Vol. 79/No. 26      July 27, 2015

The rapid move by bourgeois politicians of all stripes to take down the emblem of racist terror came in the wake of the massacre of nine people at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist, and the broad outrage that act provoked.

As the South Carolina government was preparing to remove the flag, a debate broke out in the House of Representatives on a proposal to affirm, in an amendment to a spending bill, that the same flag could be flown in national cemeteries on Confederate Memorial Day, recognized in nine states, and portrayed on souvenirs in National Park gift shops. Republican House Speaker John Boehner stopped the debate, which was so out of step with national politics. He set the entire bill aside July 9 and called for a review of Confederate symbols and memorabilia.

In a July 9 address to the City Council, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu called for the removal of monuments to Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and to Jefferson Davis, president of the pro-slavery Confederate States of America.

Landrieu also called for removing the Battle of Liberty Place monument, a memorial to the vigilante White League, which carried out a short-lived coup against Louisiana’s Reconstruction government in 1874.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, called June 23 for taking down the statue of Jefferson Davis from the Kentucky state Capitol.

In South Carolina, the removal of the Confederate battle flag rekindled the demand to remove a prominent statue of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, governor and then U.S. senator from 1890 until 1918, from the statehouse grounds. Tillman was a white supremacist terrorist who led the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction in the state. His Red Shirt vigilantes lynched seven African-Americans on July 8, 1876. A few weeks later he presided over the assassination of State Sen. Simon Coker, who was Black.

This is a national discussion. About 350 took part in a “March of Solidarity for the Charleston Nine” in Seattle July 7 sponsored by the First AME Church, the NAACP, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and others. Speakers supported the removal of the Confederate battle flag in South Carolina and called for renaming the Jefferson Davis Highway in Washington state.

Truth about Reconstruction

“The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about,” Loewen wrote.

But “the noose” — lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan and the South Carolina Red Shirts and the Louisiana Knights of the White Camelia and their ilk — was no parenthetical factor in the rewriting of history. It was the motor force.

The Civil War began in reality in the 1850s when Kansas farmers fought off bands of mercenary thugs sent by the slave-owning oligarchy in the South over whether that territory would become a free or slave state. The Republican Party was born out of that conflict.

After Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, the slaveholders in seven states orchestrated secession from the United States, and in April 1861 fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, beginning a bloody four-year war that ended in victory against the slavocracy.

For a number of years following 1867, in South Carolina in particular, the exploited rural producers, led by Blacks, established popular revolutionary Radical Reconstruction governments in the states of the former Confederacy. These governments took steps in the interests of freed slaves, small farmers and other working people. Federal troops were present to enforce the rights of the freed slaves, and popular militias were formed composed of Blacks and Caucasians.

The defeat of Reconstruction required a bloody counterrevolution led by the gangs of racist lynchers. They were given the green light by the country’s capitalist rulers, who withdrew federal troops from the South in 1877, fearing the growing alliance of freed slaves, small farmers and the emerging industrial working class.

The resulting Jim Crow segregation, which included ideological rationalization of its racist terror in history books and public monuments, lasted until a powerful proletarian-led Black movement dealt it a death blow in the middle of the last century.

Today the change in consciousness in the U.S. population, including in the South, a product of decades of Black struggle, has kindled a desire to tell the truth about the history of that struggle, and an urgency to do so.

Mary Martin in Seattle contributed to this article.
 
 
Related articles:
‘Removal of Confederate battle flag is victory for working class’
How Black struggle has strengthened working class
Family protest no charges in killing by Georgia cop
 
 
 
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