re: Lee Circle bead lady getting death threats

quote:

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No, he wasn't.

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And yet you link a letter from him that is an offer of reconciliation. Moreover, it's only one of many efforts to promote reconciliation that could be cited.

in re your other posts:

True, the South's offer to reconcile did not include terms of racial equality, but this idea that after 1867, or so, the South became the segregationist bastion that it was by 1920 is simply not true. In fact, the political cooperation of whites and blacks in the late 1880s and 1890s was the prime motivation for the disfranchisement campaigns of the turn-of-the-century. You should read C. Vann Woodward's Strange Career of Jim Crown (which was drafted originally as his address as a Fleming Lecturer at LSU). And the North's campaigns against the Plains Indians, their efforts to exclude Chinese immigration, their beliefs that the Filipinos were "incapable" of governing themselves in such a "savage" state, that the Hawaiian peoples were inferior, and that the Cubans were childlike and required something like the Platt Amendment to ensure their survival as a stable republic all combined to keep the North from raising strenuous objections to the South's efforts to subjugate African Americans (though this part of the equation was over-emphasized by Woodward in his Origins of the New South). Frankly, whites in the US really didn't give a shite at the time.

Your arguments about sharecropping and the crop-lien system are true, but those institutions weren't developed merely as an alternative to the enslaved labor system. They developed as a practical solution to a real problem: one group - whites - owned the land and the capital; another group - blacks - owned the labor. Both sides needed the other to make the system work. Once Johnson declared general amnesty and the idea of land redistribution was quashed, the stage was set for an accommodation. The institution did indeed become an evil one that trapped both sides in a regressive economic cycle, but to imply that they were somehow dreamed up as substitutes for slavery is asinine.