White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

by Carol Anderson

The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement.

This was a war about slavery. About a region’s determination to keep millions of black people in bondage from generation to generation.

Eighty-one percent of South Carolina’s wealth was directly tied to owning human beings.

Every state admitted to the Union since 1819, starting with Maine, embedded in their constitutions discrimination against blacks, especially the denial of the right to vote.

prohibited blacks from testifying in court against someone who was white.

He further explained how murder, rape, and robbery, in this Kafkaesque world, were not seen as crimes at all so long as whites were the perpetrators and blacks the victims.

“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.”

While this could have come from a simple ideological aversion to land redistribution, that was not the case and, for Johnson, not the issue; who received it was.

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.”

These laws, despite their draconian nature, were not the work of extreme secessionists. Some of the South’s most respected judges, attorneys, and planters crafted the Black Codes.

By compelling them to work, the argument went, this measure prevented the newly freed from becoming a “burden upon society.”

Having to work for free, under backbreaking conditions and the threat of the lash, was the real issue.

Johnson dismissed the numerous reports of mutilated black bodies piled up like logs, did not hear the incessant crack of the whips tearing into black flesh, and found in the draconian Black Codes that reinstalled slavery by another name nothing but progress.

Indeed, such was Mississippi’s obstinacy that it delayed ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment until 2013.65

the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which defined as citizens all persons born in the United States, except for Native Americans.

So venomous was Johnson’s veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill that it left even his supporters in Congress stunned.

Johnson had absolutely no qualms about using the power of government to ensure that plantation owners and poor whites gained or regained title to millions of acres of land, whereas those who had actually labored hard in the vast fields were treated as criminals and vagrants who needed the threat of the whip in order to work.77

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. Those who died working the fields or in the mines could be easily replaced by more black bodies charged with vagrancy and handed a death sentence.

As in most oppressive societies, those in power knew that an educated population would only upset the political and economic order.

Indeed, in the antebellum South, the enslaved were actively forbidden from learning to read and write. Many paid dearly for their literacy. One man “endured three brutal whippings to conceal his pursuit” of education. “In another instance a slave by the name of Scipio was put to death for teaching a slave child how to read and spell and the child was severely beaten to make him ‘forget what he had learned.’ ”83

Harriet Beecher Stowe remarked, “They rushed not to the grog-shop but to the schoolroom—they cried for the spelling-book as bread, and pleaded for teachers as a necessity of life.”

the formerly enslaved emerged “with a fundamentally different consciousness of literacy … that viewed reading and writing as a contradiction of oppression.”

When one of the killers, who had just bludgeoned a black man to death, was warned that “he might be punished,” he scoffed. “Oh, hell! Haven’t you seen the papers?” he said. “Johnson is with us!”

In Texas, from 1865 to 1868, nearly one thousand African Americans were lynched.94

the court became innovative and creative as it transformed corporations into “people” who could not have their Fourteenth Amendment rights trampled on by local communities.101 So, while businesses were shielded, black Americans were most emphatically not.

Chief Justice Waite, in United States v. Cruikshank (1876), ruled that the Enforcement Act violated states’ rights. Moreover, the only recourse the federal government could take was the Fourteenth Amendment, but, he continued, that did not cover vigilantes or private acts of terror, but rather covered only those acts of violence carried out by the states. The ruling not only let mass murderers go free; it effectively removed the ability of the federal government to rein in anti-black domestic terrorism moving forward.107

Like Andrew Johnson, Bradley saw equal treatment for black people as favoritism.

a unanimous 9–0 decision in Williams v. Mississippi (1898), the justices approved the use of the poll tax, which requires citizens to pay a fee—under a set of very arcane, complicated rules—to vote.

the poll tax not only ensnared black voters but also trapped poor whites. As late as 1942, for instance, only 3 percent of the voting-age population cast a ballot in seven poll tax states.

in Giles v. Harris (1903), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that “the federal courts had no power, either constitutional or practical, to remedy a statewide wrong, even if perpetrated by the state or its agents.”118

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.

To quote one historian’s paraphrase of Frederick Maitland: “The slave law of the South may have been dead, but it ruled us from the grave.”120

Hampton Smith, had become notorious for his brutal treatment of black laborers on his farm. Because his standard employee management practices included beatings, theft of wages, and whippings, he had considerable difficulty hiring anyone to willingly work his land.

the planter routinely went to the local jail, paid the fine of a black person, and then had the African American work on the plantation until the debt was paid.

He ruthlessly worked African Americans far past the point of any debt payoff and then refused to provide any compensation for the additional work. If challenged, he would pull out his whip.

Johnson took out a rifle and put two bullets into the planter’s chest. Smith died instantly. White retribution was swift, indiscriminate, and merciless.

dragged Mary to a tree, stripped her, tied her ankles together, and strung her upside down.

began “to roast her alive.” Then they saw her naked, eight-month-pregnant stomach convulsing.

sliced away at her charred flesh until the baby, now ripped out of the womb, fell to the ground and gave two cries. Someone in the lynch party then stepped forward and smashed the child’s head into the red Georgia dirt with the heel of his boot.5

The states and their supporters had erected a series of traps, sinkholes, and barriers both legal and extralegal, to contain this clearly oppressed population.

In the wake of the Civil War, government and judicial officials had decimated the right to vote, the economic provisions of forty acres and a mule, the chance for good public schools, and equality before the law.

These gruesome events were standard family entertainment; severed body parts became souvenirs and decorations hung proudly in homes.

And while African American women were not spared, they were particularly vulnerable to systematic sexual violence as rape became part of a white man’s “rite of passage.”

Equally vicious was the practice of “whitecapping,” which, since the horrors of Bosnia and Srebrenica, we now recognize as ethnic cleansing: In several Georgia and Mississippi counties, where plantations did not dominate the economy, local whites maimed, murdered, and terrorized African Americans and, as the persecuted fled, seized all the land until one could “ride for miles and not see a black face.”20

the Great Migration moved nearly 10 percent of the black population out of the South.

while African Americans understood the exodus as grabbing at a chance for freedom and equality, white Southerners saw black advancement and independence as a threat to their culture and, indeed, their economy.

September 1916, the Montgomery City 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.

The Defender discussed not only the Klan but also the governors, legislators, government officials, and business leaders who benefited from a system of oppression that robbed African Americans blind. At least as notably, the Defender’s pages published one ad after the next about job opportunities in the North with wages that were unheard of to Southerners. The

the attempt to keep the Defender out of the hands of African Americans only increased the paper’s credibility and importance.

white Southern leaders prioritized their need to stop the advancement of African Americans above all other considerations, including victory over the nation that had sunk the Lusitania and killed nearly twelve hundred passengers and crew members.