Why the Republicans don't want to know about Russian intervention in the 2016 elections

Will Bunch reminds us that not only do the Republicans want to spare themselves the partisan embarrassment of what a thorough investigation of alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 election because it would remind everyone of how the Russians preferred Donald "Make American Great Again" Trump. Looking at election system vulnerabilities would inevitably bring suggestions for election system security that would make the Republicans' efforts to suppress black and Latino voting much more difficult than they are finding it to be right now. From Can America handle the truth of the tarnished 2016 election? Philadelphia Inquirer 09/03/2017:

American elections are easy to mess with because America’s election system is terrible — Russian hacking or no Russian hacking. Voters went to the polls in 2016 after years of efforts by mostly GOP-led state governments to make it hard for citizens — but especially non-white citizens, college students or the elderly — to cast ballots. Consider Wisconsin, the state where Trump pulled arguably his biggest upset, winning by only 22,748 votes. Critics have said Wisconsin’s turnout fell sharply because of its voter ID law (although maybe not by 200,000, as one study claimed.) Voters in the Badger State were also badgered with “fake news” — some of it undoubtedly from Russia. It’s hard to tell an array of innocent computer glitches and malfunctions from criminal hacking.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist or political scientist to figure out what needs to be done. In the long run, we need massive election reform — including a new and improved Voting Rights Act that would pinpoint the most pernicious voter ID laws, an Election Day federal holiday, and same-day voter registration. We need a voting system that leaves a real paper trail that can be routinely audited and easily investigated when there are allegations of vote tampering. And, as the Times article makes clear, we need a more thorough investigation of computer hacking and other problems that occurred in 2016 — regardless of the possibility that we might learn the unthinkable.

Trump's election and major threats to American democracy

I don't have anything particularly insightful to say about the outcome of the Presidential election. Because I assume it's obvious to everyone that in two months, the inmates will officially take charge of the asylum.

But I do know the incoming President made it a central campaign promise to deport all undocumented immigrants. Like on most everything, he was vague and sometimes self-contradictory on that. But he did promise that he would make a two-year push to deport them all. He explicitly referred to the deportation program under President Eisenhower, which was literally called Operation Wetback. It was a brutal operation that directly resulted in numerous deaths. And that was under Dwight Eisenhower, who in Republican terms then was considered a moderate or even a liberal.

That also involved about two million people forced out of the country. Today it is commonly estimated that there are 11-12 million, playing a far more significant role in the economy. American agriculture is almost completely dependent on *undocumented* labor. I've seen one historian claim that expelling 12 million people would be the largest forced migration in all of history. I don't know how it may rank in the Guiness Book of Humanitarian Horrors. But it would involve a lot of very real horror. Trump very recently promised that immediately after inauguration he would deport 2 million "criminal" immigrants.

For a bit of history on Project Wetback, see: Joshua Keating, Trump Praises Eisenhower’s Deportation Program, Fails to Mention It Was Called “Operation Wetback” Slate 11/10/2015; John Dillin, How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico Christian Science Monitor 07/06/2006.

Pilar Marrero in Incrédulos, grupos pro inmigrantes prometen “resistir” ante una presidencia Trump La Opinión 09.11.2016:

Donald Trump fue electo presidente de los Estados Unidos de América, sobre una plataforma que incluyó la promesa de deportaciones masivas, la construcción de un gran muro entre Estados Unidos y México y el reforzamiento del sistema policial fronterizo, triplicando la cantidad de agentes de inmigración y anulando medidas ejecutivas de ayuda a los inmigrantes.

[Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America on a platform that included the promise of massive deportations, the construction of a big wall between the United States and Mexico and the reinforcing of the frontier police system, tripling the number of immigration agents and annuling executives measures to support immigrants.]

And she writes, "los grupos que por años han luchado contra las deportaciones y la militarización de la frontera, y por una reforma migratoria, buscan reagruparse y comenzar una lucha que se presenta titánica" ("the groups who have been fighting for years against deportations and the militarization of the frontier, and for immigration reform, are seeking to regroup and to begin a fight that appears to be titanic").

There is also the very real effect of systematic, segregationist voter-suppression efforts targeting especially black and Latino voters. Rick Perlstein summed up the state of play on those recently in GOP Voting Fraud Squads Are Nothing New Washington Spectator 11/04/2016.

Unfortunately, it's not easy to immediately evaluate those, as this article by Justin Elliott notes, What We Don’t Know: The Full Effect Of Voter Suppression and Voter ID Laws ProPublica Electionland 11/08/2016:

As journalist Ari Berman, who covers the voting rights beat, pointed out today, this is the first presidential election in half a century without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. The 2013 Supreme Court ruling Shelby County v. Holder invalidated federal oversight of states with a history of voting discrimination.

But quantifying exactly how much the changes have depressed turnout is nearly impossible.

“It’s exceedingly difficult to measure the effects of voter ID laws,” says David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. That’s because, Becker notes, “it’s incredibly hard to know who’s choosing not to vote because of barriers.”

But "not easy" is far from meaning "impossible." There are ways to determine the effects of voter suppression, as the Justice Department did in the early 1960s in court challenging segregationist voter suppression laws then.

Ari Berman, who is quoted there, has been doing great work reporting on this nefarious practice in its various forms. He explained in a piece in May the stakes involved, Voter Suppression Is the Only Way Donald Trump Can Win The Nation/Moyers & Company 05/10/2016:

Unless there’s an unexpected turnaround in his terrible numbers among nonwhite and young voters, there’s only one way Trump can win the general election: by massively suppressing Democratic voters or hoping they don’t show up on Election Day. Trump could do this by supporting new voting restrictions adopted by GOP-controlled states (17 have new restrictions in place for the first time in 2016), urging his supporters to create chaos at the polls and running a breathtakingly negative campaign that demobilizes his opposition.

Trump’s support in the primary directly correlated with racial resentment toward African-Americans, Hispanics and Muslims. “The higher you scored on racial resentment, the more likely you were to support Trump; the more you resented immigrants or professed your white ethnocentrism, the likelier you were to plan to vote for Trump,” wrote Tom Edsall in The New York Times. It’s not a stretch to imagine Trump supporters trying to block these same voters from the polls.

We probably won't have a decent picture of how that worked in yesterday's election for a while. As Ari noted there, "Studies have shown that restrictions like voter-ID laws can reduce voter turnout by 2 to 3 percent, with the largest drop-off among young, first-time and African-American voters."

Then there is campaign-financing system, which the Republican-dominated Supreme Court made orders of magnitude worse with their Citizens United decision. I wrote just after that decision in 2010:

President Obama addressed the issue in his weekly address on 01/23/09 01/23/2010, the White House transcript of which is grandly titled, President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People. As they often do, many of the words sound right (my emphasis):

But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. [my emphasis]

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections. [my emphasis]

But will he fight for real solutions? Sadly, he pleaded for a "bipartisan" solution, which has become for the Obama administration and the current Senate leadership at least an offer of preemptive surrender.

We currently have one Party, the Republicans, who are both strongly partisan and willing to fight for their goals. We have another Party, the Democrats, who are lukewarm partisan and not notably willing to fight for the goals that are most important to their Party's own base and to the majority of the people.

Sadly, the Party that is made up of fighting partisans has also become an authoritarian Party hostile to democracy and the rule. (See Bush v. Gore, the Cheney-Bush torture policy, to take two examples among many.)

It really is remarkable for the President of the United States to say of a Supreme Court decision:

This ruling strikes at our democracy itself.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest.

But those words at this particular moment in time remind me of what's been so gut-wrenching disappointing to even Democrats like me, who never viewed Obama as some kind of democratic messiah. His actions haven't matched up to the urgency of his words.

There will be a lot to say about the 2016 election. For a long time. But this are some of the most urgent issues that stand out for me on the morning after.

1963 and 2016: fanatical segregationists creating their own version of reality

James Silver's Mississippi: The Closed Society, originally published in 1964, was an important and influential book on segregation and the civil rights movement in Mississippi. And about the 1963 riot at Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi) when James Meredith was admitted as the first African-American student. (At least knowingly admitted as such. At least one black student had "passed" as white in attending Ole Miss in 1945-6 on a Navy study program.) The University of Mississippi Press issued a new edition of Silver's in 2012.

