The Militant - January 17, 2011 -- Class origins of White Citizens’ Councils

Vol. 75/No. 2 January 17, 2011

Class origins of White
Citizens’ Councils

The following excerpt is from Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. In a 2001 talk titled “Jim Crow, the Confederate Battle Flag, and the Fight for Land,” Barnes describes the roots of white supremacist organizations like the White Citizens’ Councils in the defeat of the southern slaveholders by the northern industrial capitalists in the U.S Civil War and the common goal of both to prevent any successful challenge to class exploitation by working people, Black or white. Copyright © 2009 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY JACK BARNES
Communist workers must take seriously the history of current struggles by farmers who are Black. We need to recognize their place in an ongoing continuity reaching back to the U.S. Civil War and Radical Reconstruction—the Second American Revolution—and the decades of reaction that followed in the countryside, towns, and cities across the South.

Many of these farmers are fighting to continue cultivating land that their kin have farmed for generations. For a Black family in the U.S. South to have held onto land for that long means that previous generations fought and survived the lynch-mob terror of organized white-supremacist night riders that continued, and often accelerated, in the wake of the defeat of post-Civil War Radical Reconstruction. This came closer to fascist violence on a broad scale, and over an extended period, than anything else ever seen in this country.

In the decade following the defeat of the slavocracy in 1865, the rising northern industrial bourgeoisie—now reknitting links with power landholding, commercial, and emerging manufacturing interests across the South—settled once and for all that it had no intention of meeting the aspirations of freed slaves for the radical land reform captured by the popular demand for “forty acres and a mule.” Doing so, first of all, would have deprived these exploiters of a cheap supply of jobless laborers. What’s more, the bourgeoisie correctly feared that an alliance of free farmers, Black and white, together with the growing manufacturing and machinofacturing working class in the cities, could pose a strong challenge to intensifying exploitation in town and country, North and South.

In 1877 the U.S. rulers withdrew federal troops from the states of the old Confederacy. These troops had been armed force of last resort standing between the freed Black toilers, on the one hand, and gangs of well-armed, reactionary vigilantes, on the other. Throughout the closing decades of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, successive generations of organizations such as the Knight of the White Camelia, the White League, the Klu Klux Klan, the White Citizens’ Councils, and many others—named, unnamed, or renamed—carried out an unrelenting reign of terror against the Black population in the South.

This systematic violence helped the capitalists drive toilers who were Black into virtual peonage as sharecroppers and tenant farmers and made it possible for Jim Crow segregation to be imposed and codified into state law in one southern state after another. These gangs were also organized to break the spirit of any class-conscious worker or farmer anywhere in the South who wasn’t Black—“nigger lovers”—and to prevent them linking up arms with toilers who were Black in common struggles for land, for public education, for cheap credit and railway rates, for labor union rights, or anything else in the interests of the oppressed and exploited.

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