Meteor Blades reminds those of us who love the ideals of America that on Jun 21, 1964, three young men were murdered by members of the KKK in Mississippi because they dared to try to register African Americans as voters.
The Black slaves had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War and their freedom was enshrined into the Constitution in the 13th Amendment in 1865. Then the 15th amendment, passed in 1870, guaranteed that "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
Nearly a century later the White over-class, represented by the KKK, was murdering individuals who tried to exercise that Constitutional Right or help others to do so. This was only eight months after the Church bombing in Birmingham in which four teenage girls died for the "crime" of being Black. The killers hid behind the twin veils of secrecy and intimidation of witnesses for decades, as right-wingers usually do.
It was these killers, the southern KKK in its many versions, together with the angry frightened white supporters who were being forced to share power with people their families had owned as property (like dogs and horses) a century earlier who were taken wholesale into the Republican Party in Nixon's and Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy of 1972.
Dick Cheney and the Southerners in the American Republican Party are the direct familial and ideological descendants of these frightened, vicious people. They deny it, saying that they do not approve of such terroristic tactics and of the KKK. But the fact is, the two incidents mentioned here proved counter productive. They brought down more heat than could be dealt with, and in fact encouraged a lot more people to work to share the Civil Rights all Americans were supposed to have with African-Americans. The change in the attitudes of the Southern racists was not because terrorism was immoral (illegal had never bothered them) but was because it had quit being a successful strategy -- nearly a century after the Civil War.
I was in college in 1964, so I guess that Meteor Blades and I are about the same age. I suspect he grew up in the North and saw from a distance how bad this terrorism and intimidation was. I grew up in east Texas, and it was so normal that I only realized that I was attending an all-white segregated High School because my parents made sure I was aware of Brown vs. Board of Education and because I watched TV clips of the National Guard trying to keep the peace and get the Black students safely into the Arkansas schools in the late 50's under Eisenhower. The very few incidents that made it into the news (the local editor did not want to lose subscriptions - or have his building burned down) don't touch on the violence and anger of that period.
It is somewhat better now. That is largely because the worst of the racists and terrorists have died off or gotten too old to be very active. I had thought that our kids were getting better, and that the right-wing American terrorists were becoming extinct, but the American conservative movement has either resurrected them or created a new set of terrorists with which we have to deal. Race is less the issue than it was, but now Class has come to the fore in ways not seen since the late 19th and early twentieth century, and war is still an acceptable tool to them to use for little more than just getting wealthier. And the only reason personal terrorism has declined in America is that the upper classes and wealthy have decided that it is no longer an effective tool to use to keep and augment their positions. In many ways, centralized ownership and control of the mass media has replaced much of the retail level terrorism of earlier years.
I guess that is a little better but it, too, has to be dealt with.
In the meantime, let's remember that the three murdered members of the Congress of Racial Equality died to give us many of the things that are better about America now. Those of us here now need to try to clean our nation up even more, so that we can hand it off even more improved to our children.
God! I must either be getting old or I'm in a preachy mood this morning! Or both.
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