Vol. 79/No. 13      April 13, 2015

The Second American Revolution, which defeated the slaveholders, led to Radical Reconstruction governments across the South, with South Carolina having a majority Black legislature. By 1870, the fight to pass the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution had been won and Blacks and other toilers began to use the right to emancipation, citizenship and suffrage to fight for equal rights and better social conditions. Important gains were won, including public education, medical care for the poor and universal male suffrage.

But none of the Radical Reconstruction governments had both the will and power to expropriate the big plantation owners and enforce a far-reaching land reform. Blacks and their Caucasian allies faced growing violence from the Ku Klux Klan and other racist gangs. Blacks were blocked from land ownership, systematically driven into sharecropping to profit the plantation bosses.

In 1877 Radical Reconstruction was overthrown. Northern industrial and banking capital feared a potential alliance between Blacks, farmers and the growing working class in the North. They backed a deal between the Democratic and Republican parties to withdraw Union troops from the South, accelerating the reign of terror by the Klan and other racist gangs.

This bloody defeat of Radical Reconstruction was the worst setback suffered not only by African-Americans but the entire U.S. working class in its history. It was sealed in the South by the reign of Jim Crow.

Lynchings were a key part of establishing and enforcing Jim Crow rule. Blacks were systematically stripped of their rights. To exact the most terror, some lynchings were organized as public affairs.

Some 400,000 Blacks served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War I. Expecting equal treatment and democratic rights upon their return, they had to confront the Jim Crow segregation system still in place. As Blacks expressed their dignity and resisted, racist lynchings were the response.

“In 1919, a white mob in Blakely, Georgia, lynched William Little, a soldier returning from World War I, for refusing to take off his Army uniform,” the report notes.

In 1919 there were racist riots against African-Americans in Chicago and 24 other cities. Two years later racist mobs in Tulsa, Oklahoma, rioted against African-Americans, killing an estimated 100 to 300 people and destroying more than 1,200 houses.

In the 1920s the Klan grew rapidly in Indiana and other parts of the North where it targeted Catholics as well as Blacks. Grand Dragon David Stephenson organized a secret autonomous grouping within the Indiana Klan known as the Military Machine, which had a quarter-million members.

Organizers of sharecroppers’ unions among exploited Black laborers in the South in the 1930s were also targeted.

Other racial and ethnic minorities faced lynchings, including Mexicans, Native Americans, Italians and Chinese. “From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans,” reported the New York Times, with “local authorities and deputized citizens playing particularly conspicuous roles” in this effort.

Lynchings began to decline in the 1930s and especially the ’40s and ’50s. Blacks returned from military service in World War II and the Korean War were increasingly willing to resist and were trained in the use of arms.

Anti-lynching bill never passed

Though Black rights’ groups fought for Congress to pass an anti-lynching bill, they were never successful. Bourgeois politicians in the North and West, especially in the Democratic Party, which rested on a bloc of big city political machines in the North, union support and Dixiecrats in the South, went along with arguments that “such legislation constituted racial ‘favoritism’ and violated states’ rights,” the report said.

“Not a single white person was convicted of murder for lynching a black person in America during this period,” the report noted, “and of all lynchings committed after 1900, only 1 percent resulted in a lyncher being convicted of a criminal offense.”

The mass Black-led proletarian movement that erupted in the 1950s, with battles in the streets — from Birmingham to Selma, Alabama — overthrew forever Jim Crow segregation. By the end of the 1960s, lynchings were virtually eliminated.

Finally, in 2005 the U.S. Senate apologized for not outlawing lynchings.

The revolutionary movement that toppled Jim Crow pushed back racism, strengthening the self-confidence of Blacks and the entire working class.

Some liberals and petty-bourgeois radicals argue that the racism the bosses promote in a never-ending effort to divide the working class and superexploit Blacks — reflected in the large percentage of Blacks incarcerated in recent decades, higher unemployment for Black workers, cop brutality — signifies the rise of a “new Jim Crow.” But nothing could be further from the truth.

Under Jim Crow, Blacks were legally prohibited from sitting together on a bus with Caucasians, drinking from the same water fountain, voting and much more. The racist regime was enforced by lynchings and violence. Bringing this back would take a bloody counterrevolution that working people today would never accept.

Blacks and the working class as a whole are in a stronger position today to fight to overthrow capitalism and the racism it fosters, standing on the shoulders of the gains of the 1950s and ’60s.  
 
 
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