Since the national Republican Party has "Mississippized" itself in the sense of 1964 - maybe "Ross Barneettized" would be a better term after the treason-minded governor that instigated the Ole Miss riot - Silver's description of the social context and mentality of segregation among whites has newly contemporary relevance.

The night of insurrection at Ole Miss has been called the most explosive federal-state clash since the Civil War. Before the work was done, the Army brought more troops to Mississippi than General Washington had ever commanded at one time, and almost as many as General Sherman had had in the environs of Oxford exactly 100 years before. Several hundred reporters from all news and interpretative media concentrated on the Mississippi campus to ferret out the facts about what had actually taken place and to inquire into the background of the state's turmoil. By and large the reporting was accurate and the interpretation sound and temperate. Those who wished to know have had spread before them a reasonably trustworthy record of events.

This is true for all the world except Mississippi. With their long history of being on the defensive against outside criticism, and with their predisposition to believe their own leaders can do no wrong, the people have been almost completely deceived. The closed society intuitively and immediately projected (in fact, it had foreshadowed) the orthodox version that the insurrection came as the inevitable result of federal encroachment, deliberately planned by the Kennedys and callously incited by [federal Chief Marshal] McShane when he called for tear gas. What did happen in front of the Lyceum Building in that crucial hour before eight o'clock on the night of September 30? Truth cries out that the orthodox Mississippi view is false, that cleverness in shifting the culpability for defiance of law from those creating the violence to those enforcing the law could only succeed among a people suffering from a touch of paranoia. [my emphasis]

Silver notes that there were calls by Mississippi officials for indictment of McShane and other federal officials. White segregationists were very concerned to maintain "law and order" when it came to black people. But they were not hesitant to condemn law-enforcement officials who were demanding that white rioters conduct themselves according to the law. White Lives Mattered to Mississippi segregationists.

Silver addresses the use of tear gas:

Whether Chief Marshal James P. McShane was justified in giving the order to fire at precisely the moment he did is a question for the professionals to answer. It is relevant, however, that between 40 and 50 faculty members and their wives later testified that the marshals had undergone for at least an hour a constant harassment of obscene language and a minute-by-minute heavier barrage of lighted cigarette butts, stones, bottles, pieces of pipe, and even acid. It is a small matter whether the gas should have come fifteen minutes earlier or later, but it is rather ironic that a full-scale insurrection should get under way at the exact moment that the President was appealing to Mississippians on radio and television for fair play, in the name of Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar. [my emphasis]

I've previously described L.Q.C. Lamar as "a genuine villain who conned gullible Yankees with his 'moderate' talk while fighting for white supremacy and against democracy." JFK had made Lamar one of his "profiles in courage" in his famous book.

Dealing with Ross Barnett, in particular, though, showed Kennedy that his conservative view of Reconstruction was probably deeply flawed. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978) quotes John Kennedy from 06/20/1963 commenting specifically on the murder of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers: "I don't understand the South. I'm coming to believe that [Radical Republican Reconstruction-era Congressman] Thaddeus Stevens was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But when I see this sort of thing, I begin to wonder how else you can treat them."

"Them" in this case being hardcore Southern segregationists.

Silver rightly notes, "The President had no alternative except the use of federal power when the execution of the order [to admit Meredith] was prevented by state force." That authority was clarified during the Civil War. But even in 2016, their are still political descendants of John Calhoun who would reverse that verdict. Unless they wanted to use federal troops against black communities, immigrants or labor, of course.

Schlesinger also provides this transcript of a telephone conversation between the Governor of Mississippi and the President of the United States:

BARNETT. That's what it's going to boil down to - whether Mississippi can run its institutions or the federal government is going to run things ....
KENNEDY. I don't understand, Governor. Where do you think this is going to take your own state?
BARNETT. A lot of states haven't had the guts to take a stand. We are going to fight this thing. . . . This is like a dictatorship. Forcing him physically into Ole Miss. General, that might bring on a lot of trouble. You don't want to do that. You don't want to physically force him in.
KENNEDY. You don't want to physically keep him out. ... Governor, you are a part of the United States.
BARNETT. We have been a part of the United States but I don't know whether we are or not.
KENNEDY. Are you getting out of the Union?
BARNETT. lt looks like we're being kicked around - like we don't belong to it. General, this thing is serious.
KENNEDY. It's serious here.
BARNETT. Must it be over one little boy - backed by cominunist front - backed by the NAACP which is a communist front? ... I'm going to treat you with every courtesy but I won't agree to let that boy to get to Ole Miss. I will never agree to that. I would rather spend the rest of my life in a penitentiary than do that.
KENNEDY. I have a responsibility to enforce the laws of the United States .... The orders of the court are going to be upheld. As I told you, you are a citizen not only of the State of Mississippi but also of the United States. Could I give you a ring?
BARNETT. You do that. . . . Good to hear from you. [my emphpasis]

Silver's account is also a reminder that rightwing whining about the so-called liberal press has been around for a while:

In the more than a year since then [the riot], politicians, editors, judges, lawyers, educators, churchmen — all the makers of public opinion — have continued the hypocritical tirade of misrepresentation and deceit. It does impress people who are attuned to hearing nothing else and want to hear nothing else. In the 1963 campaign, every gubernatorial candidate started out with a deep hatred for the Kennedys, and the man who screamed the loudest is now Mississippi's governor. While warming up in Florida for the main event, Paul Johnson, then lieutenant governor, spoke on the subject, "The Cause of Freedom Won at Oxford and We Have Just Begun to Fight." President Kennedy, it would seem, had tried "to subvert the foundation pillars of this great government," backed by a "kept segment" of national press, television, and radio grinding out "its slanted story, half truths and prejudiced propaganda." [my emphasis]

And the unwillingness of those fabled moderate Republicans to stand up against Trump and his overt white supremacist Presidential campaign also has a familiar ring to those who have some knowledge about Mississippi-style segregation. Silver writes:

There are moderates in Mississippi who look upon the future with some degree of optimism because increasing numbers of colored citizens are becoming eligible to vote. Unquestionably the promise of tomorrow has some merit, but not because of the assistance of [white] men of good will. The voter registration drives are all conducted by local Negroes and "outside agitators" of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, NAACP, and other organizations. In the courts the chief defender of firstclass citizenship for colored Mississippians is the U.S. Department of Justice. The Mississippi Civil Rights Advisory Committee, which seeks to protect the rights of all Mississippians, has found it well nigh impossible to recruit members.

The most unreasonable and cruel tirade James Meredith had to endure came from a [Memphis] Commercial Appeal columnist. Having, at least privately, expressed some sympathy for a much-maligned individual, this man of good will pounced upon Meredith's first apparent false step (his criticism of the U.S. Army), denouncing him as an "ignoble failure" who had betrayed his race and damaged its reputation beyond calculation. The column was filled with innuendo, falsehood, and bad judgment. Its author, who laid claim to an "overload of grief, compassion and charity," demonstrated hp had none of these qualities when he refused to rectify in any way his character assassination of an innocent man. Once again, the pious, self-righteous man of irresponsibility had failed miserably, even in a mild crisis. [my emphasis]

To quote Arlo Guthrie, "Some things change, you know. Some things don't."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 29: A veteran of Reconstruction defends it from Lost Cause dogma (3)

John Roy Lynch did a follow-up to the article from which I quoted yesterday. The second piece is called, More About the Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes The Journal of Negro History (3:2 Apr 1918). It's mostly devoted to defending his previous piece on several specific factual points on which he certainly looks to have the better of the particular critic to whom he's responding.

