>From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>
>Nathan wrote:
>>The overall theme is that the present court is using judicial review
>>to attack a range of federal civil rights laws and are replicating
>>the history from the 19th century when the courts killed
>>Reconstruction.
>
>-Nathan, you draw a wrong lesson from your own paper, if you focus
>-your fire on courts and judicial review. As you write yourself, "The
>-ultimate bulwark of white supremacy was _violence_" (emphasis added,
>-Nathan Newman and J. J. Gass, "A New Birth of Freedom: The Forgotten
>-History of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments," 2004,
>-<http://www.brennancenter.org/resources/ji/ji5.pdf>, p. 16), and what
>-sealed the fate of Blacks was that "control of federal power shifted
>-from pro-civil-rights Radical Republicans to _the party's
>-pro-business faction_" (emphasis added, p. 19):
>
>But what allowed the violence to go unpunished? Federal law made
>Klan violence illegal after the Civil War and was actually quite
>successful in rooting it out during President Grant's first term--
>1869-1873. The 1872 election was conducted with relatively little
>violence and blacks voted in mass numbers and were elected to office
>across the South.
>
>So what changed? As the paper documents, what changed was that the
>US Supreme Court struck down the Reconstruction Enforcement laws as
>unconstitutional. In Colfax, Louisiana in 1873, 100 blacks were
>murdered as they defended their right to vote. The Supreme Court
>declared that the ringleaders for this violence could not be
>prosecuted under federal law. This meant that white supremacists
>could launch terrorist murder across the South and the federal
>government could do nothing to stop it.
It wasn't the Constitution and the Supreme Court that destroyed Black Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln didn't let the Constitution or the Supreme Court or anything else stop him from waging the war as he wanted. Had the North had the political will to do so, it would have refused to demobilize the Union Army ("The Union Army is quickly demobilized. From a troop strength of one million on May 1, only 152,000 Union soldiers remain in the South by the end of 1865" ["Reconstruction Timeline: 1863-1866," <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/states/sf_timeline.html>]), placed the South under the Union Army's military dictatorship for a decade or so, confiscated all land of the big Confederate land owners, and redistributed it to Blacks and poorer whites in the South to break the economic base of white terror that would later culminate in the Colfax massacre and other atrocities. -- Yoshie
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