I believe that the violent, angry white Southerners after losing the Civil War fought back for the next 35 years against black Americans to repress their voice and their vote by changing their southern state constitutions to be exclude black Americans and by lynchings and killing black Americans to silence them, to scare them away from the polls. The Northerners who “won” could not control this violent whiter race without re-invading and forcing themselves on the rabid screaming white South. The Northerners fell morally silent, making money and expanding America to the West coast. They found their 90 year campaign of abolition and respect and dignity for all humanity had been a failure. They could not change the basic character and political structure of a violent autocratic white people who never had American values embedded in inalienable rights. They feel into silent complicity, allowing the whiters in the South to continue their one party run “country,” a de facto Confederacy.
Then I recently picked up a copy of the 1855 book “Colored Patriots of the Revolution” written by Mr. Nell, a black historian who should be famous, instead of silenced. The book chronicles the hundreds and hundreds of black Americans who fought in the Revolution for America. Even mentions colored women’s involvement, like Dororthee, a black woman who fought with guns on the side of white Northerners. A white man called for two regiments of black solders, and they formed two of both black and white Americans. After the war the government gave pensions to all who fought in the Revolutionary War up North, whites or black Americans. The book includes lengthy descriptions of black Americans written by whites profiling the black Americans dignity and respect, detailing and recognizing their equal humanity. There are descriptions of many industrious and successful freed black Americans who owned hundred acre farms, built ships, started schools, won their freedom by taking their master to court, the first being Elizabeth Freeman in 1781, followed quickly by a black man who sued as well and won based on the new constitutional right of inalienable rights.
Northern states abolished slavery on a state by state basis until they reached the (metaphoric) Mason Dixon line. There they stopped. The resistance became so great to abolish slavery a war broke out, and afterwards the Confederate losers kept fighting and fighting to get rid of the black American “threat” until the last elected black congressman left congress in 1901 and black Americans in the South lost all their vote. In 1960 almost no black Americans voted for JFK in the South because some states only allowed 1 to 3 percent of black Americans to vote, and because JFK was a member of the anti-civil rights party and all black American politicians voted into office before 1901 were Republicans, the party of civil rights.
That’s changed of course. Amnesia has struck America, trauma inflicted by the violent white southern race. Their disease of systemic intolerance has spread across America now, polluting our narrative of equality that was started in the North by died a violent death in the Civil War. Something was killed in that war: the memory of the moral fight for abolition that started it, the lived equality that Northern whites and freed blacks struggled to achieve. And now we must suffer under beliefs of some unified “white race,” one that is no more than an amoral southern white beast, a ravaging animal that was never killed, an alpha male race of raging supremacists.