There are two points that I'll emphasize here. One is his discussion of the antidemocratic turn in the Supreme Court, embodied in particular by their overturning of anti-discrimination and voting rights protections in the federal Civil Rights Act approved during Reconstruction that effectively gutted those laws (not unlike the Roberts Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act in more recent years!):

I think would have been, different. The unfortunate thing about those decisions is the wide scope of authority thus conceded to the States. In other words, they amount to a judicial re-cognition of the dangerous doctrine of States Rights - a doctrine which has been the source and the cause of most of our domestic troubles and misfortunes since those decisions were rendered. But for those unfortunate decisions our country would not be cursed and disgraced today by lynch law and other forms of lawlessness and racial proscription and discrimination. But for those unfortunate decisions lynchings could have been and I am sure would have been held to be an offense against the peace and dignity of the United States as well as the State in which the crime is committed. Consequently, the criminals could be, and in most cases would be, prose cuted in the United States courts, as was done in the case of many of the leaders of that secret criminal organization called the Ku Klux Klan. [my emphasis]

He also mentions the obvious absurdity of the Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which he does not name specifically:

The court has also decided that a State law providing separate accommodations for white and colored people on railroad trains, at least for a passenger whose journey begins and ends in the same state, is not an abridgment in violation of the constitution, provided the accommodations for the two races are exactly equal. This means that the validity even of those laws will not be affirmed whenever it can be shown that the accommodations are not equal, which can be very easily done. Equal separate accommodations are both a physical and a financial impossibility. It is simply impossible for a railroad company to provide the same accommodations for one colored passenger that it provides for one hundred whites. If, then, a colored passenger cannot occupy a seat or a sleeping berth in a car in which white persons may be passengers, this will not only be an abridgment, but in some cases, an absolute denial of such accommodations. The ultimate nullification of such unfair, unjust and unreasonable laws must necessarily follow. [my emphasis in bold]

The other point is Lynch's further defense of the quality of the Reconstruction government's in Mississippi. The critic to whom he is responding, to whom he refers as "the expert," had claimed that the alleged mismanagement in Reconstruction was more prominent in local governments than the state:

In other words [as Lynch reads the claims of "the expert"], there was nothing wrong with the State administration; it was the local county and municipal governments that were bad. And yet, a fair and impartial investigation will reveal the fact that there is no more foundation for this allegation than for those about the State government. It is admitted that during the early part of Reconstruction the local tax rate was high, the reasons for which are fully explained in [Lynch's 1913 book] The Facts of Reconstruction. Such an investigation would show that the charges of extravagance, recklessness and maladministration so generally made about the administration of county and municipal affairs were grossly exaggerated and nearly, if not all of them wholly untrue. In fact, the expert flatly contradicts himself on this point, because he admits that the evidence does not support the charge of dishonesty in the case of the Negro sheriffs, and yet the sheriff is the principal officer in the administration of the county government. [my emphasis in bold]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 28: A veteran of Reconstruction defends it from Lost Cause dogma (2)

John Roy Lynch, who I've been quoting in recent posts and who served three terms as a Republican Congressman from Mississippi during Reconstruction, wrote a defense of Reconstruction in Some Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes The Journal of Negro History 2:4 (Oct 1917). He was responding to the account of Reconstruction in the multi-volume History of the United States by James Rhodes, which he describes as "the most biased, partisan and prejudiced historical work I have ever read."

He objects to Rhodes' description of the "Redemption" (end of Reconstruction) as the restoration of "home rule" to the former Confederate states. Lynch in responding gives an accurate picture of the nature of the Redemption governments:

If home rule were finally restored to the South in 1877, the natural and necessary inference to be drawn is that prior to that time those States were subjected to some other kind of rule, presumably that of foreigners and strangers, an inference which is wholly at variance with the truth. Another inference to be drawn is that those States had enjoyed home rule until the same was revolutionized or set aside by the Reconstruction Acts of Congress and that it was finally restored in 1877. If this is the inference which the writer meant to have the reader make, it is conclusive evidence of the fact that he was unpardonably and inexcusably ignorant of the subject matter about which he wrote.

As he indicates in his argument, the "home rule" trope was a propaganda label meant to disguise the dirty and undemocratic nature of the Redemption governments.

As that term is usually and generally understood, there never was a time when those States did not have home rule, unless we except the brief period when they were under military control, and even then the military commanders utilized home material in making appointments to office. Since the officers, however, were not elected by the people, it may be plausibly claimed that they did not have home rule. But the State governments that were organized and brought into existence under the Reconstruction Acts of Congress were the first and only governments that were genuinely republican in form. [my emphasis]

He is arguing here that even the antebellum governments which were "republican" in the understanding of the Constitution of that time were not genuinely so.

The form of government which existed in ante-bellum days was that of an aristocracy. That which has existed since what Mr. Rhodes is pleased to term the restoration of home rule is simply that of a local despotic oligarchy. The former was not, and the present is not, based upon the will and choice of the masses; but the former was by far the better of the two, for whatever may be truthfully said in condemnation and in derogation of the southern aristocracy of ante-bellum days, it can not be denied that they represented the wealth, the intelligence, the decency and the respectability of their respective States. While the State governments that were dominated by the aristocrats were not based upon the will of the people, as a whole, yet from an administrative point of view they were not necessarily bad. Such can not be said of those who are now the representatives of what Mr. Rhodes is pleased to term home rule. [my emphasis]

That is a straightforward and accurate description of both the antebellum and Redemption governments. But it was very much outside the mainstream of academic and popular interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction in 1917, which had come to be dominated by the Lost Cause perspective.

Lynch also gives an account of how some Southern whites eventually became attracted to the Republican Party during Reconstruction. He offers a bit of worldly wisdom in that regard:

It is true there are some men whose party affiliations are based upon principle and convictions regardless of consequences personal to themselves. Occasionally there are found some who are even willing to be martyrs, but they are exceptions to the general rule. The average man is politically ambitious. He desires political distinction and official recognition. In determining his party affiliations, therefore, he is more than apt to cast his lot with the party through which he believes that ambition may be gratified.

And he points out that just after the Civil War, Southern whites tended to think it was safer to adhere to the Democratic Party:

The Civil War had just come to a close; sectional animosity was bitter and intense. The Republican party was looked upon as the party of the North and, therefore, the bitter enemy of the South. The southern white men who joined the Republican party were accused of being traitors to their section and false to their own race and blood; they were called Scalawags. Through a process of intimidation, chiefly by means of social ostracism, independent thought and action on the part of southern whites, during the early period of Reconstruction, were pretty effectually prevented. Through such methods, they were quite successfully held under the subjection and control of those whose leadership they had been accustomed to follow.

But with Grant's election in 1868 which put a President in the White House that was in broad agreement with the policies of Congressional Reconstruction, the political atmosphere in the South, and he is writing with particular reference to Mississippi, began to shift:

After the election of Grant, however, in 1868 the feeling of intolerance somewhat subsided, resulting in a large number of accessions to the Republican party from the ranks of the best and most substantial white men of that section. But it was not until the reelection of Grant in 1872 that the feeling of political proscription, social ostracism and intolerance among the whites seemingly disappeared. It was then that white men came into, took charge of and assumed the leadership of the Republican party, in large numbers. They then had nothing to fear and nothing to lose by being identified with the Republican party when social distinctions growing out of politics ceased to be effective. [my emphasis]

I assume in the directly following passage, he was speaking in terms of potential as well as experienced reality, which is never quite so pleasant as this passage might suggest:

The South then entered upon a new era which was destined to bring to that section wealth and prosperity with happiness and contentment among its people of both races, all living under local governments successfully controlled by the better element of native whites with the cooperation and participation to some extent of the newly enfranchised blacks.

Lynch leans to the extravagant in his praise of Mississippi whites who became Republicans: "In fact, the southern white men that came into the Republican party were typical representatives of the best blood and the finest manhood of the South, than whom no better men ever lived."

He attributed to discrediting of Reconstruction among Southern whites to three events:

The true reason why so many white men at the South left the Republican party may be stated under three heads: first, the Democratic victories of 1874 which were accepted by southern Democrats as a national repudiation of the congressional plan of Reconstruction; second, the closeness of the Presidential election of 1876 together with the supposed bargain entered into between the Hayes managers and southern Democratic members of Congress, by which the South was to be turned over to the Democrats of that section in consideration of which the said southern Democrats gave their consent to the peaceable inauguration of Hayes; third, the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States [in the Civil Rights cases] by which the doctrine of States' Rights was given new life and strength. [my emphasis]

Lynch noted in a later article that I quoted in a previous post that, in reality, the 1874 election were largely driven by the national repercussions of the Panic of 1873 and Reconstruction was such was not a major theme. But here he's talking about how Southern Democrats interpreted that result at the time.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 27: A veteran of Reconstruction defends it from Lost Cause dogma (1)

Reconstruction-era Congress John Roy Lynch (1847-1939), who I've discussed in the last two days' posts, is an example of someone who kept a more realistic, democratic understanding of Reconstruction alive when the Lost Cause version was predominant in professional history and popular culture.

