Editorials & Other Articles

struggle4progress

(118,334 posts) Fri Feb 12, 2016, 04:35 PM Feb 2016

Historian Says Additional Baltimore Confederate Statues Should be Removed

... JAMES LOEWEN: Everyone has ancestors, and Maryland did have a bunch of Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War who even joined the Confederate army, and they had to go to Virginia to do so. People who were descendants from those folks, they don't want to think badly of their own ancestors. None of us do. So the idea that their ancestors, in fact, were seceding on behalf of slavery, which is true, is hard for them to agree with, hard to--and so they do all kinds of things to convert it to anything but slavery. We might call it ABS. The Confederacy was about states' rights. No, the Confederacy was about tariffs and taxes. No. the Confederacy, in fact, was, literally, treason on behalf of slavery. We need to face that.

Between 1890 and about 1940--this was a very racist period in American history. It's called the nadir of race relations. During that period, most white folks didn't care about race relations anyway, even Northern white folks. Quasi-slavery had been reimposed in the South. Black folks were being removed from the voting rolls, they were being removed from being jurors. Being put back into second-class citizenship. It's a terrible time to be black. Well, even white folks who didn't have any Southern connections, like most Maryland people, didn't put up a fuss.

... One of the key things that happened during this nadir of race relations is the attempt at complete segregation of American cities ... St. Louis. They passed these laws which stated if you're black you can't move into a majority white block. If you're white -- just to be fair -- you can't move into a majority black block. Well, pretty soon, of course, almost every property changes hands. People move, people die. Houses get sold. This would have the immediate impact of converting the city into an apartheid city. You'd have black blocks and you'd have white blocks, period.

This got thrown out by the United States Supreme Court, it turns out. But it was almost enforced anyway, because what it was replaced with was by these little agreements that went into your deed that said no, this property shall never be lived in, rented by, inhabited by, any member of the black, or -- you know, they would name the races. Sometimes they'd say Hindu, or name all kinds of races that couldn't live there. So that replaced it after the Supreme Court made the law illegal. People don't realize that <our> houses have not been segregated from the beginning. In 1890 we had considerable mixture, even on social class lines, too, partly because rich folks wanted to have poor folks living nearby so they'd come in and cook their food and get the, get the coal stove going, you know, and heat up the house, and do the work ...

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=15643

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