The South was “treated poorly after the war”?! In fact the white south was treated better than most losing sides in a war ever are. The white slaveowners were payed reparations due to the supposed eradication of slavery, while the formerly enslaved who didn’t flee were subjected to Jim Crow segregation or worse, illegal enslavement all the way up until the Second World War, as extensively documented in Douglas A. Blackman’s Slavery By Another Name. The South was basically allowed to rewrite the nation’s history, portraying the failure of Reconstruction as being the result of Black people temporarily holding positions of power in Congress, doing away with the notion that the victor is always the one to write the history. But I suppose that you, much like Woodrow Wilson, watch movies such as “Birth of A Nation” and think you are watching an accurate portrayal of history. It’s truly astounding how this narrative of white southern victimhood continues to be promoted to this day while you refuse to take into consideration those who are victimized by your never-ending quest to enshrine white supremacy into law.
Every week your racist diatribe appears in my weekly Medium newsletter even though I have never once subscribed to you or followed your columns. Day after day you write pieces with the sole purpose of demonizing Black people — you’ve even gone so far as to refer to those who actively oppose their oppression as “black mobs”- while you portray the most oppressive group of people in the world as patriotic defenders of law and order. I can remain silent no more as you have now gone so far as to defend and justify the white terror and extreme violence of Reconstruction — violence that was completely one-sided whether you choose to believe so or not. It was not a case of “violence on all sides”, which I’m sure in that case you would then cite as justification for brutal lynchings and kkk terror.