In an essay appearing under the title Communications in its published form (The Journal of Negro History 16:1 Jan 1931; Lynch's communication itself is dated 07/17/1930), Lynch addressed distortions in a book by Claude Bowers called The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln (1929). He declares in the first paragraph that Bowers' book is "is a composition of errors, misstatements, misrepresentations, and false assertions." He sees Bowers as distorting by omission: "In spite of its extreme prolixity and verbosity the book is remarkable, more for what is concealed than for what is revealed - for what is unrecorded than for what is recorded."

Lynch challenged the Lost Cause narrative on several points. For instance, on Presidential Reconstruction, he writes:

President Andrew Johnson inaugurated a policy of reconstruction of his own, which did not meet with popular approval. He belonged to that group of public men who contended that the rebel states had never been legally out of the Union. His policy, therefore, was the oath of allegiance to the Union and the ratification of the thirteenth amendment. No other conditions were deemed necessary to complete restoration. But it so transpired that the state governments which he thus brought into existence made the ratification of the thirteenth amendment practically worthless, for the "black laws" passed by the different legislatures practically re-established the institution of slavery. [my emphasis]

It was in the struggle with Johnson over Reconstruction policy that led to the Reconstruction Acts and what became known as Congressional Reconstruction or Radical Reconstruction: "Congressional leaders were confronted with the fact that it would be impossible to bring about restoration on any other basis than that proposed by President Johnson without conferring suffrage upon the colored man."

The elections of 1868, in which Ulysses Grant was elected President focused on the issue of Reconstruction:

The first test of strength [between supporters and opponents Congressional Reconstruction measures] took place in the state and congressional elections of 1866, when the republicans were successful. Still, hope of ultimate success on the part of the democrats was not abandoned. The crucial test was to take place in the presidential and congressional elections of 1868. The national democratic convention of that year, which nominated Seymour and Blair for president and vice president, incorporated in the party platform a clause which declared the reconstruction acts of congress to be unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void. The republican national convention which nominated Grant and Colfax for president and vice-president, warmly endorsed, and boldly sanctioned the reconstruction acts. This, then was the chief, and it may be said, the sole issue before the country at that time. The result was a victory for the republicans; and yet it was a sore disappointment for the leaders of that party, for the reason that the democrats carried the empire state of New York, and if the southern states, which in the meantime had been readmitted had been lost to the republicans, the hero of Appomattox [Grant] would have been defeated. In other words, it was the southern states that participated in that election that brought success to the republican party. In consequence of this fact southern democrats did not abandon hope of ultimate success in defeating, partially at least, the congressional plan of reconstruction, especially in view of the fact that they had the vigorous cooperation and support of the democratic party throughout the country.

This is significant. The country was faced with a clear choice. And because of the male suffrage that included black men being able to vote in the South, the Republicans won a solid mandate for Congressional Reconstruction.

Lynch also adds some interesting observations about Reconstruction-era Mississippi politics. He describes an African-American leader, also named Lynch but he does not comment on whether he was related to him:

In reading the paragraph above [from Bowers' book from which he had just quoted] the reader would necessarily infer that on the Alcorn ticket [the Republican ticket for Governor in 1868] there were two or more colored men, whereas in point of fact there was only one, in the person of the Rev. James Lynch, a Methodist preacher of marked ability and of superior intelligence, who was the candidate for the office of Secretary of State. As a pulpit orator and stump speaker it is not an exaggeration to say that James Lynch had few equals and no superiors. In fact, it can be truthfully said of him that he was the Henry Ward Beecher of the colored race. He was not only intelligent and well educated, but his command of the English language was such that he could hold a congregation or audience spellbound for at least two hours at a time with his powerful and convincing eloquence. Democratic orators would rather meet any man in joint debate than James Lynch, for the reason that Lynch would be sure to come out in triumph, and yet he typified, in a large measure, the colored men who were brought into political prominence under the administration of James L. Alcorn.

He also defends the Reconstruction governments of Mississippi against Lost Cause calumnies. He cites Bowers as indicating that most African-Americans elected to the legislature in 1868 "had to make their mark," by which he meant they were too illiterate to even sign their names. Lynch responds:

The assertion that most of the colored members had to make their mark is a cruel slander. They were not college graduates, it is true, but most of them were preachers and leaders of more than ordinary intelligence. In this connection it may not be out of place to call attention to the fact that nearly all of the democratic members of the legislature at that time came from what was known in the state as the Piney-woods or Cow Counties, inhabited chiefly by poor whites, many of whom were illiterate. The white people of wealth and intelligence lived in the wealth-producing counties, in which there were more colored than white people. Those were the counties that sent republicans to the legislature, while the Cow Counties, inhabited chiefly by plebians, or poor whites, were the counties that sent democrats to the legislature. These democrats did not represent the wealth and intelligence of the white people of the state. It is not an exaggeration to say that many of the colored members were superior in every respect to most of the democrats who were then members of the legislature. At any rate a comparison would not be unfavorable to the colored members.

I grew up in the section of Mississippi known as the Piney Woods, so I got a smile out of reading that. But I was a little surprised that the area was a Democratic stronghold right after the Civil War. The slaveowning counties were more heavily along the Mississippi River shore and the Delta in the northwest part of the state. The Piney Woods are in the south-central and south-eastern section of Mississippi. There were plantations with slaves there, but not that many. Western Mississippi was less enthusiastic for secession - there was a vote - than the eastern section of the state where slaveowners were more dominant.

Also, the Free State of Jones, the county where a band of pro-Union Southern white guerrilla fighters were based, is smack in the middle of the Piney Woods. The Free State of Jones is coming to your local theater next year, with Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight and Keri Russel of The Americans as Serena Knight, Knight's first wife.

I'm curious to look more closely at the voting patterns there during Reconstruction. One factor to keep in mind is that "pro-Union" did not translate into "tolerant toward blacks." Most African-Americans in Mississippi prior to the war were slaves. And, as historian has pointed out in some detail, since black people were identified with slavery, hostility toward slavery was often combined with hostility to the presence of black people, slave or free.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 26: Historical transitions in Reconstruction

Every year, I wonder if I'm going to be able to come up with stuff to post every day for a month on the Civil War. Even though it's never happened yet, and people are writing stuff all the time about the Civil War to which I can refer.

This year is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War's end, so if anything, it's even easier than usual. The New York Times has a Disunion blog, which features substantial posts like Gregaory Downs' The Dangerous Myth of Appomattox 04/11/2015. The theme of the column is that severing the memory of the Civil War from that of Reconstruction and its overthrow is problematic. He's referring specifically to the image of the surrender at Appomattox as the effective end of the war. As Downs notes, that's misleading even in the narrow sense, since "fighting continue[d] in pockets for weeks."

Grant himself recognized that he had celebrated the war’s end far too soon. Even as he met Lee, Grant rejected the rebel general’s plea for “peace” and insisted that only politicians, not officers, could end the war. Then Grant skipped the fabled laying-down-of-arms ceremony to plan the Army’s occupation of the South.

To enforce its might over a largely rural population, the Army marched across the South after Appomattox, occupying more than 750 towns and proclaiming emancipation by military order. This little-known occupation by tens of thousands of federal troops remade the South in ways that Washington proclamations alone could not.

And yet as late as 1869, President Grant’s attorney general argued that some rebel states remained in the “grasp of war.” When white Georgia politicians expelled every black member of the State Legislature and began a murderous campaign of intimidation, Congress and Grant extended military rule there until 1871.

This is also a reminder not to make too drastic a distinction between Reconstruction and Redemption. Militant and violent white resistance occurred during Reconstruction, and pockets of democracy and maintenance of elements of African-American rights during Redemption.

But for that matter, even segregation at its worst did not mean the complete disfranchisement of every single black voter in every former Confederate state.

But none of that should become an excuse for rejecting important distinctions in describing historical developments. Reconstruction was an important democratic moment, in both its "Presidential" and "Congressional" versions, the latter also known as Radical Reconstruction. There was a turning point usefully dated to 1876 in which antidemocratic former Confederates went on the offense, with both "nonviolent" coercion and murderous Klan-style terrorism, and effectively suppressed African-American suffrage.

