Hardcore Black Democracy Fighters

Equality Tolerance is Democracy’s Definition

Wisconsin was born divided over the race issue and it remains so. [wisconsinhistory.org picture from article on suffrage in the state by Christy Clark-Pujara, 2017]

Democracy was always a struggle blacks engaged in since first getting the vote in North Carolina by default in 1667. Slavery was an evolutionary experience of downward degradation. What started off as “good” slavery — where good means “not cruel” but is still slavery — turned nastier when major political earthquakes kicked up, like rebellions. But in the Carolinas, freedmen struggled and continued to struggle harder as whites got crueler.

Freedom was never a given they learned. Any “freeholder” could vote, and the business model of Britain until the 1676 Bacon’s rebellion was one of contract worker with five-year terms of employment. After that, re-sign or go free. Hence decency started before nastiness spread by converting temporary adventure workers to permanent titled forced workers.

When “things got worse” when indentured servitude ended and Contracted Negroes were converted to permanent enslaved and some of contracted whites became their overlords, freemen or freed blacks were trapped in the middle, forced to struggle to maintain their position, their land, their voice.

White backlash because “harder” slower, and few freed blacks though there was, they became a potent symbol of civic engagements for the ever-growing number of…