The So-Called “Civil War”

 

By Steven Halpern

While I’ve read a few books on the Civil War, I don’t consider myself an expert on that enormous conflict. Currently I’m reading W.E.B. DuBois book Black Reconstruction in America. For me, this book puts the history of the Civil War, as well as its aftermath in a unique, and convincing framework. 

We can begin by asking the question: Was the Civil War, in actuality, a civil war? Certainly, many if not all historians of this war view it as a “war between the states.” According to this logic, more soldiers died in the Civil War than in any other war in the history of the United States. What are the facts?

The confederate states seceded from the United States and established another country. The government of that country established its own monetary system. This was clear evidence that the government of the confederacy wanted to break all ties with the U.S. government. Therefore, only the soldiers in the Union Army who died in the war were fighting a war that was loyal to this country. In fact, there were more U.S. soldiers who died in the Second World War than the number of Union soldiers who died in the Civil War.  

Then there is the question: What was the primary cause of the Civil War? DuBois gave a considerable amount of evidence showing that at the beginning of the war the primary issue was the secession of the confederate states from the Union. The confederate army attacked the Union at Fort Sumpter and was preparing to go to war. The aim was to subjugate the government in Washington to the will of the slave owning government.

Throughout the 19th century, up until the election of Abraham Lincoln for President, the slave owners, in essence, controlled all three branches of the federal government. They wanted the western lands to be governed by slave owners. They drove through the Fugitive Slave Act that required the northern state governments to aid slave catchers in apprehending escaped slaves. They even controlled the Postmaster General who prohibited abolitionist literature from being sent through the mail.

With the election of Lincoln, the slave owners understood that they were losing control of the government, as well as their way of life. While Lincoln was no abolitionist, he clearly was no servant to the slave owners. That point of view was intolerable to the government officials of the confederacy.

Initially the goals of the confederate army appeared to be realizable. The army of the slave owners defeated the Union Army in the first battles. All this army needed to do was to march into Washington DC and take control of the capitol. Then the slave owners might force the federal government to bow to its will. 

Even if the confederate army failed to take Washington, they thought that the Union Army would eventually give up in a war of attrition. General George McClellan was a commander of the Union Army and felt that the best his forces could do was to force the confederacy to make a deal with the government in Washington. McClellan advanced this perspective when he ran for President against Lincoln during the Civil War.

However, there was one persistent problem the slave owners weren’t thinking about. This was the fact that the confederate army was dependent on Black slaves for their food as well as for the income they would get from cash crops. These slave owners understood that there were racist attitudes against Blacks in the north. For these and other reasons, the slave owners had the seemingly insane idea that the slaves would prefer a life of slavery, rather than taking a chance to become free. 

Today many people are aware of the slave rebellions of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner. Many people are also aware the fact that about 250,000 Black soldiers fought in the Union Army. What most people are unaware of is what DuBois called the “General Strike.”

During the Civil War between 500,000 and 700,000 Black slaves left the slave labor camps and joined the Union forces. DuBois reported that initially Union officers sent slaves back to the slave labor camps. Then many of those officers began to understand that if they accepted the escaped slaves into their ranks, this would benefit the Union Army in many ways.

For a moment, we might think the reality those slaves experienced. That reality convinced them to leave the slave labor camps. An excellent summary of those conditions is included in Edward E. Baptist’s book The Half Has Never Been Told – Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

Capitalists are routinely driven to accomplish two goals. These are to sell more and more commodities and to cut costs. For the slave owner, this meant that they needed to continually coerce slaves to produce more and more using horrendous and unimaginable means of torture. 

For Black women slavery was even worse. Rape by slave owners was routine. Then the slave owners forced Black women to have sex with men to produce children that would be profitable. The slave owners would even enslave their own children to maximize their profits. 

This was the environment that caused hundreds of thousands of slaves to leave the plantations. Most of those slaves did not know how to read. The slave laws stated that if a slave was caught learning how to read, that so-called crime could be punished by death. 

Allow me to speculate on something that DuBois didn’t write about in his important book. In the Union Army there was a minority of soldiers who supported the idea of the abolition of slavery. However, most of those soldiers didn’t support abolition, and we might add that most probably had racist attitudes against Black people.

However, we might imagine the reaction of many of those Union soldiers when they looked at the escaped slaves, as well as the scars on their backs from the whippings those slaves endured. We might imagine the reaction of those rank-and-file soldiers when they learned of all the horrendous experiences of those slaves, as well as their determination to defeat the confederacy. Then, the Union soldiers realized that they had a real cause to defeat the army that was dedicated to perpetuating those horrors. 

