedom Died p.253

[3] Ibid. Guelzo Fateful Lightening p.526

[4] Ibid. Lane The day Freedom Died p.251

[5] Ibid. Zinn The Other Civil War p.58

[6] LaMorte, Michael W. School Law: Cases and Concepts 9th Edition 2008 Allyn and Bacon Inc. 2008 p.300

[7] Ibid. Zinn A People’s History of the United States pp.204-205

[8] Ibid. Huntington Who are We? p.54

[9] Ibid. Goldfield Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History p.197

[10] Gonzalez, Justo L. The History of Christianity Volume 2: The Reformation to the Present Day Harper and Row Publishers San Francisco 1985 p.252

[11] Ibid. Foner Forever Free p.208

[12] Ibid. Watson Freedom Summer p.46

[13] Ibid. Lord The Past that Wouldn’t Die p.22

[14] Ibid. Lord The Past that Wouldn’t Die p.23

[15] Ibid. Watson Freedom Summer p.41

[16] Ibid. Goldfield Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History, Updated Edition, p.206

[17] Ibid. Lane The day Freedom Died p.253

[18] Ibid. Langguth After Lincoln p.338

[19] Ibid. Zinn A People’s History of the United States p.200

[20] Ibid. Lane The day Freedom Died p.253

[21] Ibid. Lord The Past that Wouldn’t Die p.25

[22] Ibid. Lord The Past that Wouldn’t Die p.139

[23] Ibid. Lord The Past that Wouldn’t Die p.159

[24] Ibid. Lord The Past that Wouldn’t Die p.231

[25] King, Martin Luther Letter from a Birmingham Jail 16 April 1963 Retrieved from https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html 15 September 2016

[26] Bass, Jack and Nelson, Jack The Orangeburg Massacre Mercer University Press, Macon and Atlanta 1984, 1996 & 2002 pp.11-12

[27] Ibid. Goldfield Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History, Updated Edition, p.74

[28] Ibid. Watson Freedom Summer p.12

[29] Ibid. Lane The day Freedom Died p.254

[30] Ibid. Lane The day Freedom Died p.254

[31] Ibid. McPherson The War that Forged a Nation p. 191

[32] Ibid. Gray Fighting Talk p.14

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Filed under civil rights, civil war, History, Political Commentary

Tagged as brown v board of education, civil rights, dr martin luther king jr, ernest hollings, fifteenth amendment, fourteenth amendment, james merideth, jim crow laws, john harlan, kkk, letter from the birmingham jail, plessy v ferguson, reconstruction, Robert f Kennedy, ross barnett, separate but equal, ulysses s grant, united States v cruickshamk

August 31, 2016 · 07:00

Jackie Robinson and the Freedom Summer

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I am still on vacation and will posting some new material have brought an older article out of the vault. I think it is important because it covers a watershed moment in American politics, a moment that started the Republican Party down the path that has culminated today. It is about the Freedom Summer of 1964 and baseball icon and civil rights pioneer Jackie Robinson’s trip to the 1964 Republican National Convention. Though the events happened some fifty-two years ago, they are not ancient history, and the spirit and ideology that characterized them is all to present today, especially in the modern Republican Party.

So have a great day.

Peace

Padre Steve+

“A new breed of Republicans had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” Jackie Robinson on his observations of the 1964 Republican National Convention

Jackie Robinson was a Republican. So was I for 32 years and for much of that time I considered myself a “conservative” whatever that means, though I thought it meant freedom, limited government and opportunity for all regardless of race, color, religion or any other trait or belief. I also believed and still do in a strong defense, but I can no longer consider myself a man that blesses American intervention in other people’s wars unless there is a clear and present danger to the United States, not simply our so called “interests” which may not be those of the nation at all but of multi-national corporations which were originally American businesses but not only need our military, diplomatic and intelligence resources to increase their profits.

My parents were Kennedy type Democrats, but in the 1970s, torn by the extremism of the 1972 Democratic Convention in Chicago and feeling the hatred of people for those in the military, including a Sunday School teacher who told me that my dad, then serving in Vietnam was “baby killer” I at the age of 12 decided that I would be a Republican. I was a Republican until I returned from Iraq in 2008, fully aware of the lies that took us into that war and seeing the cost both to American servicemen and the people of Iraq.

I have been doing a lot of reading lately on a period of history that as a historian I had pretty much skipped over. That is the period of the Civil Rights movement of the early to mid-1960s. I guess I skipped over it because I was more interested in the glory of war and patriotism wrapped in historic myth than in the experiences of fellow citizens who had been killed, abused, tormented and persecuted by people like me simply because of the color of their skin. I had not yet begun to appreciate the concept of justice at home being interconnected to our deepest held principles and how we embody them in our foreign policy.

For many years I echoed the point made by some conservatives that it was the GOP that helped make the Voter’s Rights Act of 1964 and Civil Rights Act of 1965 passed into law. That is true. Most Republicans voted for them, with a notable exception, Barry Goldwater. However, what is also true is that the Republicans that voted for the 1964 act were considered “liberals” and treated shamefully at the 1964 convention, whose delegates voted down a part of the platform that would have supported that act. Of the Democrats that voted against those bills almost all came from the Deep South, a region which within a decade become a Republican stronghold and a key part of the Southern Strategy of every GOP Presidential Candidate since Richard Nixon. A Republican aide at the 1964 convention told a reporter that “the nigger issue was sure to put Goldwater in the White House.” (See Freedom Summer by Bruce Watson p.163)

However as a life long baseball fan there is one thing that I know, that if there had been no Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson we might not have gotten Rosa Parks or the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Robinson was appointed as a special delegate to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller who was running against Goldwater and attended the convention. He had given up his job as a spokesman for and Vice President of the Chock Full O’Nuts Coffee Company to assist Rockefeller’s campaign in 1964.

Robinson knew what it was like to be the “point man” in the integration of baseball and in his career was threatened with physical violence and death on many occasions. Some teammates circulated petitions that they would not play for a team that had a “black” on it. Robinson, encouraged by Rickey persevered and became an icon in baseball, the Civil Rights movement and the history of the United States. However, not even 10 years after his retirement from baseball and 2 years after he was elected to the Hall of Fame he once again discovered just how deep racism still ran in this country. As he attended the convention FBI agents and other Federal authorities attempted to find the bodies of three young Voting Rights staff who were part of the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi. Eventually, later in the summer the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner would be discovered buried in the base of a dam near Philadelphia Mississippi. Their killers were local law enforcement officers and members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Maybe I lived in my own fantasy world. My experience growing up was on the West Coast living in a military family in small towns and big cities. I am proud to be part of the first class that attended high school in my home town when the courts ordered desegregation in our schools. That experience at Edison High School of Stockton California from 1975-78 changed me, as did having a black roommate in college.

However, that being said it took me a long time to realize that things really haven’t changed that much from 1964 in many parts of the country, especially since I have lived most of my adult live in the historic States that comprised the Confederacy. I can say from practical observation and knowledge that racism and other forms of more acceptable prejudice live on in this country. There is not a day that goes by that I do not run into the vestiges of the hate that lived during the Freedom Summer of 1964. It is more subtle in some cases, but other times is so blatant that is sickening. I never expected that I would ever be called a “nigger lover” or “wigger” until I had people make those comments on this website in response to articles that had nothing to do with race relations or civil rights, nor did I expect physical threats from people who call themselves “Christian.” Those were learning experiences that I won’t soon forget.

Robinson wrote of his experience at the 1964 Convention:

“I wasn’t altogether caught of guard by the victory of the reactionary forces in the Republican party, but I was appalled by the tactics they used to stifle their liberal opposition. I was a special delegate to the convention through an arrangement made by the Rockefeller office. That convention was one of the most unforgettable and frightening experiences of my life. The hatred I saw was unique to me because it was hatred directed against a white man. It embodied a revulsion for all he stood for, including his enlightened attitude toward black people.

A new breed of Republicans had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.

The same high-handed methods had been there.

The same belief in the superiority of one religious or racial group over another was here. Liberals who fought so hard and so vainly were afraid not only of what would happen to the GOP but of what would happen to America. The Goldwaterites were afraid – afraid not to hew strictly to the line they had been spoon-fed, afraid to listen to logic and reason if it was not in their script.

I will never forget the fantastic scene of Governor Rockefeller’s ordeal as he endured what must have been three minutes of hysterical abuse and booing which interrupted his fighting statement which the convention managers had managed to delay until the wee hours of the morning. Since the telecast was coming from the West Coast, that meant that many people in other sections of the country, because of the time differential, would be in their beds. I don’t think he has ever stood taller than that night when he refused to be silenced until he had had his say.

