> -----Original Message-----
> From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
> On Behalf Of Nathan Newman
> Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 6:32 AM
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] End of Black Reconstruction (was Why I Hate Courts
> --orhow judicial review destroyed the country)
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Charles Brown" <cbrown at michiganlegal.org>
>
> -Seems to me the level of open terrorist rule in post-Reconstruction US is
> as
> -much or more as in Fascist Italy, and there should be a revision of
> history
> -by which the US is declared fascist in this period.
>
> I'm not sure what is gained by using a term that is poorly defined in the
> modern era. At the federal level, it's not really accurate, since the
> Klan-based terror was in opposition to federal power. As for the state
> governments, why not just call them "terrorist-backed states." It has a
> hell of a lot more resonance in modern vocabularies.
>
> -- Nathan Newman
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
> <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk> >
>
>
> 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.
>
> So by 1874 and 1876, blacks were largely no longer able to vote except in
> smaller numbers due to that violence, so Democrats first took over the
> Congress and then got more votes for the Presidency. It was only at
> that
> point that the pro-business Republicans could argue that a civil rights
> agenda was hopeless, they no longer had a base in the South, so new
> political calculations had to be made. (And remember, pro-civil rights
> Republicans would continue to be nominated; they just couldn't do anything
> at the federal level).
>
> The point of the story is that that the political shift in the Republicans
> came AFTER the Court killed the Reconstruction laws. History tends to
> focus on the deal in 1876, but the fate of Reconstruction had already been
> sealed by the Cruikshank and Reese decisions, since blacks de facto were
> going to have no chance to vote or defend their civil rights in any case,
> whoever controlled the federal government.
>
> One of my points is that liberalism has obscured this history-- in the
> Progressive Era, they ignored it because they wanted to make common cause
> with white racists in the South on economic issues, and then wanted to
> obscure it because they were defending court power under the Warren Court.
> But it was the Supreme Court before the Civil War that struck down the
> Missouri Compromise as unconstitutional and allowed slaves into every
> territory, thereby precipitating the Civil War.
>
> And it was the Supreme Court after the Civil War that made the Klan's
> violence untouchable by federal law enforcement, thereby dooming
> Reconstruction.
>
> And it was the Supreme Court that would block progressive economic
> legislation for decades in the Lochner Era. I've never seen a good
> analysis on this question, but in the whole "Why No Socialism in the US"
> debate, the role of the Court in making socialist policies nearly
> impossible to enact for decades should be part of the calculus.
>
> -- Nathan Newman
>
>
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