SDestinie’s Reviews > Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 > Status Update

#Racism was used effectively to divide, back then, but we can learn to Do Better, now.

"Yet we are blind and led by the blind."

But it doesn't have to continue thusly.

"... desperately afraid of something. Of what? Of many things, but usually of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded, or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime. And of all this, most ubiquitous in modern industrial society is that fear of unemployment."

"In each case, labor control passed into the hands of white Southerners, who combined with white labor to oust Northern capitalists."

When Northern and Southern employers agreed that profit was most important and the method of getting it second, the path to understanding was clear. When white laborers were convinced that the degradation of Negro labor was more fundamental than the uplift of white labor, the end was in sight.

So, lies, land, and racism were used to keep Black and White poor divided against each other, while "A black skin... has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind."

This is part of why the return of the Kingdom of Benin art work is so important.

That's NY/NJ explained, and of course no surprise from MD.
To this day...

Interesting: #solidarity might have made that happen:

"The workingmen of Europe felt sure that as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the Middle Class, so the American Anti-Slavery war will do for the working classes."

How did the North let states get away with this: "Mississippi provided that "every freedman, free Negro ... have a lawful home or employment, and shall have written evidence thereof . . . from the Mayor... or from a member of the board of police . . . which licenses may be revoked for cause at any time by the authority granting the same."

"Here comes the penalty which a land pays when it stifles free speech and free discussion and turns itself over entirely to propaganda. It does not make any difference if at the time the things advocated are absolutely right, the nation, nevertheless, becomes morally emasculated and mentally hogtied, and cannot evolve that healthy difference of opinion which leads to the discovery of truth under changing conditions."

"...Sumner sent in a second substitute declaring that the cause of human rights and of the Union needed the ballots as well as the muskets of colored men. He offered another amendment imposing equal suffrage as the fundamental condition for the admission of the seceded states."