It was a terrible hour for the relatively few black delegates who were present. Distinguished in their communities, identified with the cause of Republicanism, an extremely unpopular cause among blacks, they had been served notice that the party they had fought for considered them just another bunch of “niggers”. They had no real standing in the convention, no clout. They were unimportant and ignored. One bigot from one of the Deep South states actually threw acid on a black delegate’s suit jacket and burned it. Another one, from the Alabama delegation where I was standing at the time of the Rockefeller speech, turned on me menacingly while I was shouting “C’mon Rocky” as the governor stood his ground. He started up in his seat as if to come after me. His wife grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

“Turn him loose, lady, turn him loose,” I shouted.

I was ready for him. I wanted him badly, but luckily for him he obeyed his wife…” From Jackie Robinson “I Never Had it Made” Chapter XV On Being Black Among the Republicans

Belva Davis, then a young journalist wrote of her experiences at that convention:

While the Goldwater organization tried to keep its delegates in check on the floor, snarling Goldwater fans in the galleries around us were off the leash. The mood turned unmistakably menacing…

Suddenly Louis and I heard a voice yell, “Hey, look at those two up there!” The accuser pointed us out, and several spectators swarmed beneath us. “Hey niggers!” they yelled. “What the hell are you niggers doing in here?’”

I could feel the hair rising on the back of my neck as I looked into faces turned scarlet and sweaty by heat and hostility. Louis, in suit and tie and perpetually dignified, turned to me and said with all the nonchalance he could muster, “Well, I think that’s enough for today.” Methodically we began wrapping up our equipment into suitcases.

As we began our descent down the ramps of the Cow Palace, a self-appointed posse dangled over the railings, taunting. “Niggers!” “Get out of here, boy!” “You too, nigger bitch!” “Go on, get out!” “I’m gonna kill your ass!”

I stared straight ahead, putting one foot in front of the other like a soldier who would not be deterred from a mission. The throng began tossing garbage at us: wadded up convention programs, mustard-soaked hot dogs, half-eaten Snickers bars. My goal was to appear deceptively serene, mastering the mask of dispassion I had perfected since childhood to steel myself against any insults the outside world hurled my way.

Then a glass soda bottle whizzed within inches of my skull. I heard it whack against the concrete and shatter. I didn’t look back, but I glanced sideways at Louis and felt my lower lip began to quiver. He was determined we would give our tormentors no satisfaction.

“If you start to cry,” he muttered, “I’ll break your leg.” ( Belva Davis “Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism)

The sad thing is that in many states the new GOP has taken a page out of the past and has been either passing legislation or attempting to pass legislation that makes it harder for Blacks and other minorities to vote. Groups have shown up armed at heavily black polling sites in recent elections and efforts have been made to ensure that minorities cannot vote. They have also challenged the 1964 Voter’s Rights Act in Court and have a friend in Justice Antonine Scalia who called it a “racial entitlement” and violation of State sovereignty.

The tactics are quite similar to those used in the Deep South prior to 1964 which made it virtually impossible for a Black man or woman to cast a vote, and if they tried even to register to vote did so at the peril of their lives or families. The opponents of integration, voter’s rights and equal rights used some of the same lines used today against those that support these rights. “Communists sympathizers, Socialists, Atheists, Anti-Christian, Anti-American, Anti-Constitution,” you name it the same labels are being applied to those that simply want to be at the table. The sad thing that many of the most vicious users of such untruths are my fellow Christians.

These are hard things to look at and it is far easier to believe myth than it is to actually seek truth. A few years back I cannot every in a million years having written this article. However the threats to minorities be they racial, religious or even gender have become part an parcel of the new GOP, the GOP that I could not remain a part of when I returned from Iraq.

I guess that I am becoming a Civil Rights advocate, or then, maybe it’s that I’m actually becoming more of a Christian. Branch Rickey said “I may not be able to do something about racism in every field, but I can sure do something about it in baseball.” Oh well, I amy not be able to do something about racism and other prejudice everywhere but I can do it here and wherever I work or preach.

Oh well whatever, it really doesn’t matter so long as I can live with myself. Besides, I’ll get labeled anyway so what does it matter? I would rather be in the same camp as someone like Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey than Antonine Scalia or those that seek to keep people down simply because they are different anyway.

Martin Niemoller once said:

First they came for the , communist
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

Friends, it is all too important that we not forget this, even as Donald Trump and many of his supporters who include most of the White Supremacists, Klansmen, and Neo-Nazis in this country offer the same threats against blacks, other minorities, and political moderates and liberals. Make no mistake, what is happening now is nothing more than a resurgence of the hatred and violence that was unleashed against those who fought for civil rights fifty years ago.

Rebels and Racism in Gettysburg

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Gettysburg is hallowed ground for all who love this country. It is the site of a defeat which ended any hope for a Confederate military victory, and at which Abraham Lincoln spoke of a new birth of freedom. It is a place that veterans of both sides began to gather both to remember their service and comrades but also to promote reconciliation between the North and the South.

But it has also become a place in recent years for neo-Confederates to gather, not to remember the new birth of freedom, but to arrogantly defile the site by spewing hate, proclaiming racism, while openly speaking of their hatred of the United States and love of the late Confederacy. Some drive around town and in front of the Soldier’s Cemetery in large and loud pickup trucks, sometimes blaring their horns, while flying large 3′ x 5′ Confederate Battle Flags flying as if to mock the Union soldiers buried there.

It is also interesting to note that many of these openly racist people are not from the South, nor do they have southern roots. They simply tend to be racist and anti-government and gather around the flag of the Confederacy. I remember having a beer with a man from upstate New York in a bar a year or so ago who said he was the chaplain for a Confederate reenactment unit (in uniform) and went on to discuss his hatred for the United States, as well as African Americans, and other non-white American citizens. Likewise on another visit an older couple who said they were from Georgia listened to me talk with my students in the Soldier’s Cemetery, and when I was finished with reading the Gettysburg Address, the man made sure that he told me that all people were not created equal.

But let me be clear, there are also Southerners who love this country very much, who when they come to Gettysburg to remember their fallen ancestors, do so with a reverence which is perfectly in keeping with the desire for reconciliation of the Southern veterans as who returned to Gettysburg in the decades after the war.

I was walking by one of the gift shops in town and noticed a t-shirt on display. The shirt was adorned with the Confederate Battle Flag and and the words “I will not be reconstructed and I don’t give a damn!”

To some that may seem like a simple snarky statement. However, when you understand what the phase really means it should leave you cold. In 1866 it became part of the lyrics of a song called Oh, I’m a Good ole Rebel, a song that has been recorded numerous times in the years since it was written.

It was a phase used by Southerners after the Civil War who opposed the process of reconstruction, opposed all civil rights for blacks, and pushed for the return of white rule, which they achieved in 1877 when Reconstruction ended. At that point nearly every hard fought for right of African Americans was reversed, suppressed, or made so difficult to use as to be effectively revoked. Those rights would not begin to be restored until 1954 when the Supreme Court issued the Brown v. Board of Education decision which overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling of 1894. This ruling declared that the segregation laws and Black Codes of the Jim Crow era were unconstitutional. It took another ten years for Congress in the face of heated opposition to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

But among segregationists those rulings were reviled. Governors fought to keep African Americans from entering segregated public schools and universities, civil rights workers were attacked and sometimes killed, civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr were assassinated. Alabama governor George Wallace, who in his 1963 governor’s inauguration address proclaimed “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” ran on a segregationist platform in the 1968 election and won 13.53% of the popular vote. He won Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, while collecting 45 electoral votes. Interestingly enough, the demographics of Wallace’s supporters, heavily white male and lesser educated, were very much like those of current GOP nominee Donald Trump.

But I digress, yet the fact of the matter is that the open proclamation of the phrase I will not be reconstructed on a shirt displaying the flag of the republic that Confederate Vice President Alexander said, was founded on the superiority of the white race and subordination of the negro as slaves. They are the words of the KKK, the Red Shirts, and the White Leagues who used violence and terrorism to intimidate blacks and any of their white supporters.

So a a historian I will not attempt to silence those people’s free speech rights, as repugnant as I find them to be. But have to call their words what they are, a call for the return to Jim Crow and worse. They are meant to intimidate people, and I find that message evil, in fact it goes against everything that makes America great. Maybe those who say they will “make America great again” should take heed to the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and realize what really makes America great instead of spewing the hate of those who fought the propositions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness at every turn, even to begin a bloody civil war.

So until tomorrow have a great Monday.

