![]() Their aim was simple: prevent African Americans from voting. “Events in the African American town of Hamburg, in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, were typical of many others across the former Confederacy where white paramilitary groups mobilized to regain control of state governments. ![]() Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow “What possible rationale demanded this many debased representations of the recently freed Black people produced in the final third of the nineteenth century? How many ways can one call a woman or a man a "n*****" or a "c***"? How many watermelons does a person have to devour, how many chickens does an individual have to steal, to make the point that Black people are manifestly, by nature, both gluttons and thieves? Why in the world was it necessary to produce tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of these separate and distinct racist images to demean the status of the newly freed slaves in a set of fixed types and motifs, which reached their perverse apex with the characterizations of Black people during Reconstruction in The Birth of a Nation, in the figures of deracinated Black elected officials and, of course, the black male as rapist? The explanation comes in three words: justifying Jim Crow, or, in three different words, disenfranchising Black voters” ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |