It Didn't End at Appomattox

Slavery is our original sin.

As an emerging nation that stole 400,000 men, women, and children from the African continent, the United States quickly became dependent upon the labor of what would become an underclass of people forced to do the work that the White majority simply refused to do. As the descendants of these slaves were later born into that same system, their numbers grew. By the time the United States elected someone who detested the institution of slavery as president in 1860, those numbers had ballooned to over 4 million people, the vast majority of whom were confined to the cotton plantations of the American South. Shortly after the 1860 election, the southern states felt immediately threatened that their way of life, which relied upon the labor of enslaved Africans, would no longer be possible. With the secession of South Carolina, a line in the sand had been drawn: southern states were now so heavily committed to the institution of slavey that they were willing to fight a war to maintain it. 

Flash forward four years, and we have the scene above. The confederacy lost the war and thus lost its quest to maintain legal slavery. But instead of there being severe consequences for the rebellion, the confederacy and its leaders were let off the hook. Sure, they had to surrender some of their property. But by and large, Confederate soldiers suffered few, if any, hardships. Many of them moved out west to the frontier, where, instead of legally abusing slaves, they could legally hunt down Native Americans to make way for westward expansion. Some former Confederate officials, like Nathan Bedford Forrest, still held a severe hatred for the now-freed slaves and would do everything in their power to make their lives miserable. Forrest, along with several of his White colleagues, wanted to ensure that newly freed Black men would think twice before trying to vote. That's why they created a little group in Tennessee called the Ku Klux Klan to overthrow Republican state governments (remember Republicans were the liberal party during this time) and to target Black community leaders. While the Klan's initial emergence was derailed in 1872, it set the seeds for future iterations, the next of which would occur in the run-up to World War I. 

While the Klan went into hibernation, Black men and women still were not allowed to become full participants in society. This was the era of Jim Crow, where a series of laws were put into place to prevent Blacks from achieving political power. Thanks to the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that separate but unequal facilities did not violate the U.S. Constitution. Therefore, Black Americans could seek no legal repercussions, knowing that their living conditions, schools, and communities as a whole would be inherently inferior to those of their White counterparts. Black field workers could legally own property, but that ownership was completely dependent upon the White plantation owner doing the right thing. While slavery was abolished with the 13th Amendment in 1863, a new system of sharecropping emerged that once again tied Black workers to the land and prevented them from pursuing careers outside of manual labor. Combined with separate and grossly underfunded schools for their children, Black Americans were made a permanent underclass based on race and race alone. 

It wasn't until the mid-20th century that Black men and women finally began to see measurable progress. A major turning point during this time was the denial of benefits to Black soldiers returning from World War II. With doors closed for such newly minted government programs as the G.I. Bill and the introduction of the practice of redlining, Black soldiers returned home to a country that failed to honor the sacrifices they made. Finally, with the landmark Brown v. Board ruling in 1954, Black Americans were able to have the legal right to access the same resources that their White counterparts had for centuries. Schools and businesses were now expected to be integrated, but naturally, there was much resistance from the former Confederate states, which still saw Black men and women as inherently inferior. Over the next two decades, many of the most famous civil rights marches and actions took place in southern cities from Selma to Montgomery to Greensboro. Yet despite all the victories won, there still remained an undercurrent of White supremacy that simply could never let go of the idea of separate and unequal.

Just like the period between KKK iterations, the time period between the mid-1970s and mid-2010s consisted of a rebranding of the country's White supremacy networks. This marked a transitional period where the open intimidation of Black voters was replaced with the slow, methodical alliance of the religious and racist wings of what would become the modern Republican Party. This was the Southern Strategy in action as a way to harness those who were absolutely disgusted with the gains that Black America made in the 1960s and 1970s. The solid Democratic South would completely invert within a generation and would emerge with today's electoral map that bears a remarkable resemblance to the initial divisions of the Union and Confederacy during the Civil War. Starting with Ronald Reagan, each successive Republican president would balance the needs and wants of the religious and racist wings of the party until both came together in 2016 with the emergence of Donald Trump. As the movie Black KkKlansman points out, Trump was the first candidate since George Wallace to have been supported by so many people who were openly racist. It took 50 years, but the Southern Strategy had finally paid off.

We can't undo history. We can't go back in time and tell Abraham Lincoln to line up those traitorous Confederate generals against a firing squad. Instead, we're dealing with a soft Civil War at a time when the country is more divided than ever. We see that today, with GOP-led states like Florida and Texas ignoring the Constitution and doing whatever Mushroom Mussolini wants. Meanwhile, blue states like California are forced to fight back and play a game that Democrats historically have not wanted to play. But the stakes have never been higher. Red states that control all three branches of state government are doing everything in their power to take us back to the antebellum South. They're making it more difficult for people of color to vote. They're injecting their Christian theocracy into public schools. They're removing long-time immigrants on the track to citizenship from the community. Just like the Jim Crow South, we're seeing a concerted effort by the conservative party to once again prevent non-White people from attaining power in this country.

Slavery in this country ended. But its mindset did not. And with the emergence of Donald Trump and 77 million of his cult followers, we are once again at a turning point in our nation's history. There are those fighting back. The Texas Democrats are a prime example of this. Yet here we stand 160 years after Appomattox, with a divided country that still has a significant number of citizens who believe that Black men and women are inherently inferior. Robert E. Lee might have surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant on that fateful day in April 1865. But his cause and the cause of his people never truly died. 

A harsh truth that we can no longer ignore.