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Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow QUOTES

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow QUOTES

21 " Furthermore, states Guelzo, Reconstruction “restored the Union without destroying federalism, without triggering a second civil war or a genocidal race war, and without punitive waves of executions for treason. Instead, it is one of the monumental ironies of Reconstruction that the victors—freed slaves, Northern whites—were more often the targets of violence and murder than the vanquished.” That was most certainly a dramatic departure in the history of civil conflicts. "

― Henry Louis Gates Jr. , Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

22 " The court cases and acts of legislation that enshrined Jim Crow as the law of the land did not unfold in a vacuum. The larger context for them was the ideology of white supremacy, the set of beliefs and attitudes about the nature of black people that arose to justify their unprecedented economic exploitation in the transatlantic slave trade. Following the Civil War, this ideology evolved in order to maintain the country’s racial hierarchy in the face of emancipation and black citizenship. Anything but unmoored or isolated, white power was reinforced in this new era by the nation’s cultural, economic, educational, legal, and violently extralegal systems, including lynching. Among its root and branches were the paired mythology of white women’s rape and black men’s brutality, the convict-lease system, disenfranchisement, and the choking off of access to capital and property ownership. In many ways, this ideology still roams freely in our country today. "

― Henry Louis Gates Jr. , Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

23 " The odd notion that an enslaved black person would work and that a free black person would not was only one example of a deeper racist ideology that emerged in debates over abolition and the future of free black citizens. "

― Henry Louis Gates Jr. , Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow