Texas, monuments, toward a politics of self-reckoning

In this article, I examine the efforts of a group of anti-Confederate monument activists in Williamson County, Texas. The article begins with the history of the monument itself, 100 years before the activists initiated their efforts. The intransigence to removing the Confederate monument is symbolic of white resistance to struggles for racial equality more broadly. Second, I discuss how the local legal impasse has contributed to distinct anti-monument activist strategies that deploy counternarratives and memories, from performances, to challenging narrative claims regarding who is more patriotic. Finally, I explore the politics of self-reckoning—the process by which white people find that they have to answer for racism deep within themselves as well as in relation to violent white supremacy and the legal and institutional fortress that protects whiteness generally. Battling both racists and racist institutions is hard and lengthy, and monument activism persistently exposes what is at stake.

“Two Cities—One White, the Other Black”

This chapter looks at Black struggles for equal rights during the 1960s and 1970s, first assessing the impact of the Vietnam War on Blacks, with Muhammad Ali drawing the link between the war and the denial of civil rights to Blacks. The chapter looks closely at the sit-in movement that started in the 1940s and spread across the country, followed by convoys of buses in Freedom Rides marked by White mob violence, beatings, and hundreds of arrests. Activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee launched a “Freedom Summer” campaign in 1964 to register Black voters in Deep South states; the fierce White resistance included the murders of more than twenty Black and White volunteers. The chapter then shifts focus to Detroit, as the city became progressively more Black with the flight of several hundred thousand Whites from city to suburbs. The racial segregation of Black children in Detroit schools, while the suburban schools were virtually all-White, led to an NAACP lawsuit that resulted in a judicial order for large-scale busing between Detroit and its suburbs. This case, Milliken v. Bradley, ended in 1974 with a 5–4 Supreme Court decision that banned busing across school district lines, with a passionate dissent by Justice Thurgood Marshall; that year also saw violent White resistance to a busing order in Boston.

“The Foul Odors of Blacks”

This chapter covers the post-Reconstruction period and the Supreme Court’s rejection of laws to protect Blacks’ use of “public accommodations” on an equal basis with Whites, and the Court’s later upholding of Jim Crow laws that required segregation of Blacks and Whites. Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, barring discrimination against Blacks’ access to places such as restaurants, theaters, hotels, and railway coaches. Ruling in 1883 in five cases from Kansas, California, Tennessee, New York, and Missouri under the caption of Civil Rights Cases, the Court struck down the “public accommodations” provision, holding that “private” businesses could not be regulated without a showing of “state action” in their operation. This ruling drew a sharp dissent from Justice John Marshall Harlan, who argued that businesses serving the public are subject to regulation. The chapter also recounts violent White resistance to Black voting, with South Carolina senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman as leader of a White group known as Red Shirts in murdering Blacks. The chapter concludes with discussion of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1895, holding that Louisiana could provide “separate but equal” railway coaches for Blacks and Whites, over another solitary dissent by Justice Harlan, arguing the Constitution is “color-blind” and protects Blacks from state-imposed discrimination.

“Fighting for White Supremacy”

This chapter covers the years of Reconstruction from 1865 until its end in 1877. It discusses adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, President Lincoln’s assassination after praising the amendment’s granting of Black voting rights, adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, granting Blacks the “equal protection of the laws,” and adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869, providing federal enforcement of Black voting rights. Congress also established the Freedmen’s Bureau to assist newly freed Blacks, especially in setting up schools for Black children, although only one-fifth actually attended school. It also discusses the violent White resistance to Black voting, led by hooded nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan, and the massacre on Easter Sunday in 1873 of some two hundred Blacks in Colfax, Louisiana, murdered by Whites after Blacks were elected as sheriff and other officials. Three White men were convicted of participation in the massacre, but the Supreme Court reversed the convictions in United States v. Cruikshank in 1876, opening the door to the end of Reconstruction after the “stolen election” that year ended with Rutherford Hayes as a Republican president who capitulated to southern demands that federal troops withdraw from slave states, paving the way for Black disenfranchisement and restoration of White control.

The Prevention of Schoolhouse to Jailhouse

Chapter 4 documents the development of the Mississippi Delta Catalyst Roundtable to reform a deeply racist and abusive juvenile justice system and to build power in Black communities. It stresses the importance of grounding the national movement in African American communities in the South. It shows how these groups created models to combine community organizing with legal strategies and advocacy work in ways that centered the leadership of groups rooted in communities of those most impacted. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the critical importance of statewide and national networks to support local organizing carried out by small groups facing entrenched systems of oppression. It shows how people most impacted by injustice facing powerful white resistance spoke out and used intergenerational community organizing to confront systemic racism. Combining deep local organizing and national support, they made important breakthroughs and helped inspire a new racial justice movement.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the two major arguments of The Bible Told Them So. First, the book argues that many southern white evangelicals who resisted the civil rights movement were animated by a Christian faith influenced by biblical exegesis that deemed racial segregation as divinely ordered. A complete understanding of southern white resistance to civil rights requires wrestling with this unique hermeneutic. Second, The Bible Told Them So argues that segregationist theology did not cease with the political achievements of the civil rights movement. Instead, in the years after 1965, segregationist Christianity evolved and persisted in new forms that would become mainstays of southern white evangelicalism by the 1970s: colorblind individualism and a heightened focus on the family.

On the Ballot in 2020: Will the United States (finally) embrace civil rights?

This article situates the 2020 presidential election within the context of U.S. history, specifically the longstanding relationship between white supremacist views and what types of U.S. citizens were considered capable of exercising democratic citizenship. I argue that President Trump's use of racialized, nativist tropes must be understood within that context and the ongoing backlash to the advancement of civil rights in the United States. White resistance to racial progress is not new, nor is the violence associated with it. Only by looking at the intersection of white racial resentment and modern sexism can we fully understand the durability of the Trump coalition. The article closes by considering what political scientists should be learning from this moment in order to better explain American political dynamics moving forward.

Introduction

The introduction traces the intertwined history of racism and poverty in Mississippi and describes how civil rights activists used these experiences in shaping their fight for racial justice. It outlines the central argument of the book, explaining that from 1965 to 1973, there was both a war against poverty and a war against the war on poverty in Mississippi. The war on poverty provided a powerful tool for black empowerment, drawing on the vitality of Mississippi’s civil rights movement. At the same time, the fight against the war on poverty served as a template for white resistance and entrenchment, and as a way to undermine liberalism, marginalize black political power, and articulate a new conservatism.

The War on Poverty in Mississippi

When President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty arrived in Mississippi in 1965, it was met with a ferocious response. The federally-funded war against poverty—the embodiment of 1960s liberalism—clashed explosively with Mississippi’s closed society. In the years between 1965 and 1973, the opposing forces of the war against poverty and a war against the war on poverty transformed the state. Through a state-level history of the war on poverty, this book traces the attempts of white and black Mississippians to utilize antipoverty programs to address the desperate poverty in the state. The war on poverty was, at times, a powerful tool for black empowerment. But more often, antipoverty programs became a potent mechanism of white resistance to black advancement. Through the war on poverty, both black activism and white opposition to black empowerment evolved following the momentous events of 1964. White Mississippians used massive resistance as a template for resistance to black economic empowerment, forging antipoverty programs into tools to marginalize black political and economic power. This book traces the grassroots war against the war on poverty that laid the foundation for the fight against 1960s liberalism, as Mississippi became a national model for resistance to social change through its evolving resistance to the war on poverty that lay at the heart of the emerging new conservatism. Many white Mississippians forged this resistance into the political, economic, and social structures of the state, contributing to the development of the state’s Republican Party and articulating a new conservatism.