This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1465937
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1465937
Of course this analysis is correct, but isn’t it a bit over-obvious? Anyone who knows anything about the end of Reconstruction knows that the implantation of Jim Crow and lost cause historical revisionism went lock step hand in hand. Lynchings too. In the South AND in a lot of the North, especially places like Ohio and Indiana.
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The small corner of SW Ohio where I grew up has a slang name … “Kentuckyana” considering it was 6 miles east of Indiana and 35 miles north of Kentucky. There is even a peculiar drawl in speech in the area.
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I wish the author had explored cause and effect — were the statues the cause or the effect of increasing racism? How did/could that be disentangled?
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Armed intimidation of black people hasn’t stopped. A nursing mother on maternity leave is fired from her job, with strapped deputy sheriffs showing up on her doorstep to do it.
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This week we saw cell phone images of a brawl started by several White people against one Back man who was trying it do his job at a dock in Alabama. Seems the White folks were disrespected by the Black man and that was cause for the White’s opening up a can of whoop ass on the Black man. And the images show one White guy leaping into the Black man, who is by that time already outnumbered by other White people intent on doing him harm. But I’m focused on that guy who lunged in, knees first, like he was doing a cannonball into the Black man’s face.
That guy is doing Some Jail Time, I hope. And I hope he meets some fellas in there who know who he is and what he did. Those fellas will show him how it’s done.
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It seems pretty likely that the statues were an effect of local racist power – you don’t get the money to put things up from nowhere. And a place with enough rich, powerful racists to put up a monument and rename streets is also going to be enforcing racism in other ways.
But the statues were also a reminder to everyone of that racist power. The ones I’ve seen are typical of the statues that war victors erect to celebrate the strength of their regimes. So local people of color would have been (further) intimidated, white racists emboldened (the same way that, say, patriotic americans get a glow of pride from looking at the Capitol or the Washington Monument), and on-the-fence whites reminded of the world they lived in.
I think it’s a bit of a mistake to focus on the statues as a thing in themselves rather than as markers of the local power structures, but it’s probably a good first approximation. (Also, in your comment, perhaps not so much increasing racism as the increasing power and control that open racists wielded.)
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I’m not sure this is an ironclad cause and effect correlation. By the period the author focuses on, the KKK was at or near it’s height of influence and Jim Crow laws were being solidified. Maybe putting up a generic statue of a soldier (quite possibly manufactured in the North ironically) like here on the courthouse square in Denton, Tx in 1919 influenced a couple local votes but I’ll bet that local Blacks had already read the writing on the wall and local Whites were already voting mostly Democratic.
The author makes a great point though about monuments moving from cemeteries where they are more appropriate, to the public square after Reconstruction. That was my point in our local struggle to get the Confederate monument off the public courthouse square- that it had no business being displayed at the seat of governance-unless, of course, you were an unreconstructed rebel/racist.
Thank Buddha for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party for kicking out the old Dixiecrat contingent!
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The State Attorney’s Office said “It is standard procedure for at least two investigators and a member of law enforcement to make in-person visits to employee’s homes for the safety and security of all involved.” If it’s standard practice, then why did the Sheriff’s Office say "Had it been brought to him, he would have rejected this request and left it in the hands of the state attorney’s office”? DeSantis has to fire a few more people to get his house in order.
Black Americans who live in areas that have a relatively higher number of streets named after prominent Confederate generals “are less likely to be employed, are more likely to be employed in low-status occupations, and have lower wages compared to Whites.”
Looks like TPM is openly promoting CRT. Methinks Josh can expect letters from a host of red state attorneys general.
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Cause and effect is difficult to disentangle. I’m going to second @paulw’s points: it takes wealth to erect monuments, and what the wealthy choose to erect says a lot about what they value.
So, if I were constructing a structural equation model of the situation, I’d have the number of monuments as a result of racism, and a cause (through signaling) of reduced Black voting participation.
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The Dixiecrats pretty much left of their own volition, didn’t they?
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Yes, they did. Nixon blew his dog whistle for them in '68 and they came running. Racism’s been a key plank in the Republican platform ever since. No need for dog whistles nowadays though. Now it’s sing it loud, I hate and I’m proud.
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Dixiecrats were the footings and foundation for Nixon’s southern strategy.
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Racism and the legacy of slavery. The poison that still infects America to this day.
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It was the Democrats that were the party of the confederacy, Jim Crow and the guardians of the “lost cause” mythology. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century, first with integration of the military, then the Civil Rights Acts under Johnson that the parties basically flipped. As Johnson famously upped (though some claim it is apocrvaphyl) that when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and said “We’ve lost the south for a generation”.
It was the beginning of the realignment, sealed with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and solidified under Regan (who infamously kicked off his 1980 bid for POTUS with his “States Rights speech” at the site of one of the most notorious murders of civil rights workers) of why the GOP has the south as its stronghold.
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And certain parts of the north that are geographically non-south but culturally oh gosh.
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This is a captain obvious article. The same people who were erecting monuments were making it impossible for blacks to vote. Duh.
I do want to say that I thank the author for putting the facts together. It indicates a coordinated effort on the part of white southern leadership to put the old south back together for their benefit.
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Yeah, red-lining and racial covenants weren’t just practiced in the South.
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By “kicking them out” I mean, passing bills that makes them feel unwelcome. It doesn’t happen overnight. Georgia is an interesting case; Sen. Richard Russell- leader of the Southern Caucus and staunch segregationist-was their bulwark and yet, they elected Jimmy Carter as governor a little after Russell’s time. And, frankly, they need to rename the Russell Senate Office Building for someone else, IMO!
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