So, the General Strike of the escaped slaves transformed the Civil War. Abolitionists in the North mobilized to support the escaped slaves. Workers in Britain opposed slavery and mobilized in opposition to the British capitalists who supported the confederacy. Instead of producing food and cash crops for the confederacy, the escaped slaves tended the hospitals, built fortifications, farmed land, and became spies for the Union. Then about 250,000 Black soldiers fought for the Union at a time when those soldiers were essential to a Union victory.

Most histories of the Civil War center on the experiences of men. However, when we look at the essential contribution of Black people to the Union victory, I believe we can also say that the contribution of Black women was indispensable. Those women tended the wounded in the hospitals, they farmed the land, they worked as spies giving essential information to the Union Army. They gave invaluable support to Black men, but were also known for protesting when they were abused.       

The Russian Revolution

Just as the General Strike of the slaves in the Civil War was central to the Union Victory, the general strike of Russian workers in 1917 was central to the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution.

By the year 1917, literally millions of Russian soldiers died in the First World War. The war also caused conditions of famine in the cities. Russia was ruled by a czar who had absolute power and dissolved the Russian parliament known as the Duma. 

Under those conditions, the workers organized the Soviets or workers councils to defend their interests through mass action. So, under these conditions workers throughout the cities went on strike. Initially they arrested the czar. Then, after the Bolsheviks advanced the demands of Peace, Bread, and Land, as well as All Power to the Soviets, the working class ousted the provisional government and put the Soviets in power.

Many historians argued that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was “spontaneous.” In his History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky argued against that point of view. Trotsky argued that the masses of Russian workers and soldiers were determined to bring about profound change. That movement was so powerful that workers risked their lives for a chance at this change. Soldiers, who were under orders to murder the workers, refused to obey those orders. Instead, they arrested the officers who gave those orders.

So, how was the Russian Revolution in any way similar to the experience of the escaped slaves? 

Although many of the salves and Russian workers were illiterate, they were conscious of the fact that they were determined to bring about profound change. That iron will of the slaves and Russian workers transformed the world.

Most historians write about history from the point of view of the political officials, military officers, or the capitalists who have obscene amounts of money. However, revolutions happen because of a determined effort by toilers to bring about profound change. Understanding that point of view, we can say that the so-called Civil War was, in reality, the second revolution of the United States. With all its many limitations, it succeeded in removing the slave owners from political power in this country.

As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin argued in his pamphlet State and Revolution, the state was invented for capitalism as a “special instrument of repression.” So, while the Civil War removed slave owners from power, workers continue to be slaves to the system of wages. Central to the history of capitalism in the United States has been the discrimination against Black people who have lived here for hundreds of years.   

Clearly Abraham Lincoln, in spite of his many limitations played an important part in bringing about the defeat of the confederacy. Clearly, the Bolsheviks also played a leadership role in the Russian Revolution. However, without the mass movements of escaped slaves, as well as the Russian working class, both the Civil War and the Bolshevik Revolution would have been defeated.

In W.E.B. DuBois’ book Black Reconstruction in America, he went on to outline what happened after the Civil War. On the one hand the Constitution was amended to abolish slavery, give everyone “equal rights,” as well as voting rights. 

But then, by the year 1877 the federal government decided in effect to give political power in the former slave states to the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, Black people lost the citizenship rights they gained after the Civil War.

I wrote about that period in my review of Peter Camejo’s book Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861-1877: The rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction. While that is an important book, I plan to write another blog about what DuBois had to say about that period.

The U.S. Government is Scrambling in an Effort to Go Into Deeper Debt

By Steve Halpern

Nearly every year the government threatens to shut down because government officials can’t agree on a budget. Whatever agreement these paid government employees reach never favors the working class over corporate interests. However, this year there is a new wrinkle in this insidious game.

Apparently, there is a law that prohibits the government from borrowing more than $31.4 trillion. The Biden Administration apparently is using “extraordinary measures” that would allow the government to borrow more than that amount. What are those “extraordinary measures”? This is what the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

“It is predicted that even if Congress and the White House did not reach an agreement, the Treasury Department would prioritize debt service payments ahead of social spending.”

The Inquirer also commented on what might happen if the government fails to make their debt service payments.

“Federally backed debt is the backbone of the domestic and global markets. A failure to make good on U.S. borrowing could set off panic on Wall Street and spark millions of job losses.”

So, a legitimate question to ask is, What the——is going on here?

For me, a good place to start is with the question: What is a bank?

The universities and the pro-capitalist news media argue that banks finance corporations and that this financing allows most corporations to function. I have a different answer to that question.

The working class of the world produces all wealth. Corporations hire workers because the source of corporate profits comes from the labor of the workers all over the world. 

Corporations then use some of the surplus derived from human labor and give that surplus to banks in interest on the money they borrowed. All banks in the world depend on that interest on investments for their survival. 

When we understand these basic facts, it become clear that banks, in effect, never finance anything. Banks exist because of the surplus derived from the labor of the working class of the world. So, the money banks use to supposedly finance corporations is, in effect, money that was routinely taken from the workers who produce all the goods and services in the world.