And sometime around 1890, the new system of segregation and white supremacy was well enough established that Jim Crow laws forcing various forms of public performances of racial division proliferated in the South, a condition that endured well into the 1960s.

Downs describes the new white narrative on the Civil War that became dominant for decades this way:

After Grant used the military to put down the Ku Klux Klan in the Carolinas in 1871, Congress and the public lost the will to pay the human and financial costs of Reconstruction.

Once white Southern Democrats overthrew Reconstruction between the 1870s and 1890s, they utilized the Appomattox myth to erase the connection between the popular, neatly concluded Civil War and the continuing battles of Reconstruction. By the 20th century, history textbooks and popular films like “The Birth of a Nation” made the Civil War an honorable conflict among white Americans, and Reconstruction a corrupt racial tyranny of black over white (a judgment since overturned by historians like W. E. B. DuBois and Eric Foner).

While it's true that Northern whites, including the Supreme Court, didn't keep faith with African-American citizens and pro-democracy whites in the former Confederacy, that wasn't all that was going on in American politics.

John Roy Lynch (1847-1939)

Former Reconstruction African-American Congressman John Lynch, who I discussed in the previous post in this series, reminded readers of the Journal of Negro History that economics affected politics, too (Communications 16:1 Jan 1931). Writing about the decline in popularity of the Grant Administration, he writes:

But the one thing that caused a revulsion in popular sentiment was the disastrous financial panic of 1873. It was one of the worst financial panics with which the country had ever been afflicted. Beginning with the failure of J. Cook & Co. in Washington, bank failures were universal throughout the country, which resulted in thousands of people being reduced to poverty. Of course, the party in power gets the credit for prosperity, when we have it, and is blamed for whatever disaster may overtake the country whether it be merited or not. Consequently in the state and congressional elections of 1874 the whole country went as overwhelmingly democratic as it had gone republican two years prior. The democratic party not only carried the national house of representatives, but elected more than two thirds of the members of that body and came very near wiping out the large republican majority in the senate. [my emphasis]

Lynch goes on to describe the practical result in the South:

The probabilities are that the reconstruction policy of the government had very little, if any thing, to do with bringing about this result. The voters simply regarded reconstruction as having been settled and that they could give their attention to other matters; hence, those who voted the republican ticket in 1872 and the democratic ticket in 1874 did so, not as an endorsement of what the democratic party stood for, but as a protest against and a vote of dissatisfaction with, what had transpired under the Grant administration. But let the reasons be what they may, southern democrats accepted the result of that election as a national condemnation and repudiation of the congressional plan of reconstruction and an endorsement by the nation of the declaration contained in the national democratic platform of 1868, which declared the reconstruction acts of congress to be unconstitutional, revolutionary and void. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 25: Early decades of "Redemption"

The end of Reconstruction is conventionally dated to the deal after the 1876 Presidential election that allowed Republican Rutherford Hayes to become President despite losing the popular vote. The Republican concession was to abandon the Reconstruction program in the former Confederate states. The opponents of democracy who overthrew the Reconstruction governments with force, violence and fraud styled themselves as "Redeemers." And the post-Reconstruction disfranchisement of African-American citizens and the establishment of segregation is known as "Redemption."

But major historical transitions are very rarely able to date so cleanly. Reconstruction is no exception. There had been resistance from white elites and many ordinary whites to the black franchise before 1876. But federal discouragement with enforcing the Constitution and Democratic attempts to undermine the elected governments achieved a new success with the campaign of violence against Mississippi Gov. Adelbert Ames, culminating in his impeachment and resignation in 1876. This method of what we now call "regime change" was even called the Mississippi Plan after the state where it was so successful in 1875-6.

The former slave and African-American politician John Roy Lynch (1847–1939) served three terms as a Republican Congressman from Mississippi (1873-1877, 1882-1883). While the end of his first stint in Congress corresponds to the turn of the political tide in favor of the Redeemers, the second came after the general victory of Redemption. That doesn't mean that the Redeemers were happy to have an African-American Congressman. It represents the efforts of black voters in the Congressional district around Natchez to hold on to their rights even in the face of federal abandonment and Democratic power in Mississippi.

Lynch published a collection of essays title The Facts of Reconstruction in 1913, which was republished in 1970 in an edition featuring an introduction by historian William Harris. Harris writes:

When Lynch was selected for Congress by Negro delegates to the Sixth Congressional District convention, the struggle between the black and white factions in Natchez was brought into the open, and its reverberations threatened to disrupt the Republican party throughout the river counties. The factions assumed the names of "Warm Spring Indians" (blacks) and "Modocs" (whites), but such colorful appellations had no effect on the outcome of the dispute. Complete victory for the Warm Spring Indians came when Senator Ames, who naively envisioned himself in the role of mediator, placed the influence of his patronage at the disposal of Congressman-elect Lynch. The growth of black authority in the river counties, however, was checked in 1875 with the so-called redemption of Mississippi from Radical rule. But in Natchez Lynch and his followers remained until the 1890's a political influence to be reckoned with by the Democratic Conservatives. [my emphasis]

The use by both factions of Indian nicknames is also an interesting twist on race relations in Mississippi at the time.

Dennis Mitchell in A New History of Mississippi (2014) also explains:

Too often the period of Redemption (1876-1903) has been misunderstood as a return to absolute white control; instead, historians have come to view these years as a contentious time when Republicans continued to share power and a variety of political parties challenged the Bourbons, as the Democratic elite became known, for control of state and local government. Intertwined with the political conflict, a racially segregated society emerged with customs designed to remind black Mississippians daily of their status as an inferior caste. (p. 217)

And he continues to describe how the neo-Confederate myth of the Lost Cause as well as the white racist version of the Christian religion functioned as part of that process:

White Mississippians bolstered their new political and social system with a civic religion that held the "War Between the States" to have been a holy crusade fought by saintly men defending a righteous cause. J. William Jones, Virginian prophet of the creed, routinely invoked the secular saints Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson along with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in his public prayers. By the end of this period, white Mississippians had incorporated segregation into their worldview based on evangelical religion and deemed a violation of the informal segregation code a sin. On the other hand, maintaining white control justified lying, theft of ballot boxes, stuffing them if necessary, or violence against political opponents when required. The political conflict and growth of a new social system took place in a declining cotton economy in which furnishing merchants used legislature-provided lien laws to exploit and essentially enslave a growing sharecropping population whose economic desperation grew with the fall of cotton prices. [my emphasis]

It's fascinating to me to think that someone who turned 19 the year the the Civil War ended lived to see the second Administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Harris quotes from an essay that Lynch wrote in 1929, "The Republican Party South," in which he warns the new President Herbert Hoover that he should "not flatter himself with the belief that because he carried several southern states that he can keep those states in the republican column by making a trade with southern democrats at the expense of the fundamental principles and doctrines for which the republican party has heretofore stood."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 24: the neuroses of segregation

Dennis Mitchell in his A New History of Mississippi (2014) writes about the post-Reconstruction segregation system and its often weird complexities.

He describes this version of what Chauncey DeVega calls the White Gaze, "Whites treated blacks as unclean in the same way a Brahmin understood an untouchable." (p. 282)

Segregation involved customs and rituals that included what certainly qualify in some way as collective neurotic symptoms. In the following passage, he uses the term "colored people" as it was employed by segregationists, a polite term for African-Americans:

According to racial customs, a white Mississippian refused to call a colored person by his or her last name, addressing them by their first name or as "boy" - never "man." A black person, on the other hand, had to use a title of respect when speaking to any white. Boss, Captain, Mam, or Miss and the child's first name for a white child were acceptable. A white man never removed his hat or touched it on the street for a black woman, but he always made those signs of deference to a white woman. Blacks did not sit in the presence of whites and always removed any headgear when a white man entered their vicinity. If whites approached blacks on a sidewalk, blacks had to step into the street for the whites to pass. A black driver dared not pass a white driver on any road. In some towns, blacks could not drive on certain streets- Capitol Street in Jackson, for example. Blacks never approached the front door of a white residence because they could only use the back door. Some whites adopted the habit of locking the back door when they were out, but not the front so strong was their confidence that even a black thief would not enter by the front door. (p. 281) [my emphasis]

