Great OP. So true. Too many lives ruined by Jim Crow. Thank heavens there were places in Europe that, even back in the middle of the 19th Century when black abolitionists were hunted down in the U.S., provided refuge and inspiration to African-Americans.
The list is long of black intellectuals and artists who had to escape, at least for a time, the dehumanizing racism so long prevalent in U.S. society. Fortunately, Great Britain (and France too), despite their own problems “taking up the white man’s burden” and building empires in Africa and elsewhere, never allowed anything so barbaric as race slavery to get rooted in their own homelands.
If the blacks were dehumanized it was the Democraps doing it. After the Civil War blacks were quite successful for a while until Woodrow Wilson(Democrat) Segregated. Something about Democrats hating black people. Why do you hate black people?
More stupid partisan propaganda. For your information, asshole, I’m not now and never have been a Democrat, and even less would I have been one in the days of Radical Reconstruction, when black “Lincoln Republican Union men” like those pictured here were struggling against white racist KKKers and Democratic Party terrorists.
My heroes, and the heroes of genuine progressives and leftists
today, including both independents and those
in the Democrat Party, are the
Abolitionists and the
Radical Republicans of Lincoln’s day.
We stand in the tradition of those “First Black Members of the U.S. Congress” that you so hypocritically invoke.
The abandonment of “Radical Reconstruction” and the black freedom struggle, just like the rise of slavery itself, was only incidentally related to simple partisan politics. The “Original Sin” of U.S. society as a whole, race slavery, created the problem, and both slavery and Jim Crow early on sunk their deepest roots in the soil of the Old South. The first elected President born in the Old South after the Civil War was indeed Woodrow Wilson. He was a “liberal racist” not because he was a Democrat, but because he was from the South and had deeply inculcated its spirit and the spirit of Jim Crow and the “Lost Cause.” He passed as a “liberal intellectual” in those terrible racist days by bringing his “refined racism” North, serving as President of Princeton University.
To people who see American society as it really is TODAY, whether they are black or white, liberal or conservative, folks like you who use history to play cheap partisan games ... are pathetic.
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