So, understanding these facts, why would the government need to borrow more than $31.4 trillion in order to function. How and why would this effect the global economy of the capitalist world?

When we understand that all banks and corporations exist because of the labor of the working class, we can see that the system of capitalism is, in essence, a continuous struggle between capitalists and workers. 

Capitalists have three fundamental goals. These are to sell more and more commodities, and to cut costs. Because they need to continually grow, they are driven to support governments that are continually driven to dominate the entire world.

Workers, on the other hand, need and want goods and services throughout our lives. So, the needs of workers are in continual contradiction with the essence of what capitalism is all about. This explains why employers have essentially absolute control over what we do during the time we work for them on the job. 

While government officials claim they represent all of our interests, their current crisis is clear evidence of the government’s determined effort to serve banking interests before the interests of the working class.

I believe a bit of background to this crisis is useful. Responding to a previous so-called banking crisis, President Obama gave banks literally trillions of dollars in what his administration called quantitative easing. President Trump continued to give banks trillions of dollars in 2020 following the lead of Obama. Obama and Trump got that enormous amount of money by allowing the Treasury Department to print the money. Yet today, the government is faced with a shut-down because they need to borrow more from banks. 

Why would all of this effect the economy of the world?

Before the first and Second World Wars, Britain was the dominant capitalist power in the world. During those two world wars, the world’s superpower became the United States. Those wars were responsible for the deaths of about eighty million people.

Then, in 1944 before the end of the Second World War was over, the United States invited nations from around the world to a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. In that conference United States government and economic officials announced that they would be the new superpower of the world. The dollar and not the pound would be the dominant currency of the world.

Then, during the war against Vietnam, the U.S. government discovered that it didn’t have enough money to pay for that war. They responded by taking the dollar off the gold standard. Because the dollar was the international currency, nations from around the world invested their surplus in U.S. government bonds. These measures helped finance the wars against Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as the continuous massive funding of the military.

Today, workers routinely depend on banks in our day to day lives. Our salaries are drawn from banks accounts. We get the cash we use from machines operated by banks. Most of us are in debt to banks because of credit cards, home, and or auto loans. While the banks profit handsomely from these loans, they never, ever actually produce the goods and services we need and want. Yet the government is fully prepared to compromise social programs to fund the debt servicing of banks. 

The current political and economic crisis of the government is clear evidence of how the capitalist system has no answers for the problems of workers all over the world. While there are four individuals who each own more than $100 billion, there are about 34 million people who don’t have enough to eat in this country. In the world, 30,000 children die of preventable diseases every day. 

This crisis also makes clear the fact that we need a worker’s government, rather than a government that makes a priority of debt servicing to banks. That government would make it their priority to ensure that everyone in the world has the goods and services we need, as well as many of the things we want.     

What Would a Socialist World Look Like?

By Steve Halpern

I’m writing this blog in January, at a time when many people think about making resolutions for the new year. Those resolutions are usually about some form of self-improvement aimed at giving an individual a better life. Well, allow me to take this discussion out of the usual context. In order to do this, I will begin by asking the question: What do we really want?

Certainly, there are many things we want and need during our entire lifetimes. These include food, clothing, housing, health care, education, transportation, communication, and exposure to cultural activities like music, art, literature, film, dancing etc. 

We are raised with the idea that in order to get these things, we need money. Most of us need to work for that money, and if we aren’t working, then we might be denied access to those goods and services. So, I have another question: Can humanity work towards giving everyone lifetime rights to all those goods and services? In order to answer these questions, a bit of history is useful.

Feudalism

There was a time in the history of the world when feudal monarchies ruled. In those years, peasants tilled the land and produced the food. Feudal monarchs relied on sheriffs to collect a portion of the food grown by the peasants. Failure to adapt to this system was met with violence.

With the surplus food derived from the peasants, there emerged craft guilds who did the skilled labor that produced commodities. Also, with that food, workers built castles, churches, and maintained standing armies. 

The feudal monarchs had real power, but they were constrained by the reality of what feudalism was. If the kings or queens didn’t allow the peasants to have enough food, there would be rebellions. If they didn’t tax the peasants enough, they might come under pressure from other monarchs, or from the armed forces of monarchies from other nations. Because of the violence of feudalism, a king or queen might lose their life if they failed to adopt to the reality of the feudal epoch.

Capitalism

Within the feudal system, a new class of people emerged. These people began to replace the guild system with a factory system based on mass production. For this new system to emerge, there needed to be many profound changes.

There needed to be a banking system, a parliamentary government, an educational system, a news media etc. This new capitalist system came in conflict with the established monarchies. The United States was established as a result of a revolution against the feudal monarchy of Britain. 