Black citizens voting in New Orleans, 1867

But the neurotic symptoms, ugly and harmful as they were in themselves, shouldn't be confused with political disease itself. The disease was the success of the anti-Reconstruction "Redeemer" project to deprive African-Americans of their rights as citizens. In the 1977 of the famous history textbook by Samuel Eliot Morrison, Henry Steele Commager and William Leuchtenburg, A Concise History of the American Republic, the authors write:

The end of Reconstruction and the nullification of the Enforcement Acts exiled the Southern Negro to a kind of no-man's land halfway between slavery and freedom. No longer a slave, he was not yet free. He was tied to the soil by the sharecrop and crop-lien systems, excluded from most with 'separate' accommodations that were rarely 'equal.' He was expected not only to accept a position of social inferiority without protest, but to rejoice in it by playing the role of 'Uncle Tom.' At first gradually, then with dramatic speed, he was rendered politically impotent: 'grandfather' clauses, literacy tests , poll taxes, and - where these failed - naked intimidation, deprived him of the vote. (pp. 358-9) [my emphasis]

This is why the current Republican Party's nationwide push for voter suppression laws and dirty tricks to the same end are such a nightmare for anyone who believes in democracy.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 19: a sit-in case and fatuous but sadly durable arguments for segregation

In a column of 09/30/1963, "Judicial Sustenance for the Southern Racist," I.F. Stone commented on the landmark civil rights case Bell v. Maryland. His column is included in the collection In a Time of Torment (1967).

Kali Borkoski summarizes the case in Bell v. Maryland: Kenneth Mack challenges three common views SCOTUSblog 10/26/2013:

In 1960, when Bell was sixteen, he and eleven other African-American high school students participated in a sit-in at Hooper’s Restaurant in Baltimore. When they arrived, the hostess apologized that the establishment “hadn’t integrated yet,” and she asked them to leave. After they refused, the restaurant had them arrested for trespassing. Three years later, the case had made it way to the Supreme Court, which vacated the judgment against the students and remanded the case for further consideration in light of the “public accommodation laws” that Maryland had passed since the students’ arrest. Those laws made it illegal for privately owned establishments to discriminate on the basis of race. The state’s highest court, the Maryland Court of Appeals, eventually reversed the students’ convictions. After attending college and Harvard Law School (where his case was on on the syllabus), Bell went on to serve on that very same court alongside his defense lawyer, the prosecutor who tried him, and several judges who were involved in his case.

The title of Stone's column may seem incongruous for a comment on a case which now looks like it had a Happy Ending.

But what Stone particularly criticizes is the dissent written by Justice Hugo Black and joined by Justices John Harlan II and Byron White. Black had established a reputation as very liberal Justice, despite his one-time membership in the Alabama Ku Klux Klan before he was appointed to the Court. Stone worried about "the bigots who will now say, 'Why even Black....'." Or, in our present version, even-the-liberal-Hugo-Black ...

Stone writes, "The whole emotional coloration of the Black dissent is on the side of the aggrieved white Southerner, not his Negro victim."

The same observation could be made today about almost any commentary today on a race-related issue on FOX News or a Rush Limbaugh broadcast or any of its many cousins on Republican hate radio.

Stone explains that the Court sent the case back to the State of Maryland and declined to decide the constitutionality of the state statute that was involved. Stone agreed that the latter was appropriate judicial restraint in that particular moment "when Congress is in the final stage of passing the first public accommodations law since the Civil Rights Act of 1875." A constitutional ruling on the Maryland statute might have complicated the high-priority political decision in which Congress was involved at the moment.

After several paragraphs recognizing the reasons for restraint, Black proceeds in the dissent to comment on the constitutionality of the statute that allowed the police to arrest the black students for trespassing for refusing to leave a segregated public restaurant. Black was willing to accept the fatuous argument of the segregationists in this case that private property rights overruled the freedom of the black students to be served in a public restaurant:

... it is hard to take seriously a contention that petitioners were not fully aware, before they ever entered the restaurant, that it was the restaurant owner's firmly established policy and practice not to serve Negroes. The whole purpose of the "sit-in" was to protest that policy. (2) Be that as it may, the Court of Appeals of Maryland held that "the statutory references to 'entry upon or crossing over,' cover the case of remaining upon land after notice to leave," and the trial court found, with very strong evidentiary support, that after unequivocal notice to petitioners that they would not be seated or served they "persisted in their demands and, brushing by the hostess, took seats at various tables on the main floor and at the counter in the basement." We are unable to say that holding this conduct barred by the Maryland statute was an unreasonable interpretation of the statute or one which could have deceived or even surprised petitioners or others who wanted to understand and obey it. It would certainly be stretching the rule against ambiguous statutes very far indeed to hold that the statutory language misled these petitioners as to the Act's meaning, in the face of evidence showing a prior series of demonstrations by Negroes, including some of petitioners, and in view of the fact that the group which included petitioners came prepared to picket Hooper and actually courted arrest, the better to protest his refusal to serve colored people.

Short version: they knew the restaurant was segregated, so they should have just stayed out and not worried about this nonsense of equal rights and all!

Black's dissent also sidesteps the role of the State of Maryland in enforcing segregation in order to sidestep the 14th Amendment's requirement for equal protection of the laws:

The Amendment does not forbid a State to prosecute for crimes committed against a person or his property, however prejudiced or narrow the victim's views may be. Nor can whatever prejudice and bigotry the victim of a crime may have be automatically attributed to the State that prosecutes. Such a doctrine would not only be based on a fiction; it would also severely handicap a State's efforts to maintain a peaceful and orderly society. Our society has put its trust in a system of criminal laws to punish lawless conduct. To avert personal feuds and violent brawls it has led its people to believe and expect that wrongs against them will be vindicated in the courts. Instead of attempting to take the law into their own hands, people have been taught to call for police protection to protect their rights wherever possible. It would betray our whole plan for a tranquil and orderly society to say that a citizen, because of his personal prejudices, habits, attitudes, or beliefs, is cast outside the law's protection and cannot call for the aid of officers sworn to uphold the law and preserve the peace. The worst citizen no less than the best is entitled to equal protection of the laws of his State and of his Nation. None of our past cases justifies reading the Fourteenth Amendment in a way that might well penalize citizens who are law-abiding enough to call upon the law and its officers for protection instead of using their own physical strength or dangerous weapons to preserve their rights. [my emphasis]

This is a remarkably blunt defense of the segregationist view in which the world is seen exclusively from what Chauncey DeVega calls the White Gaze. This comment of his could have been directed against Black's dissent (The White Gaze Kills (Again) ... WARN 11/07/2013):

Full citizenship involves the presumption that one belongs to a political community. By virtue of that fact, citizenship also means that a person is entitled to safety and security in their person without qualification, exception, or justification. Full citizenship is not contingent or precarious.

African-Americans are not allowed such protections by the White Gaze. They are viewed as guilty until proven innocent, a criminal Other who is a priori categorized as “suspicious” and “dangerous”. While formal racism and Jim and Jane Crow were shattered and defeated by the Black Freedom Struggle, this ugly cloud continues to hover over the United States, some 400 years after the first black slaves were brought to the country.

Consequently, black Americans are not really allowed to seek help from white people; the Parable of the Good Samaritan does not apply to people of color as viewed through the twin lenses of Whiteness and the White Gaze. The black and brown Other is not allowed the luxury and privilege of knowing that if they seek help when in distress—either from the police, or white folks, more generally—that such pleadings and requests will be met with a “How can I help you? Are you in trouble?” [my emphasis]

The white authorities in segregated states could be counted on to enforced the unconstitutional segregation laws and practices. Black citizens could not count on the law to enforce their equal rights as citizens even on something as simple as restaurant service. Black, Harlan and White knew this, of course. But the White Gaze discounted it all to insignificance in this dissent.

