61
" 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. One Georgia plantation owner agreed as he asserted that white Southerners now had “the right and power to govern our population in our own way.” And, as Louisiana emphasized, that meant “getting things back as near to slavery as possible. "
― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
62
" Migration is the story of America. It is foundational. From Pilgrims fleeing oppression in Europe, to the millions who took advantage of the Homestead Act to “go West,” to the erection of the Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor, all the way up to the U.S. Congress tying Most Favored Nation status to the human right of Soviet Jews to emigrate, the movement of people fleeing tyranny, violence, and withered opportunities is sacrosanct to Americans. In fact, “freedom of movement” is a treasured right in the nation’s political lexicon. Yet, when more than 1.5 million African Americans left the land below the Mason-Dixon Line, white Southern elites raged with cool, calculated efficiency. This was no lynch mob seeking vengeance; rather, these were mayors, governors, legislators, business leaders, and police chiefs who bristled at “the first step … the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.”12 In the wood-paneled rooms of city halls, in the chambers of city councils, in the marbled state legislatures, and in sheriffs’ offices, white government officials, working hand in hand with plantation, lumber mill, and mine owners, devised an array of obstacles and laws to stop African Americans, as U.S. citizens, from exercising the right to find better jobs, to search for good schools, indeed simply to escape the ever-present terror of lynch mobs. In short, the powerful, respectable elements of the white South rose up, in the words of then-secretary of labor William B. Wilson, to stop the Great Migration and interfere with “the natural right of workers to move from place to place at their own discretion. "
― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
63
" 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. "
― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
66
" Beginning in 1917 and going into the 1920s, so-called race riots, which were essentially lynchings on a grander scale, erupted in East St. Louis, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and numerous other cities.75 Though labeled “riots,” these outbursts were more like rampages, where whites went hunting for African Americans to pummel, burn, and torture. "
― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
71
" In a 1981 interview, GOP consultant Lee Atwater explained the inner logic of, as one commentator noted, “racism with plausible deniability.”77 “You start out in 1954,” Atwater laid out, “by saying, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that,” he then deflected. "
― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
72
" In fact, African Americans did not wait for Johnson’s blessing, let alone for government support or a white benefactor. One Freedmen’s Bureau official recorded, “Throughout the entire South … an effort is being made by the colored people to educate themselves.” He identified “at least 500 schools” built, staffed, and run by black people. In Georgia, for example, by the fall of 1866, African Americans “financed entirely or in part 96 of the 123 day and evening schools.” 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. "
― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
74
" Although many poor whites languished, refusing to attend schools built under the supposed “nigger programs” of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the formerly enslaved emerged “with a fundamentally different consciousness of literacy … that viewed reading and writing as a contradiction of oppression.”87 Instead of offering any support to those who embodied the self-reliance he said he valued, Johnson was blind to the herculean and impressive effort that blacks had mounted in the South, and he demanded that they do even more without any help.88 The Civil Rights Bill of 1866 also came under attack by the president. In vetoing the proposed legislation, Johnson raised several telling objections. He argued that blacks had to earn their citizenship, reminding Congress that African Americans had just emerged from slavery and, therefore, “should pass through a certain probation … before attaining the coveted prize.” There was to be no born-on-American-soil-lottery, he intoned; instead, they had to “give evidence of their fitness to receive and to exercise the rights of citizens.”89 For Johnson, nearly 250 years of unpaid toil to build one of the wealthiest nations on earth did not earn citizenship. "
― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
77
" The Supreme Court justices gave the aura of being “strict constitutionalists” whose job was not to interpret or create but merely to distinguish between the rights the federal government enforced and those controlled by the states.99 But the supposedly legally neutral interpretations had profound effects. And the court, just like Johnson, demonstrated an uncanny ability to ignore inconsistencies and to twist rules, beliefs, and values to undermine the solid progress in black people’s rights that the Radical Republicans had finally managed to put in place. The court declared that the Reconstruction amendments had illegally placed the full scope of civil rights, which had once been the domain of states, under federal authority. That usurpation of power was unconstitutional because it put state governments under Washington’s control, disrupted the distribution of power in the federal system, and radically altered the framework of American government.100 The justices consistently held to this supposedly strict reading of the Constitution when it came to African Americans’ rights. Yet, this same court threw tradition and strict reading out the window in the Santa Clara decision. California had changed its taxation laws to no longer allow corporations to deduct debt from the amount owed to the state or municipalities. The change applied only to businesses; people, under the new law, were not affected. The Southern Pacific Railroad refused to pay its new tax bill, arguing that its rights under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment had been violated. In hearing the case, 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. The ruling that began this long, disastrous legal retreat from a rights-based society was the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases. "
― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
80
" These were not idle threats. Suspected labor agents were arrested routinely whenever a trainload of African Americans left or when the fields were empty and there was no one to work the land.40 The Reverend D. W. Johnson, a black labor agent in Mississippi, barely escaped detection, the sting of the whip, or worse for handing out free railroad passes north to African Americans. “About twelve o’ clock,” he recounted: that door swung open and there was two great big, three great big red-faced guys … Now they had a bullwhip on they shoulder and a rope and a gun in each of their hands. And those pistols, them barrels looked like shotguns, you know? They gonna kill every so-and-so Negro that they found had a pass. Well, so they searched us one by one and they searched me … Had they pulled off my shoe, that’d been it for me. Because they swo’ they was gonna kill the one who had it. Yeah, it was in the toe of my shoe. "
― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