Today we can say that capitalism created a new reality that most feudal monarchs could not have imagined. Millions of cars, cell phones, and countless other commodities are produced every year. Those commodities are supported by literal armies of workers employed in sales, banking, insurance, advertising, as well as the so-called Defense Department. For the feudal monarch who relied on taxes paid by peasants, today’s capitalist world would appear to be unrecognizable.

However, just as the feudal monarch needed to adapt to that system, today’s capitalist, as well as their millions of supporters, need to adapt to what Karl Marx called the “coercive laws” of capital and competition. At the heart of capitalism is the drive for profits. Private employers will only hire workers if they believe that those workers will create a surplus that capitalists call profits. 

The fundamental problem with capitalism is that it needs to continually be obsessed with two priorities. One is to sell more and more commodities. A corporation that fails to do this will be put out of business by the larger corporation that can sell commodities at lower prices. The other priority is to cut costs. We see this in the move of manufacturing corporations leaving this country, and financing the construction of factories where wages might be ten dollars per day or less. 

All of this created an atmosphere where one nation dominates the politics and economics of the world. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was a leader of the Russian Revolution understood this reality and argued that “Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.” 

In the feudal system, monarchs needed to violently repress opposition to their rule. Lenin argued that with capitalism the state was created as a “special repressive force,” ultimately aimed at taking the fruits of the labor created by workers. That enormous surplus is routinely handed over to a tiny minority of capitalists. 

The wealth of the feudal world went to monarchies and religious clerics. In capitalism, the wealth created by workers goes to capitalists in profits, bankers in the form of interest, insurance companies, rents to landlords, advertising, corporate law firms, and money for the so-called Defense Department.

So, when we think of the actual production and distribution costs of commodities, those costs represent a tiny fraction of the prices we pay for commodities. The enterprises I listed above take the lion’s share of the money paid for commodities. 

When we look at the skyscrapers located in most large cities, we are looking at office buildings where people get dressed up every day to work at desks. Their jobs, for the most part, add no value to the goods and services we need and want. 

While the feudal monarchs needed to adapt to that system, the power brokers of capitalism need to adapt to the coercive laws of capital. So, there is no question that the hundreds of billions of dollars that are used in advertising every year, might be better used to feed the hundreds of millions of hungry people in the world.

In capitalism, failure to advertise, means a failure to grow the economy. If this doesn’t happen, there will be recessions and depressions where millions of workers will be thrown out of their jobs.

Because of the drive to continually cut costs, discrimination is a pillar that supports capitalist production. Black people have historically done the worst jobs for the lowest pay. After the legal discrimination of Jim Crow segregation was pushed aside by the civil rights movement, a new form of discrimination emerged. Michelle Alexander wrote her book, The New Jim Crow—Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This book documents how the entire so-called criminal justice system in this country targets African Americans. 

We were taught in school that the institution of slavery was abolished because of the Civil War. However, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution allows for slavery with respect to those who are “duly convicted” of a crime. Over 90% of those in prison today are there because of the plea-bargaining system. Rather than face long prison sentences, those accused of a crime, cop a plea to a lesser charge and a much shorter sentence. However, after these prisoners are released, they discover that it is almost impossible to find work with a prison sentence. 

Recently the Supreme Court declared that women in this country do not have the right to decide if and when they become mothers. That ruling only reenforces the systematic discrimination against women that has existed throughout the history of this country. There is also institutionalized discrimination against Latinos, and Native Americans. Immigrants have no rights in this country, in spite of the fact that no one has any control over where we are born. 

During the 1800s Frederick Engels wrote a book describing the horrendous conditions that existed for workers in Manchester, Britain. Today those conditions have clearly improved in that part of the world. So, there are many who argue that this is evidence that there is real progress in the capitalist system.

That argument neglects to mention that during the 1800s capitalism was in its infancy and was largely isolated to Britain. Today capitalism has spread its tentacles all over the world. When we consider that about 70% of the world’s population lives on $10 per day or less, there is an unescapable conclusion. Throughout its history the majority of those who live in the capitalist system, live in dire poverty.   

These are just some of the issues that the capitalist news media refuses to report on. Rarely, if ever, does the press report on the contradiction that there are four people have over $100 billion in assets, while billions live in poverty. The fact that this enormous amount of wealth exists, in the midst of dire poverty, has always been the essence of what capitalism is all about. 

So, while this is how the capitalist system works, we can begin to see how the fundamental problems we face could begin to be resolved with a socialist political economic system.

Socialism

While the power brokers of capitalism are driven to sell more and more, while cutting costs, a genuine workers government would have completely different priorities. This would be to provide everyone with the goods and services we all need and want. 

When we go shopping in supermarkets, we see how there is no shortage of food. In fact, much of the unused food is thrown out. What does this mean?