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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Filed under civil rights, Political Commentary

Tagged as black codes, brown v board of education, civil rights act of 1965, donald trump, george wallace, gettysburg, jim crow, kkk, plessy v ferguson, racism, reconstruction, red shirts, segregation, voting rights act of 1964, white leagues

April 19, 2016 · 07:00

Jim Crow and After

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I am taking the day off to be with my wife as she recovers from her procedure and am posting another section of my Civil War text, this dealing with the coming of Jim Crow. It is still a pertinent topic, especially because there are quite a few people in our country today who would like nothing more than to re-establish it and in addition to African Americans include others such as Hispanics, Muslims, and Gays to their list of people that it would be legal to discriminate against. We are already seeing this in a number of Southern States when it comes to laws making it harder from Blacks to vote, especially elderly and poor ones, as well as religiously inspired anti-LGBT laws which are so vague, that they could be used against anyone.

So anyway, have a good day,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

The legislation enacted by Congress to declare African Americans free, the Thirteenth Amendment; to recognize them as citizens, the Fourteenth Amendment; and to give African American men the right to vote, the Fifteenth Amendment were revolutionary documents. However, after Reconstruction ended every state in the South, with the acquiescence of Northern businessmen and politicians worked to roll back those rights and this ensured that the “resurrected South would look a great deal like the Old South, a restored regime of white supremacy, patriarchy, and states’ rights. This political and cultural principles became holy tenants, dissent from which threatened redemption.” [1] The means used to regain this in included state legislation against blacks, violence committed by people associated with racist terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, and the actions of Federal Courts including the Supreme Court to regulate those rights out of existence.

Newly elected President Rutherford B. Hayes officially ended Reconstruction in 1877 and all Federal troops assigned to enforce it were withdrawn. Despite this, some people in the South attempted to fight for the rights of African Americans, including men like former Confederate Generals James Longstreet, William Mahone and Wade Hampton. Their motives varied and all of them were vilified by their political opponents and by the press. The attacks on Longstreet were particularly vicious and in the Myth of the Lost Cause he is painted as a man worse than Judas Iscariot.

Hampton is perhaps the most contradictory and curious of these men. Hampton was and remained an avowed White Supremacist who used his own money to finance, recruit and lead a regimental sized unit in the Civil War. He was elected as the first post-Reconstruction governor of South Carolina despite the generous help and assistance of the Red Shirts to rig the election by suppressing the black vote, actually campaigned against the black codes. During his term in office Hampton, to the chagrin of white South Carolinians even appointed African Americans to political offices in the state and maintained a regiment of African American state militia in Charleston against strident opposition.

While Hampton remained a white supremacist and used the Red Shirt militia to help in his election as Governor of South Carolina, he disappointed many of his white supremacist supporters. Hampton, despite his past, was also was committed to the upholding the law and “promoting the political rights to which freedmen were entitled to under law, and he consistently strove to protect those rights.” [2] This made Hampton anathema for many South Carolina politicians, including Benjamine Tillman who as governor during the 1890s dismantled policies that Hampton had introduced to allow blacks to political patronage appointments. Once he did that Tillman set out to deprive South Carolina’s blacks of almost every basic civil right, and in 1895 he led “a successful effort to rewrite the South Carolina constitution in such a way as to virtually disenfranchise every black resident of the state.” [3] Longstreet, who had become a Republican, was wounded while leading Louisiana militia in an unsuccessful fight against White Leaguers in New Orleans on September 14^th 1873.

The Supreme Court, the Congress and the Presidents rolled back these rights after Reconstruction ended. The Courts were the first to do this and once they had set the precedent were followed by the now Democrat controlled Congress and President Grover Cleveland. In 1883 “the Civil Rights Act of 1875, outlawing discrimination against Negroes using public facilities, was nullified by the Supreme Court, which said: “individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of the amendment.” The Fourteenth Amendment, it said, was aimed at state action only. No state shall…” [4] Associate Justice Joseph Bradley who had so eviscerated the Enforcement Act again played his hand in overturning a law that he despised on principle. He had written when Grant first signed the act in 1875 “to deprive white people of the right of choosing their own company would be to introduce another kind of slavery…. It can never be endured that the white shall be compelled to lodge and eat and sit with the Negro. The latter can have his freedom and all legal and essential privileges without that. The antipathy of race cannot be crushed and annihilated by legal enactment.” [5] In writing to overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1875 Bradley wrote that such laws were made African Americans a “special favorite of laws” and ignored the fact that in most of the country blacks were indeed not a favorite and were in fact still the subject of discrimination, segregation, political disenfranchisement, systematized violence, murder and lynching.

The actions of the court and alliances between Northern corporations and Southern landowners led to even more discrimination and disenfranchisement for blacks, “From the 1880s onward, the post-Reconstruction white governments grew unwilling to rely just on intimidation at the ballot box and themselves in power, and turned instead to systematic legal disenfranchisement” [6] which furthered the black codes into what we now call the era of Jim Crow.

Not all on the Court agreed with these rulings. One of them was Associate Justice John Harlan, who was a former slaveholder. Harlan dissented in Court’s decision to overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and also in Plessy v. Ferguson. In the case of the Civil Rights Act ruling Harlan insisted “our Constitution is color blind” [8] and wrote a strongly worded opinion:

As eloquent and as correct as Justice Harlan’s argument was, it was not sufficient to turn the tide of the new Court backed segregation laws. Harlan “was fighting a force greater than the logic of justice; the mood of the Court reflected a new coalition of northern industrialists and southern businessmen-planters.” [10] The “separate but equal” measures approved by the Court majority in Plessy v. Ferguson led to the widespread passage of Jim Crow laws, not only in the South but in other areas of the country. The Jim Crow era took nearly a century to reverse, and “only began to disappear with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.” [11]

These court decisions and legislation strengthened racism and discrimination against blacks, “effectively excluding blacks from public places, from the right to votes, from good public education, and so forth.” [12] The Plessy ruling was a watershed. Southern legislators, now unencumbered by Federal interference passed “state laws mandating racial segregation in every aspect of life, from schools to hospitals, waiting rooms to toilets, drinking fountains to cemeteries…segregation was part of a complex system of white domination, in which each component – disenfranchisement, unequal economic status, inferior education – reinforced the others.” [13] For decades future courts would cite Plessy and Cruikshank as well as other decisions as precedent in deny rights to blacks. It would not be until 1954 when the Supreme Court overturned Plessy and the “Separate but Equal” Jim Crow laws in Brown v. Board of Education. Brown was a watershed for it deemed that separate schools were “inherently unequal.” The reaction across the South, especially Mississippi was stunned shock, disbelief and anger. “A Mississippi judge bemoaned “black Monday” and across the South “Citizen’s Councils” sprung up to fight the ruling. [14]

Mississippi led the way in disenfranchising black voters through the use of voter qualifications that would eliminate most blacks from the rolls of voters. In 1895 the state legislature passed a measure that would “technically apply to everybody but actually eliminate the Negro without touching the white.” [15] The move was in open defiance of the Fifteenth Amendment and resulted in tens of thousands of black voters being dropped from the rolls, in most cases under 5% of black voters who had been eligible to vote in 1885 remained eligible in 1896. Mississippi was rewarded in 1898 when the Supreme Court in Williams v. Mississippi that “there was no reason to suppose that the state’s new voting qualification were aimed specifically at Negroes.” [16] “In 1900 blacks comprised 62 percent of Mississippi, the highest percentage in the nation. Yet the state had not one black elected official.” [17]

Violence was used with great effect and between 1880 and 1968 approximately 3,500 people were murdered or lynched throughout the South. This had become a far easier task and far less dangerous for the perpetrators of violence against blacks as Supreme Court “interpreted black people’s other constitutional rights almost out of existence.” [18] Since the court had “limited the federal government’s role in punishing violations of Negro rights” this duty fell to the states, which seldom occurred, and when “those officials refused to act, blacks were left unprotected.” [19]

One of these was the case of United States v. Harris where the federal prosecutors had indicted “twenty members of a Tennessee lynch mob for violating section two of the enforcement Act, which outlawed conspiracies to deprive anyone of “equal protection of the laws.” However the Court struck down section 2 because the “lynching was not a federal matter, the Court said, because the mob consisted only of private individuals.” [21]

Many Southern states, especially Mississippi continued to tighten Jim Crow throughout the first half of the twentieth century. “In 1922 a new Jim Crow law kept up with the times by segregating taxis. In 1930 another new law prohibited “publishing, printing, or circulating any literature in favor of or urging inter-racial marriage or social equality.” [22] Not only were physical barriers being erected, but thought and free speech was now illegal if one supported equal rights.

