Race in America Should we work to reconcile ethnicity with citizenship, or the other way around? In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. offered us a choice: "chaos or community." Which are we choosing?
Slavery as History
To understand the political role of slavery in American history, you have to think of it in terms of its meaning to two groups of white people. To do that does not ignore the humanity of the slaves, or the fact that slavery was the central aspect of a slave's life. But it does set it aside for the duration of the argument
Northern Racism
De Tocqueville observed that "race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known"
Lincoln and Race
"You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence."
Mulattoes and Southern Culture
As a legal or census definition, "mulatto" meant not just the product of a union of a white parent and a black one, but also of the union of a black and a mulatto.
A Northern Lynching
Pennsylvania had three lynchings in the years when that was common practice in America. In Coatesville, Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1911, a black man named Zack Walker was burned alive for killing a white steel mill cop
The York, Pa., Race Riots of 1969
Whites in York still blame it on "outside people coming in stirring up the neighbors." A York College professor put it like this: "It's not simply that people were bigoted. Many whites just didn't see race issues as their problem. Probably most York citizens were in favor of integration, but they saw it as a Southern problem"
Southern Populists
"You are made to hate each other," he said, addressing both races, "because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars you both."
New South
Non-Southerners often gloss right over the fact that slavery, racism, and segregation were national experiences. Nothing done outside the South really counts as racism to them since, well, it wasn't the South
Flag dispute
From 1879 to 1956, the Georgia state flag was essentially the "Stars and Bars," the original national flag of the CSA government, with (after 1902) the Georgia seal off to one side. If you were going to link any state flag with slavery, that would be the one
New Lost Cause
A native-born Southern white woman worked with native-born Southerners, black and white, with a shared sense of decency, to accomplishing the work of desegregation in Mississippi. Where is this side of the story in the textbooks or the PBS specials?
Jonathan Kozol
"In this [school] district, there are 11,000 elementary school children. Of those 11,000 children, last year, exactly 22 were white. ... That is a segregation rate of 99.8 percent. So two-tenths of 1 percent marks the difference between legally enforced apartheid in the South 50 years ago, and socially and economically enforced apartheid in New York today"
Bibliography
A listing of some of the published sources consulted
| 2002 - Slavery in the North - Slave and Free in Pennsylvania - Causes of the Civil War - The Confederate War - The War in the North |
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