We work for employers so they can derive a profit. Then, we go to the store and pay prices that enable capitalists to profit again. The idea that we are in fact creating a surplus by working and that surplus could be used for the purchase of food is never mentioned.

As I’ve argued the skyscrapers in the cities can be seen as monuments of accumulated surplus that was derived from the working class of the world. Rather than continuing to support enterprises that contribute nothing to our wellbeing, a worker’s government would organize a discussion where we could plan an economy that would benefit everyone. This is how a genuine democracy could work. 

We could then go into the supermarket, get the food we need and want, and walk out without paying anyone. The price for the food would be paid for in the surplus derived from our labor. If we didn’t want to go to the supermarket, the food could be delivered to our home with no charge.

Eventually society would move towards developing and efficient mass transit system. However, that would only be part of the way to deal with transportation. A worker’s government could plan municipalities so that jobs, schools, shopping centers, and restaurants were all located in close proximity to where we live. When we would want to travel outside our local area, there could be high-speed rail networks that could get us to our destination faster, using less fuel, in a much safer way than with auto transport.

When we consider how to save fuel, we might think about insulating homes properly. This would radically reduce the amount of fuel we need. 

We can also consider how the vast resources of the capitalist world could be used to transform the health care system. Health care would become a lifetime right, free of charge, for everyone. The number of doctors could be tripled and massive funds could be used in research to cure diseases. However, today many people suffer and die because of curable diseases.  

However, these advances will only have real meaning if they are shared with everyone in the world. The United Nations reports that every day about 30,000 children die of preventable diseases. There are two primary causes of these deaths. 

One is the fact that many children in the world have no shoes. Parasites enter the feet of those children and their stomachs become bloated. Before the age of five, these children do not have the immunological systems that can fight off many infections. So, they develop diarrhea and die of dehydration. The other cause of many childhood deaths is exposure to infectious mosquitoes. 

So, we don’t need to have a degree in medicine to understand that the technology has existed for a long time to save the lives of all those children. This hasn’t happened because capitalist governments in the world are locked into a system where the accumulation of massive amounts of surplus value is seen as more important than saving the lives of 30,000 children every day.

The only way that a worker’s government will come to power is when a movement develops that makes the elimination of all forms of discrimination its top priority. That government would work towards rebuilding the least affluent neighborhoods first. Workers who had been discriminated against in the past would be given opportunities to have the best jobs. 

The government would also make it a priority to ensure that Black people, Latinos, Native Americans, Immigrants, and women were all represented in government. These representatives would have real power to establish how neighborhoods were rebuilt.

Today, capitalist enterprises routinely pollute the air, sea, and land. A worker’s government would make it their priority to end and reverse the pollution of the world. 

Commodities would be packaged in recyclable containers so they would not need to be disposed of. Food that would be thrown out could be used as mulch for gardens. Clearly, this would be an involved task, however, the first step in reversing the destruction of the environment is to develop the political will to do the job. The current capitalist system is about destroying the environment for the sake of maximizing profits.  

Conclusion

Unfortunately, a genuine worker’s representative government will not come about because of a debate between those who support capitalist versus socialist perspectives. Anti-capitalist revolutions erupted in Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cuba. The masses of people in those nations faced intolerable conditions and were open to those who advanced a revolutionary perspective. 

In Cuba we see a government that makes the needs of the people on the island, as well as people all over the world their priority. Ever since the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Cuba has given medical assistance to nations all over the world. Cuba also gave military support to Angola defending that nation from a South African supported invasion. That support paved the way for the overthrow of the apartheid government. So, while other nations that had anti-capitalist revolutions abandoned many of their socialist perspectives, Cuba remains true to its revolution. 

In the United States, 10% of the population or about 34 million people have about $1.2 million or more in assets. Yet the Department of Agriculture reports that a similar number of people are “food insecure,” meaning they have inadequate access to food. This gross disparity of wealth has always been routine to capitalism. However, the dire conditions that existed in the nations where there have been anti-capitalist revolutions haven’t existed in this country for a long time.

Today, the capitalist analysts argue that we are headed for a recession or depression. From a rational point of view, this doesn’t make any sense. There are adequate numbers of workers as well a natural resources to provide for everyone. However, because we live with capitalism, recessions and depressions are inevitable. 

All of this means that the debates between the Democratic and Republican parties are not about a debate about rational politics. Those debates merely reflect the style that capitalists will use to exploit the working class of the world. When we look at the politics of President Joe Biden, there is very little that distinguishes him from the politics of former President Donald Trump.

For me, all this means that we need to advance a perspective that argues for rational solutions to our problems. This means arguing against the perspectives advanced by all the pro-capitalist media outlets. As the Grenadian leader Maurice Bishop once argued, “Forward ever, backward never.”