This remained the case until the 1960s when during the Freedom Rides when Mississippi again became a battleground in the Civil Rights movement. In 1961 James Meredith, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, became the first black to ever be admitted to the University of Mississippi. His admission was fought by the university, Mississippi politicians including U.S. Senator James Eastland, Governor Ross Barnett, numerous congressmen and state representatives, and a populace that threatened violence and even war if the Federal government or courts order them to comply. Governor Barnett spoke for many when he made a statewide television address in September 1961 “We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them ‘NEVER!’” [23] He then called for the arrest of any federal officials who attempted to hold a state official for defying federal court orders. Backed by federal court orders to admit Meredith, and by the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy called Barnett on September 24^th.

“Governor,” Kennedy observed, “you a part of the United States.”

“We have been a part of the United States, but I don’t know whether we are or not.”

Are you getting out of the Union?”

“It looks like we are being kicked around – like we don’t belong to it.”

Back to specifics again, Kennedy ended the talk with a typical crisp wrap-up. “My job is to enforce the laws of the United States.” [24]

Eventually U.S. Army MPs and mobilized National Guard units were called up and battled Molotov cocktails which were being thrown by the anti-integration protests to relieve the beleaguered marshals and border patrolmen. The troops finally cleared the campus and ended the riot. During the riot 160 marshals were hurt, some 28 of who were wounded by bullets fired by the protestors. The next morning with Meredith admitted to the university a local clergyman saw the Confederate flag still flying and “with firm step, he strode out to the pole, loosened the halyard and lowered the Confederate flag.” [25]

In South Carolina, which had fought integration in the courts outgoing Governor Ernest F. Hollings realized that the handwriting was on the wall, and South Carolina was different than Mississippi, its racism was the old aristocratic type, which gave more value to an orderly society. Hollings told the legislature:

Grant was correct in his analysis. The policies enacted by the North in 1865 that were considered benevolent were seized upon as signs of weakness in the defeated South. The leaders of the South knew that the Republican Party was a coalition and worked to push the fault lines of the Republicans until they broke, and they were successful. The Confederacy may have lost the war in a military and economic sense, but in the “ways that mattered most to white Southerners – socially, politically, and ideologically – the South itself did not.” [29] Grant died in 1885 hailed throughout the nation, but knowing that he was unable to secure the new birth of freedom, that he and his friend Abraham Lincoln and so many others had fought for in the Civil War.

Southerners may have lost the shooting war, but they did not accept the peace and by successfully wearing down the will of the people of the North and exploiting the fissures in varying components of the Republican Party, they succeeded in winning the things most important to them in regard to race relations and White Supremacy.

After the war, White Southerners resorted to all means to reverse their military defeat through political, social, economic and judicial means and “justice was sacrificed for the unjust peace ushered in by “redemption” of the South, a peace marred by Jim Crow, poverty and lynching.” [30] Most Northern leaders, politicians, the media and the clergy failed to appreciate this until it was far too late, and hindered by President Johnson’s opposition failed to win the peace in the South when they had the best chance. They failed to appreciate that even after the shooting is often that “there is a need for further threats, and indeed action, because postwar disorder and even chaos will have to be address, and victorious allies are always likely to squabble over the spoils of victory” [31] as certain was the case in the divided Republican Party of the Reconstruction era. By the time Ulysses S. Grant was elected President many in the North were already tiring of Reconstruction and African Americans and when he resorted to harsh yet effective means of quelling violence and enforcing the laws many, even in his own Republican Party rebelled, ensuring the former Confederates of a political and social victory that took nearly another hundred years to end, if indeed it is truly ended.

Notes

[1] Ibid. Goldfield American Aflame p.403

[2] Longacre, Edward G. Gentleman and Soldier: The Extraordinary Life of General Wade Hampton Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville TN 2003 p.265

[3] Ibid. Longacre Gentleman and Soldier p.274

[4] Ibid. Zinn The Other Civil War p.57

[5] Ibid. Lane The day Freedom Died p.253

[6] Ibid. Guelzo Fateful Lightening p.526

[7] Ibid. Lane The day Freedom Died p.251

[8] Ibid. Zinn The Other Civil War p.58

[9] LaMorte, Michael W. School Law: Cases and Concepts 9th Edition 2008 Allyn and Bacon Inc. 2008 p.300

[10] Zinn, Howard A People’s History of the United States Harper Perennial, New York 1999 pp.204-205

[11] Ibid. Huntington Who are We? p.54

[12] Gonzalez, Justo L. The History of Christianity Volume 2: The Reformation to the Present Day Harper and Row Publishers San Francisco 1985 p.252

[13] Ibid. Foner Forever Free p.208

[14] Ibid. Watson Freedom Summer p.46

[15] Ibid. Lord The Past that Wouldn’t Die p.22

[16] Ibid. Lord The Past that Wouldn’t Die p.23

[17] Ibid. Watson Freedom Summer p.41

[18] Ibid. Lane The day Freedom Died p.253

[19] Ibid. Langguth After Lincoln p.338

[20] Ibid. Zinn A People’s History of the United States p.200

[21] Ibid. Lane The day Freedom Died p.253

[22] Ibid. Lord The Past that Wouldn’t Die p.25

[23] Ibid. Lord The Past that Wouldn’t Die p.139

[24] Ibid. Lord The Past that Wouldn’t Die p.159

[25] Ibid. Lord The Past that Wouldn’t Die p.231

[26] Bass, Jack and Nelson, Jack The Orangeburg Massacre Mercer University Press, Macon and Atlanta 1984, 1996 & 2002 pp.11-12

[27] Ibid. Watson Freedom Summer p.12

[28] Ibid. Lane The day Freedom Died p.254

[29] Ibid. Lane The day Freedom Died p.254

[30] Ibid. McPherson The War that Forged a Nation p. 191

[31] Ibid. Gray Fighting Talk p.14

Who is Guilty? Racism & the Birmingham Church Bombing

Friends of Padre Steve’s World

On September 16^th 1963 a young Southern White lawyer in Birmingham Alabama spoke these words after a black church was bombed and the police attacked peaceful protesters:

“from anger and despair, from frustration and empathy. And from years of hopes, hopes that were shattered and crumbled with the steps of that Negro Baptist Church.”

Most Americans will not recognize the names and I would dare say that many do not even know about what happened in Birmingham Alabama 52 years ago today. At 10:22 in the morning on September 15th 1963 a bomb exploded during the worship service at the 16th Street Baptist Church. It was one of the most brazen attacks against a church in the modern era, and men who claimed to be “Christians” committed it.

Four young girls, three 14 year olds and one 13 year old were killed. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley lost their lives that day. Twenty-two other church members were wounded in an attack, which was carried out by members of the KKK and tacitly approved of by many political leaders including Alabama Governor George Wallace. Why were they killed and why were the others wounded? For the crime of being black and the crime of their church serving as a focal point of the Civil Rights movement.

Likewise, most people, including many blacks do not know that before that beginning in 1955 there had been 19 other bombings of black churches and the homes of black leaders in Birmingham before this one. But even before that outbreak of violence, Birmingham had become known as “Bombingham” because over 50 bombing attacks against blacks, black churches and black institutions in the years after the First World War.

The church had served as a focal point of the Freedom Summer where Civil Rights activists and students from around the country had met, trained and organized to register blacks to vote. This made it a prominent target for violence.

Early in the morning of September 15th four members of the United Klans of America Frank Bobby Cherry, Thomas Blanton, Herman Cash and Robert Chambliss placed a box of 10 sticks of dynamite under the church steps near the basement. A time delay detonator was set o ensure that the church was filled when the bomb went off. The blast occurred as children were entering the to listen to a sermon, ironically entitled “The Love that Forgives.”

The attack was a heinous crime and an act of cold-blooded premeditated murder that maybe a number of years before might not have made the news in much of the country. But this was 1963 and over the preceding months of the Freedom Summer opened the eyes of people across the nation to what was happening in the South. The brutal attacks on many blacks, civil rights workers and student volunteers during that time raised the profile of the Civil Rights Movement and shown the ugly hatred towards blacks held by many Southerners hidden underneath the veneer of polite Southern hospitality.

Blacks protested and were met with a massive police response coordinated by Governor Wallace that brought about more violence, and more dead blacks. A day later a young white lawyer, Charles Morgan Jr.; a true Southerner by right and heritage spoke to the White Businessman’s club of Birmingham. His words were forceful and to the point. Instead of simply asking why, the young man began his speech with this poignant remark:

“Four little girls were killed in Birmingham yesterday. A mad, remorseful worried community asks, “Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?” The answer should be, “We all did it.” Every last one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and a decade ago. We all did it.”

