White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

by Carol Anderson

Though the killing was horrific enough—forty-one bullets were fired, nineteen of which hit their target—what left me truly stunned was the clinical, antiseptic policy rationale espoused by New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. On the news show Nightline, the mayor, virtually ignoring Diallo’s death, glibly and confidently spouted one statistic after the next to demonstrate how the NYPD was the “most restrained and best behaved police department you could imagine.” He touted policies that had reduced crime in New York and dismissed African Americans’ concerns about racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and police brutality as unfounded.

What was really at work here was white rage. With so much attention focused on the flames, everyone had ignored the logs, the kindling.

White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies.

It’s not the Klan. White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.

The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up. A formidable array of policy assaults and legal contortions has consistently punished black resilience, black resolve.

The truth is that the hard-fought victories of the Civil Rights Movement caused a reaction that stripped Brown of its power, severed the jugular of the Voting Rights Act, closed off access to higher education, poured crack cocaine into the inner cities, and locked up more black men proportionally than even apartheid-era South Africa.

neighborhood’s “safety” meant killing first and asking questions later, a very real warning was sent that black lives don’t matter.

“I am not,” Lincoln had said, “nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”

once Johnson ‘held up before us the hope of a white man’s government,’ it led ‘[us] to set aside negro suffrage’ and to resist Northern plans to improve the condition of the freedmen.”

The delegates at Louisiana’s Constitutional Conference in October 1865 were so confident in the president’s support and their reclaimed power that they resolved, “We hold this to be a Government of white people, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race; and in accordance with the constant adjudication of the United States Supreme Court”—specifically, the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1856, wherein Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had stated explicitly that black people have “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.”

Johnson, who saw black empowerment as a nightmare, insisted, “This is … a country for white men, and by God, as long as I’m President, it shall be a government for white men.”

54 Therefore, Louisiana’s declaration that “people of African descent cannot be considered citizens of the United States” aligned perfectly with Johnson’s.

Congress, therefore, passed both the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which defined as citizens all persons born in the United States, except for Native Americans.

In fact, the authors of the Black Codes crafted the South’s criminal justice system to enforce these brutal new laws to extract labor under the harshest conditions and provide wholly inadequate sustenance to the convicted.

So, while businesses were shielded, black Americans were most emphatically not.

Their killers were then charged with violating the Enforcement Act of 1870, which Congress had passed to stop the Klan’s terrorism. Chief Justice Waite, in United States v. Cruikshank (1876), ruled that the Enforcement Act violated states’ rights.

Unequal treatment, however, became the law of the land. In Hall v. DeCuir (1877), the justices ruled that a state could not prohibit racial segregation.110

Despite more than a generation of irrefutable evidence of widespread racial discrimination in the aftermath of the Civil War, the court created the mythic “separate but equal” doctrine to confirm racial segregation as the law of the land. The court then followed up with a ruling in Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899) that even ignored Plessy’s separate but equal doctrine by declaring that financial exigency made it perfectly acceptable to shut down black schools while continuing to operate educational facilities for white children.

The Supreme Court thus identified states as the ultimate defenders of rights, although Southern states had repeatedly proven themselves the ultimate violators of those rights.

African Americans’ schools routinely opened as late as mid-November.26 Beyond sick and tired of the anemic and inadequate public education designed for blacks, African Americans were willing to go north to find good schools for their children.

For years, political and economic elites had deluded themselves into believing that African Americans were somehow satisfied with the brutal inequality of the status quo; comfortable with having their wages stolen year after year; pleased to be trapped in debt slavery; OK with black women having absolutely no right to their bodies; and happy to have their children illiterate, uneducated, and futureless.

Commission enacted a law “that any person who would entice, persuade or influence any laborer or other person to leave the city of Montgomery for the purpose of being employed at any other place as a laborer” would be fined one hundred dollars and face six months’ hard labor, or both.39

City councils, state legislatures, and police forces were determined to punish those, who, in a capitalist economy, offered African Americans a better employment opportunity.

the Chicago Defender served as one of the primary conduits of information about opportunities up north.

Over and over again, the newspaper pounded on the idea that Dixie was going to have to prove that it deserved the presence of African Americans, not the other way around.45 And, the Defender argued, what the region’s governments and employers had delivered so far left but one option: “Get out of the South.”46

Freedom of the press and First Amendment rights are hallowed constitutional ground in the United States, and the Defender had not violated any libel law: The lynchings happened; the theft of wages was real; the rape of black women was no secret. The Defender had done nothing but report the truth.48 But for that crime, Southern elites felt it had to be silenced.

The officials, therefore, decided to go after the railroad system. The logic was simple: If the ideas that led to the exodus couldn’t be stopped, then certainly the physical means by which hundreds of thousands had already left the region could be.

Rather than brace themselves, the same Southern leaders who had always been such staunch and proud adherents of states’ rights now lobbied the federal government for help.