Stone in 1964 also observed:

The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were intended to free the Negro from slavery and give him first class citizenship. The Southern states sought to circumvent them first by the Black Codes and then by Jim Crowism. In this they were aided by Supreme Court decisions which read the 14th amendment so narrowly as to take the heart out of the first Civil Rights Act. Their spirit lives on in the Black-Harlan-White dissent. But the records of these cases is full of testimony that restaurant and hotel owners refuse service to Negroes not because of their own prejudices but because they fear those "local customs" the Southern states foster. [my emphasis]

Black also states in the dissent, "But the Fourteenth Amendment of itself does not compel either a black man or a white man running his own private business to trade with anyone else against his will." Stone rightly notes of that comment:

It is the standard Southern answer to say, as the dissenters do, that "the 14th Amendment of itself does not compel either a black man or a white man running his own private business to trade with anyone against his will." This is a tissue of invidious misstatement. The 14th Amendment can and should be read as part of the public policy of this country, which is against racial discrimination. What a man does in his "private business" may be his own affair. But where he has a business which opens its doors to all comers then he cannot deny entrance or service to some solely because of their race. When he does so, he cannot under the 14th Amendment have state support in the shape of police and judicial action to enforce the discrimination via "criminal trespass." Nor can states which have done all they could to maintain the Negro in subjection then come into court and claim that they are merely enforcing property rights. This was the argument of the Solicitor General and of counsel for the sit-in demonstrators. [my emphasis]

The segregationist subculture never gave up some ideas and arguments and excuses. And it seems now with every day that passes they become more deeply ingrained as the positions of today's Republican Party.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 5: God and white supremacy

Ian Millhiser writes about When ‘Religious Liberty’ Was Used To Justify Racism Instead Of Homophobia Think Progress 02/26/2014. This has new immediate relevance with the right's new reliance on "religious freedom" pitches to justify discrimination. He talks about Mississippi's notoriously racist Senator Theodore Bilbo (1877–1947):

For Senator Bilbo, however, racism was more that just an ideology, it was a sincerely held religious belief. In a book entitled Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, Bilbo wrote that “[p]urity of race is a gift of God . . . . And God, in his infinite wisdom, has so ordained it that when man destroys his racial purity, it can never be redeemed.” Allowing “the blood of the races [to] mix,” according to Bilbo, was a direct attack on the “Divine plan of God.” There “is every reason to believe that miscengenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance to the will of God.”

Bilbo was one of the South’s most colorful racists, but he was hardly alone in his beliefs. As early as 1867, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld segregated railway cars on the grounds that “[t]he natural law which forbids [racial intermarriage] and that social amalgamation which leads to a corruption of races, is as clearly divine as that which imparted to [the races] different natures.” This same rationale was later adopted by state supreme courts in Alabama, Indiana and Virginia to justify bans on interracial marriage, and by justices in Kentucky to support residential segregation and segregated colleges.

In 1901, Georgia Gov. Allen Candler defended unequal public schooling for African Americans on the grounds that “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.” After the Supreme Court ordered public schools integrated in Brown v. Board of Education, many segregationists cited their own faith as justification for official racism. Ross Barnett won Mississippi’s governorship in a landslide in 1960 after claiming that “the good Lord was the original segregationist.” Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia relied on passages from Genesis, Leviticus and Matthew when he spoke out against the civil rights law banning employment discrimination and whites-only lunch counters on the Senate floor.

Citing Millhiser's post, Joan Walsh writes that "the history of pro-slavery and anti-integration racists using the Bible to justify their racism [was] often in terms eerily similar to those used to defend 'religious freedom' laws today." (Indiana’s Mike Pence is starting to look like Lester Maddox — without the spine Salon 03/30/2015).

It's always good to see democracy score a win against segregationism

From Bill Morlin, Nevada’s speaker-designate declines position after reports of controversial views surface Hatewatch 11/24/20147:

The speaker-designate of Nevada’s State Assembly is declining the position just days after reports surfaced detailing his controversial views on blacks, women, gays, Israel and fellow Republicans.

The views of Republican legislator Ira Hansen – considered racist by many – received extensive attention in Nevada and elsewhere, including the Washington Post, after they were first reported Thursday by Dennis Myers, a columnist for the Reno News & Review.

Good. I'm glad to see it.

The Chait-Coates controversy on white racism

I want to provide links here to installments in the Chait-Coates discussion of the last few weeks, including some of the various comments from other on it. Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine and Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic discussed various aspects of white racism as it currently manifests in the United States.

First, let me mention a piece from today by Coates, This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist The Atlantic 05/01/2014, in which he provides a well-nuanced look at how the justified disapproval of crass racists like Massa Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling can co-exist with widespread de facto racial discrimination against African-Americans. Noting the similarity of Massa Cliven's expressed beliefs with those of prominent and respectable conservatives, he observes:

But style is the hero. Cliven Bundy is old, white, and male. He likes to wave an American flag while spurning the American government and pals around with the militia movement. He does not so much use the word "Negro" — which would be bad enough — but "nigra," in the manner of villain from Mississippi Burning or A Time to Kill. In short, Cliven Bundy looks, and sounds, much like what white people take racism to be.

The problem with Cliven Bundy isn't that he is a racist but that he is an oafish racist. He invokes the crudest stereotypes, like cotton picking. This makes white people feel bad. The elegant racist knows how to injure non-white people while never summoning the specter of white guilt. Elegant racism requires plausible deniability, as when Reagan just happened to stumble into the Neshoba County fair and mention state's rights. Oafish racism leaves no escape hatch, as when Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond's singularly segregationist candidacy.

The articles I flagged on the Chait-Coates controversy include the following:

• Coates, The Secret Lives of Inner-City Black Males The Atlantic 03/18/2014
• Chait, Barack Obama, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Poverty, and Culture New York 03/19/2014
• Coates, Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind 03/21/2014
• Chait, Barack Obama vs. the Culture of Poverty New York 03/28/2014
• Coates, Other People's Pathologies The Atlantic 03/30/2014
• Tressie McMillan Cottom, A Nasty Piece of Cornbread: Chait, Coates, and White Progressivism Tressiemc 03/30/3014
• Andy Seal, Historians and the F-Word US Intellectual History Blog 04/04/2014
• Chait, The Color of His Presidency New York 04/06/2014
• Joan Walsh, Jonathan Chait’s epic race fail: How a story about racism and Obama goes horribly wrong Salon 04/07/2014
• Chauncey DeVega, Politics is Professional Wrestling: New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait Reveals White Racist Conservatives Are Now 'Victims' of Anti-Racism's 'Terrifying Power' in the Age of Obama WARN 04/07/2014
• Jamelle Bouie, Color Blind Slate 04/07/2014
• Chauncey DeVega, An Additional Thought on Jonathan Chait's Essay 'The Color of His Presidency': Why Are White Liberals So Afraid to Call Republicans Racist? WARN 04/08/2014
• Chauncey DeVega, Jonathan Chait's Unintentional Teachable Moment: 10 Lessons About White Supremacy in the Age of Obama WARN 04/10/2014
• Andy Seal, Fatalism and the Age of Fracture US Intellectual History Blog 04/11/2014
• Chauncey DeVega, Did You See Jonathan Chait's Letdown of an Interview About Conservative Racism and White Victimology on MSNBC? 04/11/2014
• Elias Isquith, Objectively bad: Ezra Klein, Nate Silver, Jonathan Chait and return of the "view from nowhere" Salon 04/12/2014
• Chauncey DeVega, Jonathan Chait Versus the Melissa Harris-Perry Show: An Intellectual Rope-A-Dope? Who do You Think Won? 04/13/2014
• Armando, Jonathan Chait's new form of hippie-punching: Playing the 'GOP are not racists' card Daily Kos 04/13/2014
• Chait, Is the Rising Democratic Majority Doomed? New York 04/23/2014

Tags: white racism, segregation

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 30: Talking about white racism

It turned out that April provided a rich source of material for Confederate "Heritage" Month posts! The Chait-Coates controversy. Defense of voting rights. Massa Cliven Bundy and his militia buddies. The Roberts Court's Schuette decision. And, one that I haven't even discussed, NBA commissioner Donald Sterling. (Stanely May, NBA bans Donald Sterling for life, asks Board of Governors to force sale of Clippers SI Wire 04/29/2014; L.A. Clippers Owner to GF: Don't Bring Black People to My Games ... Including Magic Johnson TMZ Sports 04/25/2014)

There was some good news at the end of the month on the voting rights front: Alana Semuels, Federal judge strikes down Wisconsin voter ID law Federal judge strikes down Wisconsin voter ID law Los Angeles Times 04/29/2014.