He continued, “A short time later, white policemen kill a Negro and wound another. A few hours later, two young men on a motorbike shoot and kill a Negro child. Fires break out, and, in Montgomery, white youths assault Negroes. And all across Alabama, an angry, guilty people cry out their mocking shouts of indignity and say they wonder, “Why?” “Who?” Everyone then “deplores” the “dastardly” act. But you know the “who” of “Who did it” is really rather simple.”

Not only was the attack heinous, but, the response of many in law enforcement at the local level and even at the office of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was criminal. Hoover refused to investigate, and although a witness identified Chambliss, he was not charged with the bombing; instead he was charged for having a case of dynamite without a permit. He was fined $100 and given a six-month jail sentence.

Thought FBI agents had investigated the crime and discovered evidence against all four men, Hoover ordered the evidence not be provided to local or Federal prosecutors. So for eight years the crime was covered up.

However in 1971 Bill Baxley was elected Attorney General of Alabama. Baxley re-opened the case and requested the FBI files, which had been suppressed by Hoover, who had died in 1972. In 1977 Chambliss was indicted and convicted of first degree murder, he died in prison. Blanton was tried in 2001, convicted of four counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Cash died in 1994 with ever having been charged with a crime and Cherry was convicted in 2002, sentenced to life in prison and died in 2004.

The attack and the deaths of the four girls served as a catalyst in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. However it did not end the fight for equality, and others would die in its aftermath, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who died at the hands of an assassin’s bullet less than 4 years later.

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voters Rights Act of 1965 many blacks have been elected to local, state and federal offices or served in some of the highest ranks of the military, judiciary, and at the Cabinet level. Two, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have served as Secretary of State, two, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, as Attorney General of the United States; one, Clarence Thomas, as a Justice of the Supreme Court; and one, Barak Obama elected as President of the United States. Black sports stars, actors and singers are celebrated as heroes among much of society.

But despite these advances, racism is still quite prevalent. One of my former co-workers from Georgia, a white Southern Baptist minister and retired military chaplain noted that many whites may not be explicitly racists in interpersonal relationships with blacks, but have an attitude that blacks still need “to stay in their place.” He noted that he thinks that quite a few believe that many whites believe that this is a large part of the reason that President Obama is opposed and even hated by so many whites. It is not just politics or ideology. While politics may play a role the root of the hatred is racism because I cannot for the life of me imagining any white Democrat, including Hilary Clinton getting this kind of treatment.

But the sad truth is there still is an undercurrent of unrepentant racism in the country and not just the South. In fact many places in the South have seen greater advances in racial relations than other parts of the country. That is not to say that there are those who would attempt to disenfranchise blacks, some of the voting laws recently passed are designed to ensure that significant parts of the black population, specifically the elderly and students living away from home have greater difficulty voting. It is actually a more insidious method than past Jim Crow laws because the drafters of these laws hope to keep just enough black and other poor or minority voters from voting to ensure that they maintain power. Some of those who drafted or supported these state laws designed to disenfranchise voters have openly admitted that fact.

Not only is racial prejudice experienced by blacks, it is experienced by many Americans of Hispanic origins, some of Asian descent but also by those of Middle Eastern, Iranian, Pakistani or Indian descent. And yes, people of all races, including racial, ethnic and religious minorities can be as racist and violent as the men who bombed the 16^th Street Baptist Church 52 years ago. Racism is an ugly part of our human condition and no matter whom it is targeted against, and who does the targeting, it is wrong and needs to be fought.

The Southern Poverty Law Center http://www.splcenter.org lists 784 active hate groups of all types operating across the country, including neo-Nazis, Klansmen, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black separatists, border vigilantes and others. (See the Hate Map here https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map) The number is down from recent because a number of more the virulent White Supremacist and militia groups have gone underground, shut down websites and social media pages.

Too many people have died in this struggle to stop now. If today you read this before or after going to church, remember those four little girls who died at the hands of four murdering, racist Klansmen. Likewise remember that there are others out there full of hate who would not hesitate to do the same again and others who would actively support those efforts. Sometimes even in the name of God.

As for me I will fight it no matter whom it is against.

Charles Morgan Jr. closed the speech which brought about death threats against him and his family and forced him to leave Birmingham with these words.

“And who is really guilty? Each of us. Each citizen who has not consciously attempted to bring about peaceful compliance with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, every citizen who has ever said “they ought to kill that nigger,” every citizen who votes for the candidate with the bloody flag, every citizen and every school board member and schoolteacher and principal and businessman and judge and lawyer who has corrupted the minds of our youth; every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred, is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb.”

Charles Morgan Jr.

Charles Morgan died in 2009, but after he left Birmingham he went on to lead a remarkable life, especially in his commitment to Civil Rights and Justice. The New York Times obituary noted:

“Among his many cases as a civil rights lawyer, Mr. Morgan sued to desegregate his alma mater, the University of Alabama; forced a new election in Greene County, Ala., that led to the election of six black candidates for local offices in 1969; and successfully challenged racially segregated juries and prisons. After the civil rights movement began to subside, Mr. Morgan, as a leader of the American Civil Liberties Union, fought three celebrated court cases involving protests against the Vietnam War.

He represented Muhammad Ali in his successful court fight to avoid being drafted. He represented the civil rights activist Julian Bond in the early stages of an ultimately successful lawsuit after Mr. Bond had been denied a seat in the Georgia legislature because of his antiwar views. And he defended an officer when he was court-martialed for refusing to help instruct Green Berets headed for Vietnam.”

We cannot ever let ourselves forget that it was supposedly Christian men who bombed a church and killed those four little girls, and that as long as all of us fail to live up to our responsibilities such things will happen again. If we do not, we are as guilty as those who throw the bombs, shoot the bullets, and those preachers, pundits and politicians who deny the fact that these things are still commonplace.

Yes, my friends, we will be at least as guilty as the brazen killers who continue to try to kill the dreams of those who are not like them. As for me, I hope that I will be as committed to stand for the rights of the oppressed and for justice as did Charles Morgan.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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August 13, 2015 · 16:22

Shades of Confederate Gray

Major General Patrick Cleburne C.S.A.

“When the prophet, a complacent fat man,
Arrived at the mountain-top
He cried: “Woe to my knowledge!
I intended to see good white lands
And bad black lands—
But the scene is gray.”

Stephen Crane

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

If you read my work you know how much I condemn the cause of the Confederacy and the institution of slavery. I also make no bones about the continued use of the symbols of the Confederacy by some who do not use them simply to honor the memory of dead soldiers but rather to further inflame political and racial divides. As a descendant of slave owners and Confederate officers I do understand the tension. THe family patriarch on my paternal side was an unreconstructed Rebel. He was a slave owner who served as a Lieutenant in the Confederate cavalry during the war and refused to sign the loyalty oath to the United States. For this he lost his lands and plantation. There are some who sincerely desire to honor their ancestors, and I think that is honorable, but to stand by an indefensible cause as my ancestors did is another matter to me.

I agree with historian George Santayana who wrote “Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes.” I think we have to be able to deal with that, and I do not only mean for the descendants of slave owners and Confederates. Certainly the descendants of those in the North who cooperated with, enabled and profited from slavery, and then the entire movement to reenslaved freed blacks by other means after the war have nothing to be proud of in this regard. I readily admit that many political, industrial and religious leaders in the North were little better than many Southern leaders (see my articles Accomplices to Tyranny: The North & Reconstruction and Corporate Slavery & the Black Codes ). Both of these articles highlight how Northerners, especially politicians from both political parties and industrialists who took in those injustices committed against blacks. The same people on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line dis similar things to poor whites who they referred to as “White Trash” as well as Native Americans, women later other immigrants like the Chinese. As we get closer to Labor Day I am going to spend some time on how American workers of all races were treated during that time, but not today.

Instead I want to talk about shades of gray. As my regular readers know I believe that people are the most important part of history, and that people are seldom fully good or fully evil. In fact most people, saints and sinners alike live lives of some shade of gray. Thus I believe that good people can sometimes support evil causes and otherwise evil people can end up on the right side of history by supporting a good cause. We have other people that we treat as icons who had dark places in their lives, and did things that were not honorable; history is full of them. The problem is that we like to look at people as totally good or totally evil, it’s easier that way.

That is the case when we look at men who fought for the Confederacy and the Union during the Civil War, and since I have spent a lot of time hammering the cause that Confederate soldiers fought to defend, even those who opposed secession and slavery; it is only right that I spend some time talking about the shades of Confederate Gray. To do this we have to be able to put aside the notion that every Confederate was a racist or White Supremacist.

