I have to disagree with the author's contention that we are making progress on racial issues in America. Racial progress is and always has been cyclical in America. We had some racial integration among Black and White plantation workers in the Virginia colony in the 1600's before Bacon's multiracial plantation workers rebellion was put down in 1676. In reactionto the rebellion a racial caste system was put in place. Poor Whites gain the right to own property and slavery became a permanent status for all those of African decent. Between the end of the Civil War (1865) and the Tilden Hayes election of 1876 there was rapid racial progress. Blacks were in Congress and held judgeships. I know specific stories of this era derived from my own family documented history and oral readition. After a split decision in the election of 1876 wherein Rutherford B Hayes won the electoral college and Samuel Tilden won the popular vote. The South threatened to secede for a second times if Hayes was innaugerated as President. A compromise was reached in which Hayes was installed as President and the Northern occupation troops were removed from the South. They were removed from the South and charged with the genocidal removal of indigenous Americans from their lands throughout the lands conquered by America. A reign of terror arose in the South as Black Codes, Segregation and a new system of slavery was put into place based upon arresting Blacks for trumped up charges such as loitering or being without work leading them to be sold to plantations, steel mills and other industries in peonage slavery. This peonage system only ended during WWII when the U.S. Attorney General issued Circular 3591 in December 1941 outlawing all forms of slavery.including peonage which was not covered by the 13th Amendment.
Slow progress was made from the late 1940's (integration of the military) through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, The 1965 Voting Rights Act and The 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Reform Act.
This period of progress began to abate with George Wallace's campaign for the Presidency and the Southern Strategy put in place by Nixon and Lee Atwater in 1968 and was accelerated by the the election Ronald Reagan who attacked and ended the remnants of Johnson's War on Poverty and replaced it with the Drug War specifically attacking Blacks and Hispanics. His campaign was a forerunner of Trump's racist campaign. Reagan announce his candidacy just outside of Philadelphia Mississippi in the same County where two Jewish and one Black Civil Rights workers were murdered in an unsolved hate crime at that time. Reagan, is his speech declared his support for "States Rights" the anthem of both supporters of slavery and segregation dating back to the years before the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
Republican Presidents subsequently reshaped the Supreme Court from a progressive to a regressive institution which culminated in gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act which resulted in the arbitrary closing of polling places and early voting in Black and Hispanic areas from North Carolina to Texas as well as disenfranchising thousands through unconstitutional redistricting.
Regretfully we are not making progress. We are stuck in a recurring Sisyphusian cycle of progress and retrenchment. Clearly now we are stuck in a period of fighting the downward roll of the rock of civil rights progress. The late law professor and Law School Dean wrote about this cycle in his various books, most notably "Faces At The Bottom Of A Well". Sadly though, like Sisyphus even if we know our sad history we are unable to break this fateful cycle. That led Derrick Bell to conclude that racism in America is permanent. I sadly must agree.
John H Armwood
Trump Reminds Us the Racial Justice Movement Is Growing | The Nation
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