Southern resistance movement

I'd tend to disagree, because it was a factor among a huge number of others, and while violent, it's hard to call the various uncoordinated acts of men looking to get rich, often killing each other, to the proud, unabashed violence in defense of "the Southern Way of Life" that defined so many Southern whites during Reconstruction. People shot each other in the 1920s as a quick way to riches - the Redeemers did it for "honor."

I'm not sure the Prohibition example holds because you have a law that only had narrow support in the first place. It took highly adept pressure group poliitics, and simply ignoring the population shift that had taken place (the 1920 redistricting was straight up canceled, because it would give too many seats to "those" city people) in the early 20th C. to get Prohibition through. Scolding half of the population, making it damn clear that Prohibition had very little to do with booze and a whole hell of a lot to do with coming down on immigrants, Catholics, and every one else the WASP elite found undesirable, demonstrating a huge hypocrisy in the execution and then loading a ton of gangsters on top of it and you loose your majority right quick.

Wheras the end of Reconstruction allowed the white South to bring a boot down, again and again, on the face of people who were a majority in many cases.

The problem is that the South will be able to outwait the North every time unless the South REALLY pisses off the North somehow. The fact was that Southerners were far more concerned with keeping down Blacks than Northerners were about Black Civil Rights.
 

JSmith

Banned
The Deep South is still some of the poorest areas of the country:

US state income per capita:

GuSXrJS.jpg
And it consequently receives the largest percentage of tax dollars and it votes GOP-well the white South does anyway. So which of these facts is not like the other :eek:
 
Whose decision in particular?

As previously noted, the overthrow of Reconstruction was already 90% achieved even before 1877. Even had Hayes not pulled the troops from LA and SC, at best their Radical governments might have limped along for another couple of years. As his wife observed to a critic "What was Mr Hayes to do? He had no army" - an exaggeration, but only a slight one.

The United States Army had less than 4,000 soldiers ''occupying'' the South by the end of Reconstruction, and only about 25,000 men in all, throughout the nation in a time of ongoing campaigns against the aboriginal population. They were asked to do the impossible. Sherman thought it would take a hundred thousand men, and only who knows how long the occupation would be. They should have listened to him.
 
The United States Army had less than 4,000 soldiers ''occupying'' the South by the end of Reconstruction, and only about 25,000 men in all, throughout the nation in a time of ongoing campaigns against the aboriginal population. They were asked to do the impossible. Sherman thought it would take a hundred thousand men, and only who knows how long the occupation would be. They should have listened to him.

Except the North was in no way willing to do so. If the Republicans ran on a platform "We will occupy the South with 100,000 troops for the next 20-40 years so that the Blacks will have their civil rights actually enforced" you would see a Democrat landslide election.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
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Because NOBODY cared about black's right, even in the north.

Remember Guess who is coming for dinner? discrimination is bad... until a nigger wants to marry your daughter; when this outrage happens, everybody (even "civil rights champions") run for their oversized conical hats.

This was the rule in 1865, is the rule today and will be the rule as long as southern whites will exist.
Nationalist/regional bigotry is against the rules here.

You just broad brushed about 20% of the U.S. population as irreparable racists based solely on their address.

DO NOT do that again.
 
That was pretty radical. There are some Southern whites who don't support the status quo. This includes myself.
 
Because NOBODY cared about black's right, even in the north.

Remember Guess who is coming for dinner? discrimination is bad... until a nigger wants to marry your daughter; when this outrage happens, everybody (even "civil rights champions") run for their oversized conical hats.

This was the rule in 1865, is the rule today and will be the rule as long as southern whites will exist.

Except of course that attitudes change. They may change slowly, they may change to something that is still hilariously awful, but just not as bad, but they change. Yes, the South seceded over white supremacy, and the amount of the population that's still enamored of it has remained distressingly high to the present day, but it's a bit dangerous to suggest that any group's attitudes are completely frozen in amber.

'Course, with the South the cultural trends seem to be visible closer to the surface - the stand your ground shootings, the birtherism, the various fun noose pranks, the various dreadfully enlightening comments about the "culture" that "those people" have, you can go on. It's acceptable to take that to a whole other level in a way you can't in the rest of the country. But the statistics and surveys of social attitude seem to be showing the same disconnect at the under 40 line as the rest of the country, so there's hope.

Now this can seem like a huge claim - you literally just have have to open the newspaper homepage to see yet more examples of voter suppression, stand your ground murders, examples of "I'm not racist, but....", but at the same time there's push back to all of that even within the South, something you didn't always see in the past. In the first half of the 20th C, lynching were lead by the pillars of the community. Now, its more of a fringe thing - and part of being a more high status person in the modern South means disclaiming (or even actively opposing) attitudes that were par for the course thirty years a go.

It's slow progress - but if you talk like the National Front or any anti-immigrant parties from Stockholm to Segovia, you don't rarely get elected here anymore. But tying this back to the OP, yes, I think that all of the attitudes that still persist in the modern South can be traced the early and violent resistance, post-1865, to any idea that a thing about the pre-war social structure, aside from property title, had to change.
 
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