Sundown Towns – A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

 

By James W. Loewen

The New Press, 2005, 2018

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

The late James W. Loewen was the author of the bestselling book, Lies My Teacher Told Me. That book is a documentary account of the falsifications contained in the American history textbooks most students are exposed to. However, Loewen believed that his book on the Sundown Towns was his most important work. Why did he feel this way?

Loewen gave the following definition of what he meant by a sundown town – “A sundown town is any organized jurisdiction that for decades kept African Americans or other groups from living in it and was thus ‘all white’ on purpose.” In his research Loewen confirmed that there were at least 184 towns in 32 states that had signs on their borders with the words, “N—word, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in __.” Among those towns, only seven were in the traditional South where Jim Crow segregation was the law. In all, Loewen estimated that there were about 10,000 towns across this country where there was a deliberate policy prohibiting all but a few, if any, Blacks from living there. 

So, when we think about the “Great Migration” of Black people out of the states where Jim Crow segregation was the law, we can also think about the sundown towns. Because racist mobs and city planners organized these towns to prevent Black people from living there, Blacks who left the South were effectively forced to move into the urban centers. While segregation has broken down to a certain extent, many Blacks continue to live in segregated neighborhoods of the inner cities.     

There have been many books about the system of Jim Crow segregation in the southern states, as well as the histories of thousands of lynchings. However, Loewen discovered that his book was the only documented history of sundown towns. Because this book gives us a new perspective on the history of this country, Loewen felt it was his most important work. Of the books by Loewen that I’ve read, I agree with that opinion. 

A history of sundown towns

After the Civil War there was a period of radical reconstruction where people who had powerful government positions favored doing away with the vestiges of slavery. Schools were set up in the former slave states. Many white and Black students learned to read for the first time. There were Black elected officials and Black players in the integrated baseball leagues of those days. 

W.E.B. DuBois was a talented African American student in the late 1800s and was raised by a single mother who was a maid. A collection was made in Western Massachusetts that enabled DuBois to attend college. He would go on to become one of the most profound leaders in the history of this country. This was another example of the sentiment that favored an end to discrimination.

In most histories I’ve read, this period ended in 1877. Loewen argued that the reconstruction sentiment vanished in 1890 with the state Constitution of Mississippi. At that time, the Democratic Party was known as the “White Man’s Party” and promoted a program of vicious racist discrimination. The Republican Party under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln organized for the military defeat of the slave owning army known as the confederacy. 

Several prominent republicans favored defending the rights of African Americans. However, by 1890 that sentiment vanished. In the South a system of Jim Crow segregation became the law. Jim Crow was always a flagrant violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that was supposed to be about “equal protection under the law.” However, the Supreme Court came up with decisions like Plessey v. Ferguson that favored Jim Crow and flagrantly violated the Constitution.

The system of Jim Crow was designed to force Black people to do the worst jobs for the lowest pay. Even an accusation that a Black person acted in any way that questioned this system, might be punished with a gruesome lynching. The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till was just one of the thousands of lynchings in this country.

James Loewen’s book on sundown towns reported on an entirely different style of vicious discrimination that erupted in the Northeast, Midwest, and West. Up until 1890, Black people lived in many of the towns in these areas. This discrimination was primarily aimed at Black people, but Jews, Mexicans, and Chinese citizens were also prohibited from living in many towns. 

During slavery times, Black slaves needed to have written permission to be out after dark. After slavery in the South, racists lynched Blacks in order to “keep them down.” In other parts of the country whites lynched Blacks to “drive them out.” 

Loewen argued that the years 1890 through 1940 were the “Nadir” in race relations in this country. While the Black and white population increased in the northern cities during those years, the Black populations in the sundown towns decreased. Loewen cited the statistics of Granite City Illinois as an extreme example of this. “from 1900 to 1970 Granite City, Illinois zoomed in population from 3,122 to 40,440, owing to skyrocketing employment, while its Black population fell from 154 to 6. Obviously, these growing cities had an abundance of new jobs—for whites.”

Loewen detailed what happened in Anna, Illinois that made it a sundown down. In 1909 a 24-year-old white woman named Anna Pelley was murdered in the town. A Black man named Will James was arrested for the murder, but the evidence against him was very weak. The sheriff, Frank Davis attempted to get James out of the vicinity to avoid the lynch mob that had been organized. He wasn’t successful and about a thousand onlookers viewed the lynching of Will James. 

Then, this mob drove the 30 to 40 Black people who had been living in Anna out of the town. Anna got the reputation of “Ain’t No N—words Allowed.” After 1909 few if any Black people lived in Anna, Illinois.  

We can also see how this racist sentiment included Chinese immigrants. The city council of Santa Ana, California passed a resolution in 1906 that called for “the fire department to burn each and every one of the said buildings known as Chinatown.” We might consider that Chinese immigrants did some of the indispensable work to build the transcontinental railroad. That railroad transformed this country and opened the western states for development. Yet by 1882 the federal government adopted the Chinese Exclusion Act that prohibited Chinese immigration for ten years.