Lieutenant General A.P. Hill

Those who fought for the Confederacy spanned the spectrum of belief and often fought for reasons other than slavery and some of their stories are tragic. Lieutenant General A.P. Hill opposed slavery before the war and opposed secession but because his state and his family seceded he went south. In 1850 he was on leave from the army and learned of a lynching in his home town of Lynchburg, he wrote “Shame, shame upon you all, good citizens…Virginia must crawl unless you vindicate good order or discipline and hang every son of a bitch connected with this outrage.” Hill was incredibly brave and led his troops honorably throughout the war. Sadly he died in action just days before the end of the war at Petersburg and his widow took no part in any commemorations of the Lost Cause after the war.

Brigadier General Lewis Armistead who led Pickett’s troops to the High Water mark at the Battle of Gettysburg is another tragic figure. He was a widower who lived a life of much sorrow and loneliness and the army was his life; his best friends were in the army. His very best friend, Winfield Scott Hancock and his wife Almira remained with the Union, their parting in California at the beginning of the war is heartrending, and it was Hancock’s troops who inflicted the mortal wound on him.

Major General Patrick Cleburne, called the “Stonewall Jackson of the West” is another. He was an Irish immigrant to Arkansas. He had no slaves, opposed the institution and fought because the people he lived among were his friends. He was the first Confederate to broach the subject of emancipating the slaves, and for this he was ostracized, and not promoted to Lieutenant General and command of a Corps. He died in action at the Battle of Franklin in 1864.

There are others, Lieutenant General James Longstreet who was probably the best corps commander on either side during the war, quickly reconciled, became a Republican and served in various capacities in government after the war. For this, as well as needing a scapegoat for the loss at Gettysburg Longstreet was treated as a modern Judas Iscariot by many in the South, especially among the proponents of the Lost Cause. Major General William “Little Billy” Mahone was another like Longstreet who joined the Republican Party and suffered a fair amount of criticism for his stance.

Another more interesting personality was Colonel John S. Mosby, the legendary “Gray Ghost” of Virginia whose “Raiders” caused Union forces much difficulty throughout the war. Mosby is interesting, he did not support slavery, was not a proponent of secession but felt that it was his duty to fight for his state. This was not unusual because in that era most people in all parts of the country, felt much more loyalty to their own state, or even city or county than they did to the national government. He and his troops served honorably and after the war too he supported reconciliation, he became a Republican and a friend and supporter of Ulysses Grant. He was not ashamed of his service and stated after the war, “I am not ashamed of having fought on the side of slavery—a soldier fights for his country—right or wrong—he is not responsible for the political merits of the course he fights in” and that “The South was my country. But he also condemned those in the South who denied that slavery was the cause of the war. All this made him anathema and he had to live the rest of his life outside the south or serving in various overseas diplomatic postings.

There were other shades of gray among Confederates, some like Lieutenant General Jubal Early who was not a slave owner and vehemently opposed secession in the Virginia legislature until the state seceded. When it did he joined the Confederate forces and became one of the fiercest supporters of Confederate independence who ever lived. In fact Early, though pardoned by President Andrew Johnson, never reconciled with the United States and became the leading proponent of the history of the Lost Cause. Early’s Corps Commander Lieutenant General Richard Ewell was more circumspect, he owned and admitted the mistakes he made during the war as a commander, and he fully reconciled to the United States. Before he died Ewell “insisted that nothing disrespectful to the United States Government be inscribed upon his tomb.”

Lieutenant General Wade Hampton

Lieutenant General Wade Hampton of South Carolina was one of the richest men in the South if not the country when war came. He supported secession, owned hundreds of slaves, but for a slave owner he was relatively decent in the way he treated his slaves. He fought through the war and returned home to nothing. He became involved in politics, remained very much a White Supremacist, but that being said built bridges to African American political and religious leaders when he ran for governor, even as the terrorist bands of the Red Shirts did all they could to ensure that blacks were harassed, disenfranchised and even killed to keep them from voting. To the surprise of the militants Hampton adopted a moderate course, kept blacks in his cabinet and in state offices, kept a regiment of African American militia in Charleston and opposed the black codes and Jim Crow. For this he was run out office. When he died his last words were “God bless my people, black and white.”

One the other hand there were men like Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest who helped found the Ku Klux Klan, and even led some of the early violence against blacks, and purchased black prisoners for use on his plantation after the war. However, he evolved on the issue, and left the Klan in 1869 and in 1875 two years before his death began to promote racial harmony. He spoke about that to a group of African Americans, where he received a bouquet of flowers from a black women he was condemned throughout the South. An article in the Charlotte Observer noted “We have infinitely more respect for Longstreet, who fraternizes with negro men on public occasions, with the pay for the treason to his race in his pocket, than with Forrest and Pillow, who equalize with the negro women, with only ‘futures’ in payment.”

There were many Confederate Soldiers who fought and died because they did believe in White Supremacy and hated the North, that too is a fact, and many of those who lived carried on that hate until they died.

There were others who never reconciled and who rewrote history to minimize the importance of slavery and White Supremacy to the Confederate cause, these included Jefferson Davis, his Vice President Alexander Stephens, and Brigadier General Henry Benning of Georgia. All had spearheaded the drive for secession, spoken and wrote forcefully for not only preserving but expanding slavery Stephens said quite clearly in 1861 what the Confederacy was founded upon in his Cornerstone Speech “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” However, after the war all of them sought to distance themselves from this and change the narrative to Constitutional, economic and political reasons.

There were also many Confederate soldiers for whom the war never ended and they did continue it by other means, either as members of any of the various terrorist groups such as the Klan, the Red Shirts, the White League, the White Liners, or any of the related groups who terrorized and killed blacks and their white supporters, be they Northern “Carpetbaggers” or Southern “Scalawags.”

I could go on longer or in more detail on any of these men and probably could write a book about any of them, but I wanted to show that even when a cause is wrong, that we cannot condemn people as groups, and we also have to take into account people’s evolution on issues. The evolution of Wade Hampton and Nathan Bedford Forrest was far different than that of Jubal Early and others who supported the Lost Cause. I wish my family patriarch had been more like Mosby, Hampton, Hill, Ewell, Cleburne, or even Forrest rather than Jubal Early and others who never reconciled and in some cases continued to use violence to oppress others.

Shades of gray. In history you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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July 19, 2015 · 09:32

Ulysses Grant’s Fight Against the KKK

Friends of Padre Steve’s World

This is another article excerpted from my Civil War and Gettysburg texts, this dealing with the fight against the Ku Klux Klan and other racist terrorist groups operating in the South. Unlike his predecessor, Andre Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant believed in freedom and equality for African Americans and was willing to use to the military and police power of the Federal Government to crush violent terrorist groups. In the end his effort failed, however among U.S. Presidents after Abraham Lincoln, Grant was most committed to ending racism and promoting equality in the United States.

Sadly, while the Klan and other groups like operate only on the margins of society, only popping up for Confederate Flag rallies, a protest here or there and of course the occasional mass killing; there are millions of others who harbor many of the same attitudes held by the Klan against African Americans, other minority groups, immigrants, and non-Christian religions. These people just maintain a tidier act. They wear expensive suits, Hang out with presidential candidates and popular preachers. They get interviewed on cable news to spread fear and loathing of those that they hate, and then capitalizing on that fear they use political action and the courts to push their agenda. Interestingly enough these well to do hatemongers almost never criticize or condemn the attitudes and action of Klan members or other white supremacists. If they do they brush it off as an “isolated” incident unconnected to their own ideology.

The fact is they don’t condemn them because they share the same goal; a racially pure white supposedly Christian country. That my friends is why this still matters and why I admire that great General and far too under appreciated, President, Ulysses S Grant.

Have a great and thoughtful day,

Peace

Padre Steve+

President Ulysses S. Grant

The passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments provoked even more violence from enraged Southerners. Thousands of Southerners, many former Confederate soldiers, formed a variety of violent racist organizations which turned the violence from sporadic attacks to what amounted to a full-fledged insurgency against the new Reconstructionist state governments and African Americans. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan which engaged in terroristic violence while heavily armed so called “social clubs” that operated under the aegis of the state Democratic Party leadership in most Southern states did the same. Under the leadership of former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest whose troops had conducted the Fort Pillow massacre, the Klan’s membership throughout the South “was estimated at five hundred thousand” [1] and the majority were former Confederate soldiers. As the shadowy organization grew it became bolder and more violent in its attacks on African Americans, Republican members of the Reconstruction governments, and even Southern Jews.

