Sam Smith - The removal of Confederate statues is another
reminder of a thesis I've pretty much kept to myself, namely that the
South lost slavery and the right of succession thanks to the Civil War,
but it won a lot of other things, such as the right to segregation and
disproportionate control over Congress.
For
example, those more than 700 statues were mainly built not in the wake
of the war but during the period of southern white supremacy from the
1920s to the 1960s, the so-called Jim Crow era. When I graduated from
college in 1959 and went to Washington as a radio reporter, I was
surprised to discover the power of Dixiecrat members of Congress at the
time reflected by even some of my northern friends who had come to work
on the Hill developing southern accents. It became quickly clear that
the south ran the place.
Thanks to the
civil rights movement, we no longer talk about the confederacy save as
history, but the north-south conflict can still be found if you look
closely. Take the 2016 election. Eliminate the count in the former
confederacy and Hillary Clinton would have won by 35 electoral votes.
Undernews
keeps a record of good and bad things happening by state and right now
there isn't a single former Confederate state in the top half of the
union.
Sure, there's been a lot of
progress in the south, but we should recognize - as demonstrated by
Georgia's recent effort to suppress the black vote - that the issues
that brought on the Civil War and the Jim Crow era haven't left us yet.
