Bull Connor Had a Billy Club, Trump Has DEI

The emerging Jim Crow 3.0

Source: Library of Congress, originally New York World — Telegram; No known copyright restriction

The cycle is an old one.

Stimulus and response. Progress and pushback.

After the Civil War, freed slaves in the American South made significant gains in establishing themselves as upstanding American citizens. They owned land, started businesses, they even ran for (and won) elected office.

Eventually, former Confederate states, through a combination of violence, legal maneuvering, and federal passivity, reasserted white social, political, and economic dominance in the South. The Compromise of 1877 marked the end of Reconstruction, the withdrawal of federal troops, and the reassertion of white control through the Jim Crow system. By the end of the 19th century, blacks were effectively disenfranchised in the South. Jim Crow 1.0 was born.

In the civil rights era of the 1960s, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) criminalized many Jim Crow tactics used to suppress minority voting. African American registration and voting surged. As occurred one hundred years previously, a legal, political, economic, and sometimes violent backlash accompanied this progress.

However, Jim Crow 2.0 was more subtle than the original — using issues such as crime, busing, and “wasteful” government spending as vehicles for preserving the…