We might recall that in the year 1985, the Police Department in the city of Philadelphia fired 10,000 rounds of ammunition into a home occupied by members of the organization MOVE. Then the police dropped a bomb on the home. The Fire Commissioner ordered the Fire Department to “Let the fire burn.” As a result, homes on three blocks adjoining the MOVE Home were engulfed in flames and destroyed. The parallels between the bombing of the MOVE home and the destruction of the Chinese homes in 1906 in Santa Ana, California are striking.  

Trayvon Martin

The title of a chapter in this book is “Enforcement.” The signs prohibiting Black people from entering towns was backed up with racist terror aimed at preventing Black people from even walking through these towns. The organization that enforced these illegal terrorist acts was the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had huge chapters, not only in the South, but throughout the northern states. 

In 1898, J.J. Wallace invited a Black man to do construction work in Norman, Oklahoma in 1898. This is how James Loewen described what happened next.

“The mayor and other whites beat up Wallace because of it and ran the African American out of town. Wallace sued the government, arguing lack of protection, but the court concluded that neither it nor the state could be expected to do anything about local sentiment—even though the mayor helped lead the attack.”

Loewen gave this summary of all the methods used to keep Black people out of sundown towns.

“When all else fails, after ordinances and covenants were declared illegal, when steering, discriminatory lending, and the like have not sufficed, when an African American family is not deterred by a community’s reputation—when they actually buy and move in—then residents of sundown towns and suburbs have repeatedly fallen back on violence and the threat of violence to keep communities white.” 

So, when we think about the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, we see how the circumstances surrounding this murder had a long history in this country. Zimmerman murdered Martin for merely walking in the neighborhood where he lived. While Zimmerman was found not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin, in the years of the Nadir (1890-1940) whites who murdered Black citizens for merely walking through sundown towns weren't even charged with a crime.  

Labor

One of the reasons racists used for prohibiting Blacks to live in sundown towns was the fact that employers attempted to use them as scabs or strike breakers. When white workers went on strike, employers oftentimes used Black workers to break the strike. Under those and other conditions, there were times when employers defended Black workers against racist mobs. 

However, one of the most important developments in the labor movement was the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.). This labor federation began to see the importance of recruiting Black workers. 

One of the unions in the CIO was the United Auto Workers Union (U.A.W.). The UAW leadership understood that it needed to organize the Ford, River Rouge plant located in Dearborn, Michigan if it would become a national union. Thousands of African American workers toiled in this plant and this was one of the best jobs Black people could get at this time in the country.

The UAW proved that it could be an effective representative of Black workers by making significant stands against Jim Crow and other forms of racist discrimination.

However, the Ford River Rouge plant is located in Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn in a sundown town. This meant that Black workers needed to commute from their homes in Detroit in order to work in Dearborn. 

Ironically today there is a large Arab community that lives in Dearborn. The residents of the town apparently preferred to live with Arabs rather than Black people.

There was a similar situation at the Ford assembly plant in Mahwah, New Jersey. Black workers in this plant did not live in the Mahwah area and many commuted to their jobs from Newark, New Jersey.

In 1985 I supported a strike by members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union against the Hormel Meat Packing company in Austin, Minnesota. The workers at this plant went on strike because the routine conditions they faced were unimaginably horrendous. However, Austin had a long history of being a sundown town. 

I believe that during the course of this strike, the workers consciousness as to who they are changed. They began to see that the employer was the force that was determined to profit off their labor at any cost. I believe that consciousness might have had a role in changing the attitudes of those workers with respect to the issue of racist discrimination. 

Today anyone who understands basic arithmetic has the tools to see how and why institutionalized racist discrimination is a routine part of the reality of the United States. Black workers, on the average, have lower salaries and have less accumulated savings than white workers. Because the owners of corporations are not paying Black workers the same wages, they profit from this discrimination. Therefore, the working class has a real interest in doing away with this clear discrimination. While employers claim they are opposed to discrimination based on race and sex, the numbers don’t lie. 

In my opinion, the goals of the labor movement to champion the interests of the working class can only be achieved if labor supports the unconditional liberation of Black people and the abolition of all forms of racist and sexist discrimination. 

Immigration

James Loewen gave several examples of how sundown towns now allow Mexican and other Latin people to live there. What he didn’t mention is the drive by the federal government to deport millions of immigrants from this country. With the emergence of sundown towns as well as with the drive to deport millions of immigrants, we see clear parallels to the legacy of chattel slavery.

In the year 1850 the United States government adopted the Fugitive Slave Act. This law required all state governments to cooperate with slave catchers who were paid money to apprehend human beings. They returned escaped slaves to a condition where they were viewed as commodities who had no rights at all. 

