i’ve just remembered this from an essay by Eric Foner.
i mean that’s obvious. but when you chime in with all this hysterical nonsense about ‘woke radicals destroying america’, you are basically just joining in the attack on the civil rights movement. i mean, really? do we have to rehash the arguments of the 1960s again. do you want to return to jim crow and segregation too?
that’s what this is really about. releasing a press statement on MLK’s day. it’s about a culture war going back to the civil rights movement and the reappraisal of history that began then.For many decades, historians viewed Reconstruction as the lowest point in the saga of American democracy, a period, allegedly, of corruption and misgovernment imposed on the South by vindictive Radical Republicans in Congress once they overturned Johnson’s supposedly more statesmanlike white supremacist Reconstruction policies. The cardinal error was granting suffrage to black men, said to be by their nature incapable of exercising democratic rights intelligently. This interpretation formed part of the intellectual legitimation of the Jim Crow South, which in the late 19th century began abrogating the rights blacks had gained during Reconstruction. The supposed horrors of Reconstruction offered a stark warning of what would happen if Southern blacks were able to exercise their right to vote. But after the civil rights revolution (sometimes called the Second Reconstruction), a wholesale shift in historical outlook took place. Today, Reconstruction is seen as a noble effort to create the foundation of racial justice in the aftermath of slavery. The tragedy is not that it was attempted, but that it failed.
i mean that’s obvious. but when you chime in with all this hysterical nonsense about ‘woke radicals destroying america’, you are basically just joining in the attack on the civil rights movement. i mean, really? do we have to rehash the arguments of the 1960s again. do you want to return to jim crow and segregation too?