Early KKK Gathering

Allegedly organized for self-defense against state militia units composed of freed blacks they named themselves “White Leagues (Louisiana), White Liners or Rifle Clubs (Mississippi), or Red Shirts (South Carolina). They were, in fact, paramilitary organizations that functioned as armed auxiliaries of the Democratic Party in southern states in their drive to “redeem” the South from “black and tan Negro-Carpetbag rule.” [2] These men, mostly Confederate veterans “rode roughshod over the South, terrorizing newly freed slaves, their carpetbagger allies, and anyone who dared to imagine a biracial democracy as the war’s change.” [3] This unrequited violence and hatred set the stage for the continued persecution, murder and violence against blacks and those who supported their efforts to achieve equality in the South for the next century.

Throughout his term in office Johnson appealed to arguments used throughout later American history by “critics of civil rights legislation and affirmative action. He appealed to fiscal conservatism, raised the specter of an immense federal bureaucracy trampling on citizens’ rights, and insisted that self-help, not government handouts, was the path to individual advancement.” [4]

White League Members Intimidating Blacks at the Polls

Ulysses S. Grant succeeded Johnson as President in 1869. “For Grant, freedom and equal rights were matters of principle, not symbolism.” [5] Grant used his political capital to fight for the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment which gave black men the right to vote. It was one of the things that he remained most proud of in his life, he noted, “A measure which makes at once four million people voter who were heretofore declared by the highest tribunal in the land to be not citizens of the United States, nor eligible to become so…is indeed a measure of grander importance than any other act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day.” [6] Grant ordered his generals in the South to enforce the Reconstruction Act and when the Ku Klux Klan attempted to stop blacks from voting Grant got Congress to pass the “enforcement Act, which made racist terrorism a federal offense.” [7] He created the Justice Department to deal with crimes against Federal law and in 1871 pushed Congress to pass a law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act and sent in the army and federal agents to enforce the law.

White League and KKK Poster

Grant’s efforts using the military as well as agents of the Justice Department and the Secret Service against the Klan were hugely successful, thousands were arrested, hundreds of Klansmen were convicted and others were either driven underground or disbanded their groups. The 1872 election, was the first and last in which blacks were nearly unencumbered as they voted until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act.

However, Grant’s actions triggered a political backlash which doomed reconstruction. The seminal moment in this came 1873 when General Philip Sheridan working in Louisiana, asked Grant for “permission to arrest leaders of the White League and try them by courts-martial” [8] for their violent acts against blacks and their seizure of the New Orleans City Hall in a brazen coup attempt. The leak of Sheridan’s request sparked outrage and even northern papers condemned the president’s actions in the harshest of terms.

Apart from the effort to support voting rights for African Americans Grant’s efforts at Reconstruction were met mostly by failure. Part of this was due to a weariness on the part of many Northerners to continue to invest any more effort into the effort. Slowly even proponents of Reconstruction began to retreat from it, some like Carl Schurz were afraid that the use of the military against the Klan in the South could set precedent to use it elsewhere. Others, embraced an understanding of Social Darwinism which stood against all types of government interference what they called the “natural” workings of society, especially misguided efforts to uplift those at the bottom of the social order…and African Americans were consigned by nature to occupy the lowest rungs of the social ladder.” [9]

Southerners knew that they were winning the political battle and continued their pressure in Congress and in the media to demonize supporters of Reconstruction as well as African Americans. Southerners worked to rig the political and judicial process through the use of terror to demoralize and drive from power anyone, black or white, who supported Reconstruction. By 1870 every former Confederate state had been readmitted to the Union, in a sense fulfilling a part Lincoln’s war policy, but at the same time denying what the war was waged for.

To be continued….

Notes

[1] Ibid. Lane The Day Freedom Died p.230

[2] Ibid. McPherson The War that Forged a Nation p. 178

[3] Ibid. Jordan Marching Home p.118

[4] Ibid. Foner Forever Free p.116

[5] Ibid. Lane The Day Freedom Died: p.2

[6] Flood, Charles Bracelen, Grant’s Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant’s Heroic Last Year DaCapo Press, Boston 2011 pp.78-79

[7] Ibid. Lane The Day Freedom Died p.4

[8] Ibid. Langguth, A.J. After Lincoln p.314

[9] Ibid. Foner Forever Free pp.192-193

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June 18, 2015 · 15:55

Call it Terrorism: Massacre at Emmanuel AME

“You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Dylann Storm Roof

Last night a young man who the Charleston Police have identified as Dylann Storm Roof, walked into the historic Emanuel Africa Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston South Carolina. He sat next to the pastor, Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who also served as a State Senator for an hour before taking out a gun and opening fire as the meeting broke up. According to survivors he stated that he was at the church to kill black people and he did so, killing nine of the 13 people present including Reverend Pinckney. During the attack a survivor noted that he reloaded his gun five times.

Reverend Clementa Pinckney

Like many people I am shocked by this but I am not surprised. For decades the mainstream Right Wing media have been chumming the water with enough hatred directed against African Americans, other racial minorities, Moslems and Gays. Such people have been blamed by the Right, and not just the nutty fringe for every evil in our society for so long that it was only a matter of time before an act of terror like the one in this church was committed. Some of those people are already on the air today explaining this away not as an act of racially motivate terrorism, but as another attack on Christians.

However, that was not the case. Yes, these men and women killed by Dylann Roof were Christians, but he killed them because they were black. That is the cold hard fact that no one can get around in this case. He murdered these men and women simply because they were black and they represented a threat to the “White America” that he and other White Supremacists and defend.

The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is the oldest AME church in the South. Nine people died in a hate crime shooting on June 17, 2015.

Had Roof simply wanted to kill Christians to really make a point he could have gone to any church. There are plenty of the in Charleston, my God it is known as The Holy City because of the vast number of churches. But instead he went to a church which has a long history of standing up for the civil, social and political rights of blacks dating back to 1816. It was the hub of anti-slavery activism and where Denmark Vesey and others plotted a slave revolt which was ruthlessly crushed by South Carolina’s militia. South Carolina’s government burned the church, scattered the congregation and banned blacks from meeting in organized congregations until after South Carolina was liberated by General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army.

We don’t know much about Roof, and I’m sure that we will. However, one thing that I noted was that in one picture Roof was wearing a jacket which had the flag of the old Apartheid South African State and the flag of the also the flag apartheid Rhodesia sewn over the right breast pocket. His car had a decorative Confederate States of America license plate in front. A friend from high school said

“I never heard him say anything, but just he had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs,” he said. “He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.” But now, “the things he said were kind of not joking,”

When Roof was captured he appeared to be headed for the Blue Ridge Mountains in Western North Carolina of Eastern Tennessee. Eastern Tennessee, Western North Carolina and Southwestern Virginia are the home of numerous KKK, Neo Nazi and other White Supremacist groups.

So today even on Fox news, that bastion of balance hosts are scrambling to call this anything but racially motivated terrorism called it a crime against Christians which fits into their ideological content more than the truth that this was racially motivate terrorism. However this was the same kind of terrorism as the notorious KKK sponsored Birmingham Church bombing of September 1963, or the burnings and bombings of black churches in the South before and after that.

Mark my word by this evening some of the more prominent Right Wing radio and internet pundits are going to be blaming this on everything but racism and terrorism. Imagine though if the shooter was a Moslem what they would say. They would have been all over the air labeling all Moslems as jihadist’s intent on killing Christians and demanding action against all Moslems based through guilt by association. That my friends is a fact and it is not in dispute.

In the coming days we are going to find out more about this and it will not be pleasant reading. We are going to find a young man whose heart has been poisoned by hate propagated by both mainstream Right Wing media as well as extremist White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi groups.

We want to think that we have progressed, but sadly despite a veneer of progress, there still remains a lot of racism and other hatred that lurk beneath the veneer of the post-racial society. Michael Savage who has one of the most popular right wing radio programs in the country described inner-city children as “ghetto slime,” Ann Coulter said in 2013 “Perhaps, someday, blacks will win the right to be treated like volitional human beings. But not yet.” Rush Limbaugh too many too mention, and sadly there are some who call themselves Christian commentators who say even worse and not just about blacks.

Let us call this crime what it is. Racially motivated terrorism.

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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Tagged as 16th street baptist church, clementa pinckney, dylann storm roof, emmaunel a.m.e. church massacre, kkk, neo-confederate, neo-nazis, racism, right wing hatred, terrorism

March 24, 2015 · 13:33

Religious Discrimination Restoration Acts

There has been a trend in so called Red States where state legislatures are busy working on legislation with a wonderful sounding name, Religious Liberty Restoration Acts. I mean who could be against religious liberty? I mean when I see what the Taliban, the Islamic State and Boko Haram are doing to Christians, Shia Moslems and others I want to climb on that wagon and say absolutely. But then I realize these laws are not about restoring religious freedom at all, because no one is threatening anyone’s constitutional right to worship or even bear public witness to their faith.

