OMG— I didn’t know about that rhyme and now I can’t shake it. How horrible. As someone who grew in Buffalo a few miles from that recent massacre and now lives in Texas, where yesterday’s massacre occurred, though in Houston where the NRA conference starts Friday, I feel like these atrocities are not escapable. My children’s last day of school is to tomorrow and I’m hoping to make it through. They don’t even have an armed guard protecting their school like the one in Uvalde had that got in a shootout with assailant (who shot a second one that came to defend).
Your aunt sounds like she is a kook aid drinker (sorry, kool aid, spell check problems) and certainly not respectful to the humanity of your wife and child. But I must slightly disagree as I think they (Republican white-wingers) are very aware of what they are doing. They were “solid south” democrats before becoming Republicans in 1965, and expressed the same open, deliberate ideology back then. Democrat Senator Butler (actually in July just before his election of that year 1876) sue the local government on behalf two white farmers because black federal soldiers (Coast Guard) were “blocking their path” on Main Street in a small South Carolina town. Butler demanded the soldiers turn over their guns. They did not. The white illegal militia formed all around them from neighboring towns, shot two dead (including the black marshall), surrounded the federal armory, made all the black soldiers surrender, took five of those prisoners and then shot them. He was propelled to the Senate.
The Democratic Party started Jim Crow through that violence (the Hamburg and the Ellenton massacres), with the Northern Democrats complicit in caucusing with them for 89 years. In 1901 Democrat Senator TIllman said on the Senate floor, “We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern the white man, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man.” Democrat President Wilson, who segregated the government, wrote in his books that he was clearly of this same position as Mr. TIllman. One quote taken from his first book, was used when he was president in the film “Birth of a Nation”, described Butler’s approved use of force: “The policy of the [Lincoln Republican] leaders wrought…a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South in the determination to ‘“put the white South under the heel of the black South.’” The white men [Southern white militia “patriots” who killed the federal black guard, one a black sheriff, and one black elected state senator] were rouse by mere instinct of self-preservation…until at last there had spring into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect southern country.” Pretty much as racist as you get in backing the slaughter of federal troops by white militia using extrajudicial violence to murder blacks. That was 1915.
Senator Strom Thurmond who said, “There's not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation,” wrote first radical of the “Southern Manifesto” in 1956, in response to Brown v. Board of education decision to desegregate schools that had said they will not recognize the Supreme Court decision. Although the tamped down the language in the final draft, 87 bigoted Democrat congressmen and Senators, and 2 bigoted republicans signed it. The manifesto said the Supreme Court was in “clear abuse of judical power and they promised to use “all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution.” They vowed “to prevent the use of force in its implementation” [meaning to stop US national guards from forcing desegregation of the Brown decision]. Then he and all his bigoted “Solid South” Democrats quit and joined the Republicans, taking their “unique” violent brand of racism with them.
This is not some fumbling strategy but an awareness of the “heritage” they’ve long been “defending” and articulating at the highest levels of government. At least the Klan March 1926 didn’t end in a storming of the Capitol (then again, they already believed they were controlling it and just showing solidarity to maintain it).
Good luck with your aunt and thanks for telling us about her.