Dahlia Lithwick in a column on Schuette discusses something on which I've focused this year, What We Talk About When We Talk About Talking About Race Slate:

The starting point for the most recent chapter of this knotty and crucial conversation is Chief Justice John Roberts’ famous getting-past-race language in a 2007 case about racial remedies and school busing, in which he wrote that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Roberts used that turn of phrase to both highlight his own philosophy that the Constitution must be color blind, and also to flick at the proposition that the time for overtly racial remedies to historical problems must be put behind us.

Told, in effect, that race has no place in modern constitutional discourse despite the central role it has played in her own life, Justice Sotomayor pushes back on that formulation. Her dissent in Schuette starts from the implicit proposition that Roberts was wrong to close the door in 2007, and is wrong to do so today: "In my colleagues’ view,” she writes, "examining the racial impact of legislation only perpetuates racial discrimination. This refusal to accept the stark reality that race matters is regrettable." Then she goes on to poke at Roberts with a sharp stick: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination."

This language of white-racism-denial coming from the Supreme Court and embodied in Court decisions has a particularly strong influence on the way race and racism are discussed in public discourse. And therefore talking about the realities of institutional racism will require continually countering the redefinitions and denials that advocates of segregation use to avoid that recognition.

Jamelle Bouie talks about the importance of recognizing the institutional nature of white racism in It Doesn't Matter That Donald Sterling Is a Racist Slate 04/28/2014. His argument relating to Sterling could be stronger, but the headline is misleading; he isn't dismissing Sterling's attitudes, he's pointing out how it has been manifested for years in concrete and substantial ways, not just in his obnoxious words that brought his problems to a head the last few days:

Donald Sterling settled for an undisclosed sum in 2005 - paying $5 million in plaintiff legal fees — but faced renewed scrutiny in 2006, following federal civil rights charges. According to the Justice Department, Sterling, his wife, and his three companies engaged in housing discrimination by refusing to rent to blacks and "creating, maintaining, and perpetuating an environment that is hostile to non-Korean tenants" at their properties. Again, Sterling settled. He paid $2.65 million to a fund for people harmed by his discriminatory practices — a record sum in a federal housing suit—as well as $100,000 to the government.

These were huge offenses — entrenchments of disadvantage in a city segmented by past bias. After all, Los Angeles was heavily redlined throughout the 20th century, with blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, and other minorities blocked from mortgage loans and relegated to the least desirable parts of the city.

But, despite the magnitude of the offenses and the size of the settlements, there was no outrage. Sterling caused actual harm to dozens of families, and the response was near silence. And it's in that contrast that we can clearly see our public hypocrisy on racism.

Bouie's piece uses the plural pronouns rather vaguely in that piece. What he calls "our public hypocrisy on racism" is a necessary element of the kind of substantive hypocrisy that is integral to institutional white racism in America. The Rand Pauls of the country want racism defined down to only expressions of overt biological racial supremacy and to bad manners. Massive, systematic discrimination in housing and mortgage lending, they don't want to count. And that is the direction that the Roberts Court has gone a long way toward making authoritative Constitutional law.

And the blog's old friend, Bro. Wade "Sword-of-Vengeance" Burleson weighed in on the Sterling matter to do, well, what Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby does so much: criticize them mean libruls! (Donald Sterling, Hate, and the Hypocrisy of Liberals Istoria Ministries 04/29/2014)

The Young Turks discuss some of the issues on which Bouie's article focuses, Just HOW Racist is LA Clippers' Owner Donald Sterling? Uh, VERY. (Some profanity used) 04/28/2014:

And the blog's old friend Bro. Wade "Sword-of-Vengeance" Burleson has also weighed in on the Sterling affair to complain about, well, the same thing Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby gripes about all the time: how mean them thar libruls are! (Donald Sterling, Hate, and the Hypocrisy of Liberals Istoria Ministries 04/29/2014)

"Liberals have become the new racists," writes Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance. And that is pretty much the point of his post. In the Republican Bizarro-world, opposing racism is the real racism. Just like Southern segregationists in 1964 arguing that the Civil Right Act and later the Voting Rights Act were racist against white people. The old traditions are still alive!

It's worth noting that Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance even rewrites Sterling's notorious recent comments to have him criticizing Christianity instead of black people. And he invites his readers to consider that if Sterling had said that, he wouldn't have suffered any consequences because the real problem, you see, is persecution of Christians in America. It's kind of crazy, but Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance writes like a Bircher, so that's par for the course. It is a good example of redefining the problem of white racism into its opposite, particularly if you can expect your audience to understand Christians being persecuted as white people being persecuted.

The soul of Jefferson Davis goes marching on!

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, donald sterling, white racism, segregation

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 29: the Roberts Court vs. voting rights

This is a PBS Newshour report on the Roberts Court ruling last year in favor of segregationist state voter-suppression laws. Oddly, it doesn't mention the name of the decision, Shelby County (June 2013).

Was the Supreme Court ruling a setback for voting rights? 04/21/2014:

The video is a reminder of what a throwback to pre-1965 days the Shelby County decision is. It features a smug, smarmy Southern white legislator reassuring us that voter-suppression laws are just reassuring little adjustments, certainly not meant to prevent The Negro from voting.

This is an issue for which the standard, this-side-says-the-other-side says reporting is ill-suited. For instance, this is the closing exchange, with Gwen Ifill posing a question to good-ole-boy North Carolina legislator David Lewis, whose homepage as of now opens up with a banner that says, "Help Stop NC Voter Fraud" - "voter fraud" being the segregationists current favorite slogan to justify voter-suppression laws:

GWEN IFILL: But let me ask you this.

Is it fixing a problem — that you have evidence that fixed a problem that existed?

DAVID LEWIS: Well, we definitely have evidence, as I said, that folks that — some folks that registered to vote on the same day were never able to be verified.

We don’t know if they were actually eligible to vote or not. We think it does make sense to present a photo I.D., that the photo matches the name to say who you say you are. The professor referenced student I.D.s Doesn't it not make sense that if are you going attest, as the constitution of North Carolina calls for, that you are a resident of the state, that you would have taken time to have gone to the DMV and to get your driver's license or to get your non-operator's license, if this is truly your home, if this is the home in which are you going to exercise that precious right to vote, certainly being able to obtain an I.D. at no direct cost to you can’t be considered an impediment to voting.

GWEN IFILL: Well, this sounds like this is an issue that the administration is certainly not going to give up on.

And we’re going to — the Supreme Court may have just started this argument.

Kareem Crayton from the University of North Carolina and David Lewis with the North Carolina House of Representatives, thank you very much.

In fact, in-person voter fraud is a virtually non-existent problem. But Ifill instead let Lewis get away with answering her question with hypotheticals. One would think that the leading Quality TV news program could do a little research on alleged voter fraud in North Carolina to challenge a clearly evasive answer like that.

Dana Liebelson describes some of the actual results of the Shelby County decision in The Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act. What Happened Next in These 8 States Will Not Shock You. Mother Jones 04/08/2014:

Before the Shelby County v. Holder decision came down on June 25, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required federal review of new voting rules in 15 states, most of them in the South. (In a few of these states, only specific counties or townships were covered.) Chief Justice John Roberts voted to gut the Voting Rights Act on the basis that "our country has changed," and that blanket federal protection wasn't needed to stop discrimination. But the country hasn't changed as much as he may think.

We looked at how many of these 15 states passed or implemented voting restrictions after Section 5 was invalidated, compared to the states that were not covered by the law. (We defined "voting restriction" as passing or implementing a voter ID law, cutting voting hours, purging voter rolls, or ending same-day registration. Advocates criticize these kinds of laws for discriminating against low-income voters, young people, and minorities, who tend to vote for Democrats.) We found that 8 of the 15 states, or 53 percent, passed or implemented voting restrictions since June 25, compared to 3 of 35 states that were not covered under Section 5—or less than 9 percent. Additionally, a number of states not covered by the Voting Rights Act actually expanded voting rights in the same time period.

She also manages to tell us more about what North Carolina has done since Shelby County that Gwen Ifill and her guests did: "About one month after the Shelby decision, Republicans in North Carolina pushed through a package of extreme voting restrictions, including ending same-day registration, shortening early voting by a week, requiring photo ID, and ending a program that encourages high schoolers to sign up to vote when they turn 18."

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, white racism, segregation