What they are, are horrible laws with incredible bad second and third order effects on every citizen. They have nothing to do with religious liberty, but rather are much more like the restrictive sharia laws of the Taliban and the Islamic State. These laws are designed to allow religious groups to discrimate against individuals and groups that they believe that their God hates.

In every one of these states these laws are directed at one minority group. Gays, or the LGBT community, and are a protest against court rulings and laws which allow Gays to marry, to visit their spouse or significant other in the hospital, or basically enjoy the same legal rights that straight people, even those in illicit relationship enjoy. The laws almost all allow government employees or employees of private businesses to deny services to gays based on a “sincerely held religious belief.” Some laws like one in Arkansas have even go so far as to allow the state to void local non-discrimination ordinances passed by towns, cities and counties. A similar law is being floated in West Virginia. Arizona and some other states are debating bills similar to that of Indiana.

Indiana passed theirs today and Governor Mike Pence, a conservative Christian says that he is looking forward to signing it. Of course this ensures that the good Christian people of Indiana are free to discriminate against anyone they want. While targeted at gays the same law could be used against, Jews, Moslems, Hindus, Sikhs, or any other group of people. Logically since some Christian sects believe that Blacks are still under the curse of God, the bill could allow a KKK Christian not to serve a Black man or woman based on their sincerely held religious belief.

A similar bill in Oklahoma disappeared last week after a Democrat representive attached an Ammendment mandating that any business wanting to use religious liberty to deny service had to post a sign saying that they did so. I think that is rights anyone who wants to use the law not to serve someone should make that very clear. Just like the days of Jim Crow, where “No Blacks Allowed” was common, or Nazi Germany where “no Jews allowed” was almost universal.

I think that the wording of such signs should be quite clear and explicit. For instance, if it is a Christian business owner who refuses to serve gays the sign should say: “No Gays served due to my deeply held Christian beliefs.”

If a Moslem wants to claim their deeply held beliefs about sharia, claim that their act is a peaceful jihad against the infidels in order to discriminate against unbelievers just let them say so, I have no problem with that if Christians have that right.

Orthodox Jews should have the same right in such a world, who cares if the Goyum can’t buy their babka bread or bagels at the Jewish bakery, after all it’s the right of the owner, right?

Likewise I think that the Gay florist should be able to refuse to do business with people having their weddings in churches that refuse to allow gays to be married. So what if they are the only florist in town, they should have that right too and be able to claim a religious reason as to why they can, after all fair is fair.

Now, let’s step back and look at the absurdity of such laws. They open the door for anyone to discriminate against anyone based on their religious beliefs regardless of other established laws.

In reality such laws only work in theocracies where a majority religion can in effect use religious law to discriminate and disenfranchise unbelievers with impunity. When governments attempt to apply such laws in pluralistic societies there can be only one result; a Balkanization of society from which no good can come.

These laws are not laws to promote religious liberty, these laws are designed to allow a specific group of people to usurp laws that apply to everyone because of their religious beliefs.

Sadly, these laws are the last gasp of a religious aristocracy that has lost influence in society and that is dying; conservative Christianity. All the polls and studies say so, and sadly it is in large part the fault of churches and people that identify themselves as such. Their younger members are fleeing at an ever increasing rate and non-believers want nothing to do with them. The days of the “God loves you” type of evangelism are over. Instead, what suffices as public witness is that “God loves me and hates you.”

Why are people fleeing? Evangelical pollster George Barna’s group did a study and the results paint a picture that shows a church that is now described by the majority as Hypocritical, anti-homosexual, insincere, sheltered and too political. The Pew Survey as well as others that survey religious belief and practice in this country back this up.

These laws show how desperate and increasing irrelevant that church has become. It is a sad commentary and they should know better, but like cultural suicide bombers they will destroy themselves to hurt those that they hate. It is short-sighted, and tied more to the political power of conservative Christians and to preserve their influence than any demonstration of the grace, love, mercy or even the justice of God.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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March 7, 2015 · 19:03

Bloody Sunday at 50

Today Representative John Lewis led a thousands of people on a march to commemorate the March 7th 1965 Selma march, a march that the then 25 year old Lewis, working for voting rights as a leader of the SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee both led and organized. In today’s march, Lewis was accompanied by President Barak Obama and nearly 100 members of Congress. They were joined by former President George W. Bush and his ice Laura. Though about two dozen Republican members attended, sadly, of the Republican House or Senate leadership only Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy bothered to show, changing his mind late Friday. Lewis remarked today:

“We come to Selma to be renewed. We come to be inspired. We come to be reminded that we must do the work that justice and equality calls us to do…”

This is profoundly important today.

In 1965, the political and police leaders of Alabama, including Governor George Wallace, as well as those of Selma, determined to stop any movement that might advance the cause of blacks acted to crush the marchers. Wallace denounced the march as a threat to public safety and promised to stop it. He ordered the State Police to take all measures to ensure that it did not happened. In Selma, the county sheriff ordered all adult white males to report to the courthouse to be deputized.

On the 7th some 550-600 protesters led by Lewis and the Reverend Hosea Williams and began their march. All went well until they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. There they ran into a phalanx of State Police. The commander of those men ordered the marchers back. Williams attempted to discuss the matter with him and was rebuffed. It was then that the State Police advanced into the ranks of the demonstrators. They knocked them down, and beat them with nightsticks. Another group of State Police began to launch tear gas which incapacitated the unprepared and peaceful crowd. Still more mounted troopers charged into the now struggling mass of people beating them with nightsticks as they rode through the demonstrators.

Dozens of marchers, men, women and children, including Lewis were injured. Seventeen required hospitalization. Wallace appeared to have succeeded in stopping the march, but instead the images of the brazen brutal acts committed by his police energized people around the country, including President Johnson.

It triggered additional demonstrations not only in Selma, but in Montgomery, the State Capital. While the demonstrations were peaceful, and the later march which took place on March 21st was protected by U.S. Army soldiers and Alabama National Guard troops under Federal orders, more protesters would be killed or injured. Reverend James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston was attacked by a white mob armed with clubs. He died of massive brain trauma two days later. On March 25th, Viola Luizzo, a white mother from Detroit who had come to support the marchers, was assassinated by members of the KKK.

The marches led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As he introduced the act to Congress Johnson noted:

“Even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too, because it is not just Negroes but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

Fifty years later, the battle is still not over. I know that much progress has been made in my lifetime, from my experience in high school where due to a court order I went to school with people I would have never met, people who today, are among my best friends. Racism and discrimination are not as bad as they were back in 1965, but sadly they are still all to common and not just in the South, and its reach extends far beyond blacks, although African Americans still suffer the brunt of it.

President Obama gave an amazing and inspiring speech today at the Pettus Bridge. I recommend that you either watch it or read it. Here is just a part of what he said today:

And yet, what could be more American than what happened in this place?

What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people – the unsung, the downtrodden, the dreamers not of high station, not born to wealth or privilege, not of one religious tradition but many – coming together to shape their country’s course?

What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this; what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

That’s why Selma is not some outlier in the American experience. That’s why it’s not a museum or static monument to behold from a distance. It is instead the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents:

“We the People…in order to form a more perfect union.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

These are not just words. They are a living thing, a call to action, a roadmap for citizenship and an insistence in the capacity of free men and women to shape our own destiny…

The American instinct that led these young men and women to pick up the torch and cross this bridge is the same instinct that moved patriots to choose revolution over tyranny. It’s the same instinct that drew immigrants from across oceans and the Rio Grande; the same instinct that led women to reach for the ballot and workers to organize against an unjust status quo; the same instinct that led us to plant a flag at Iwo Jima and on the surface of the Moon.

It’s the idea held by generations of citizens who believed that America is a constant work in progress; who believed that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what’s right and shake up the status quo.

That’s what makes us unique, and cements our reputation as a beacon of opportunity…

The actions of those who marched at Selma in 1965 and the words of the President appeal to the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, they appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called “the new birth of freedom.”

That being said, we shall overcome.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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Filed under civil rights, History, News and current events, Political Commentary

Tagged as 1965 voting rights act, bloody sunday, civil rights, civil rights movement, congressman john lewis, edmund pettus bridge, george wallace, hosea williams, james reeb, kkk, president barak obama, racism, selma alabama, viola luizzo

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