Although the KKK targetted Catholics and Jews, their main fascist terror was directed against African-Americans. This U.S. fascism , arising coincident with U.S. imperialist phase of capitalism, was a pre-Italian fascism, but it was open terrorism. Cui bono ? The newly formed financial oligarchy, just as in 1930's Europe.
Charles Brown
>>> "Charles Brown" <charlesb at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> 05/22 11:30 AM >>>
> J Cullen wrote:
Huck Finn came out in 1884, when slaves had been freed but when the Ku Klux Klan was terrorizing freed slaves as well as carpetbaggers and other liberal whites in the South in an attempt to turn back Reconstruction. I believe Clemens had moved west by that time, but he still was a Southerner who was effectively repudiating his upbringing in "Huck Finn" while Harriet Beecher Stowe was a Yankee who had no such emotional investment (not to take anything away from her work).
Within a dozen years of the publication of Huck Finn, most of the Southern states, with Confederate veterans back in control, had adopted segregation laws that one might say reimposed slavery without making the masters responsible for the upkeep of their black workers. The "Jim Crow" segregation laws were at least in part a reaction to efforts by the agrarian populists to make coalitions between black and white sharecroppers against the Southern Democratic establishment.>
>>Charles comments>>
>> I think Jim Crow was fascism for Black people in the U.S. 20th Century America is discussed as if it is democratic and free of fascism, but this is misleading. The fact that the KKK were sort of rural without methods of mass destruction like the Nazis does not mean that their spot terror did not constitute open and effective terrorist rule objectively in the interest of the U.S. ruling class, which was at that time becoming imperialist bourgeoisie.
Also, Jim Crow lasted for a much longer time than Nazism.>>