The chief of the United States Employment Services, a man from Meridian, Mississippi, in fact, vowed “that the first thing he was going to do was to see that Niggers were stopped from going North.”71

The reason Southern officials rose up to try to stop the Great Migration of a people for whom they clearly had such contempt goes far beyond the easy default response of “labor.” Black flight threatened much more than the economic foundation of a feudal society; African Americans’ determination to achieve their full potential endangered the legalistic, biological, and philosophical tenets of a racially oppressive system. Black prosperity and success—indeed, black intelligence—were unimaginable and, thus, justified the disparate funding in education that had led to abysmal schools and made the brutality of the criminal justice system necessary.

The whole culture of the white South was erected on the presumption of black inability.

Chicago, for example, had hemmed the black population into tight, confined areas with finite housing possibilities. In 1917, the Chicago Urban League found that real estate agents had so constricted the supply of homes for African Americans that on one day alone, only fifty houses were available for 664 black applicants.

The next year, Sweet’s relatives in Ocoee, Florida, lived in the part of town that whites incinerated “in the single bloodiest day in American political history.” Whites went hunting for a black man who had dared approach the ballot box in the 1920 presidential election, and, in the process, killed scores of African Americans and ethnically cleansed the town until it became all-white for nearly sixty years.94 As a result of his experience, Ossian Sweet had packed, among all the moving boxes and satchels, a small arsenal of guns and four hundred pounds of ammunition.95

It was like throwing gasoline on a fire. Since the war, Detroit had become Klan country, thirty-five thousand members strong. Thus far, a coalition of white ethnics and blacks—arrayed around the slogan “Keep Detroit an American City!”—had

David Lilienthal wrote in the Nation, the question was “Did Negroes have the same right of self-defense as white people?”

“There is nothing but prejudice in this case. If it was reversed, and eleven white men had shot and killed a black while protecting their home and their lives against a mob of blacks, nobody would have dreamed of having them indicted … They would have been given medals instead.”

Sweet, the doctor’s wife, who had been cooking dinner when the rocks and bullets started flying, contracted tuberculosis while being held for nearly a month in the dank, crowded, and unsanitary jail. Their baby daughter also became infected, as did Henry. All of them died. Ossian Sweet, who had fought so hard, tried to soldier on, but eventually he faced foreclosure, had to sell the home on Garland Avenue, and was forced to move to a small apartment in Black Bottom. He put a gun to his head one night and pulled the trigger.132

In the early 1930s, under the direction of brilliant legal tactician Charles Hamilton Houston, the NAACP launched a campaign in the courts to destroy Jim Crow and overturn the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that had made “separate but equal” the legal cornerstone of racial segregation in America.

Senator James O. Eastland (D-MS) vowed, “We will protect and maintain white supremacy throughout eternity.”30 Mississippi governor Fielding Wright concurred, adding, “regardless of the consequences.”

“South Carolina will not now, nor for some years to come, mix white and colored children in our schools” even if, he continued, that meant shutting down the entire education system.

Even the taciturn Roy Wilkins could barely contain himself. “May 17, 1954, was one of life’s sweetest days,” he later recalled.35 Nor was the significance of this judgment confined to the education of black children. “If segregation is unconstitutional in educational institutions,” observed Charles Johnson, president of Fisk University, “it is no less so unconstitutional in other aspects of our national life.”

On the other hand, the Southern states made clear that they were ready for war. The first step was to ensure that only those who felt threatened by Brown could vote.

Georgia’s legislature even went so far as to pass a resolution to “repeal the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America and to impeach the members of the Supreme Court.”57 On July 1, 1956, the state adopted a new flag, designed by segregationist John Sammons Bell, which “featured a prominent confederate battle flag. It was Georgia’s way of letting the NAACP and the rest of the nation know that white Georgians, once willing to die to protect slavery, were also willing to die to protect segregation.”

Proud of the consequences, one man bragged, “As long as we can legislate, we can segregate.”64 Indeed, by 1963, not one black child attended a public school with a white child in South Carolina, Alabama, or Mississippi.

African Americans faced a Hobson’s choice: back down and accept the inferior, unequal, and unconstitutional education that states insisted black children deserved, or call the South’s bluff and risk no public schools at all.

While white children were educated, 2,700 black children were locked out. The defiance of Prince Edward County was singular—no other school system in the nation remained closed for five years (1959 to 1964) rather than comply with Brown.84

Henry Cabarrus recalled one of Prince Edward County’s white officials declaring that he would “rather his children be baked in the oven” than go to an integrated school.

By contrast, an entire generation of black children who had fought long and hard to receive a quality education was now forced to face this cold, hard new economy with neither the necessary education nor work skills. It was not just black America, however, that suffered the cost of this waste of human lives and talent. The brutally relentless tactics of stall and defy, then stall and undermine—tactics that went on for at least four decades—left the United States with millions of citizens who lacked the education needed to be competitive in a global, technology-driven economy. This, in turn, left the United States lagging far behind other developed countries and placed the nation at enormous economic risk.

White leaders in the South saw no such thing; they saw themselves as defenders of the Constitution and saviors of states’ rights against a federal Leviathan. In their minds, they were patriots not racists.

Indeed, in five states, NAACP members were banned from holding public employment. Moreover, identifying who paid dues to the Association meant that NAACP members would also be targeted for violence.