Here is what the socialist scholar, W. E. B. DuBois, had to say about the situation. Amazing how he saw so much of the problem, and how little the problem has changed since 1953.
"Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism in the United States" by W.E.B. Du Bois, published in the April 1953 issue of Monthly Review
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0403dubois.htmHow “free” was the black freedman in 1863? He had no clothes, no home, tools, or land. Thaddeus Stevens begged the government to give him a bit of the land which his blood had fertilized for 244 years. The nation refused. Frederick Douglass and Charles Sumner asked for the Negro the right to vote. The nation yielded because only Negro votes could force the white South to conform to the demands of Big Business in tariff legislation and debt control. This accomplished, the nation took away the Negro’s vote, and the vote of most poor whites went with it.
This newest South, turning back to its slave past, believes its present and future prosperity can best be built on the poverty and ignorance of its disfranchised lowest masses—and these low-paid workers now include not only Negroes, but Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the unskilled, unorganized whites. Progress by means of this poverty is the creed of the present South.
The Northern white worker long went his way oblivious to what was happening in the South. He awoke when the black Southern laborer fled North after World War I, and he welcomed him by riots. Slowly, however, the black man has been integrated into the unions, except those in whose crafts he was not skilled and had no chance to learn. One of these was the textile unions. They excluded Negroes. It is taking a long time to prove to them that their attitude toward Negroes was dangerous. If Negro wages were low in the South, what business was that of New England white labor? Today the union man sees that it was his business. The factories are moving out of New England and the North into the South. One hundred thousand textile workers are idle. This illustrates a paradox of capitalism: in the South, the nation, and the world, the workers are too poor to buy the textiles they need; while machinery is able to make more textiles than its owners can sell at the prices they demand.
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The organized effort of American industry to usurp government, surpasses anything in modern history, even that of Adolf Hitler from whom it was learned. From the use of psychology to spread truth has come the use of organized gathering of news to guide public opinion and then deliberately to mislead it by scientific advertising and propaganda. This has led in our day to suppression of truth, omission of facts, misinterpretation of news, and deliberate falsehood on a wide scale. Mass capitalistic control of books and periodicals, news gathering and distribution, radio, cinema, and television has made the throttling of democracy possible and the distortion of education and failure of justice widespread. It can only be countered by public knowledge of what this government by propaganda is accomplishing and how.
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The efforts have only increased and intensified and been successful to the point where perhaps even DuBois wouldn't recognize the country now.
It has been my understanding, since I found this forum some years ago, that one of the main purposes of DU is to help counter the failures that Dubois spoke of back in 1953. Many of us in the south, black and white, have been working at that for decades. Many of us have suffered dreadfully, even died in those efforts. How is it that our efforts can be denigrated and tossed aside so blithely by other DUers?
I will not get into a personal hollering match with any specific DUers. However I URGE those who are being so divisive to look into a little real history of the south, of the peoples' struggle in the south, and how it relates to the rest of the country, and to the progressive movement as a whole.
Wat
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