In recent years the federal government agency known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) has been deporting millions of workers from this country. Thousands of these immigrants have children who were born in this country. When the parents are deported, the children are not supposed to be deported since they are citizens. So, thousands of children of deported immigrants are separated from their parents possibly for the rest of their lives. In the times of slavery, slave families were routinely separated so slave owners could maximize profits on their investments. 

While sundown towns kept African Americans and other nationalities out, today the federal government has a clear policy of throwing millions of workers out of this country. We might also think about the fact that corporations rely on the profits extracted from nations where workers are paid between one and ten dollars per day. That is the primary reason why workers from other countries feel the need to come here in order to make a sustainable living. No one can control the place where we are born. 

Cuba and the United States

James Loewen concludes his book with suggestions of how to combat the legacy of the sundown towns. He argues that when young people are raised in segregated or integrated neighborhoods, they oftentimes develop differing perspectives on life. Growing up in integrated neighborhoods enables people to have attitudes that are more critical of racist and sexist discrimination.

While this is true, there is more to this story. In her book The New Jim Crow – Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness, Michelle Alexander documented how Black people are grossly overrepresented in the prison system in this country. The United States has more prisoners than any other nation in the world. According to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, slavery continues to be legal with respect to the millions who have been “duly convicted” of a crime. 

We can also see how the gross inequality between Black and white workers continues to be a fact of life in this country. For these reasons, I believe that Loewen’s suggestions to deal with the legacy of the sundown towns are inadequate. 

In my opinion, the persistence of racist discrimination in this country comes out of the routine functioning of the capitalist system. So, when we look at the timeline of a comparison between events in this country and the nation of Cuba, I believe a clear trend takes shape. I wrote a blog about this timeline in my article Two Conflicting Histories—The United States and Cuba.

April 19, 1775—The revolution that gave birth to the United States has been called the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The reason for this battle was about which side would control the arms depot located in that area. 

October 16 1859—John Brown and his supporters raided an arms depot at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The goal of this raid was to take the arms from the depot, retreat to the Allegheny Mountains and use those arms in the battle to end slavery.

July 26, 1953—An armed force led by Fidel Castro attacked the Moncada Barracks in Santiago, Cuba. The goal of this attack was to take the arms stored at this garrison, retreat to the mountains of the Sierra Maestra and advance the Cuban Revolution.

The ruling powers at the time of these rebellions defeated all three of the uprisings. Eventually revolutions erupted that would remove the British, the slave owners, and the U.S. supported Cuban regime of Fulgencio Batista from power.

August 18, 1955—A racist mob brutalized and murdered Emmett Till in Mississippi. His murderers were found not guilty in a so-called trial that made absolutely no attempt to bring Till’s murderers to justice. 

December 1, 1955—A police officer arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to sit in the back of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The NAACP responded to this arrest with the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott.

December 2, 1956—A small force of Cuban revolutionaries landed on the shores of Oriente Province in Cuba. The forces of Fulgencio Batista murdered most of those who landed. Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and Ernesto Che Guevara were among the survivors, and they retreated to the mountains of the Sierra Maestra.

January 1, 1959—The victorious revolutionary army marched into Havana, Cuba. The new revolutionary government outlawed racial discrimination and organized a literacy drive that taught everyone on the island how to read. As a result, today Cuba might have more teachers and doctors per capita, than any other nation in the world.

April 17, 1960—An armed force created and financed by the United States government attacked Cuba at the Bay of Pigs or Playa Girón. This force was quickly defeated by the Cubans.

December 22, 1961—Cuba announces it has completed its mobilization to teach every Cuban how to read. Today there are tens of millions of U.S. citizens who are functionally illiterate. In 2016 Donald Trump made the statement, “I love the poorly educated.”

March 7, 1965—Police attacked a demonstration of peaceful protesters at the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Alabama. The protesters were attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to demand the right to vote for African Americans. 

November 5, 1975—1991—Cuba sent about 36,000 military troops to Angola in an effort to stop a invasion of the country that was supported by the apartheid regime of South Africa. The Cubans and Angolans succeeded in stopping that invasion. In later years, the President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela thanked the Cubans for their role in coming to the defense of the African people.  

September 13, 1994—President Clinton signed his 1994 Crime Bill. This law made it possible for the prison population in the United States to skyrocket. African Americans are grossly over-represented in the dungeons of this country.

Recently the United Nations voted for the 29th time to condemn the United States embargo against Cuba. However, that embargo, with its international implications continues to be in effect. Because the Cuban Revolution erupted in an underdeveloped nation, Cuba has found it extremely challenging to work its way around that criminal embargo.

On the December 11, 2022 issue of the New York Times there was a front page article about the increasing number of Cubans who are leaving the island. We might consider the fact that about 250,000 people left the United States after the revolution in this country.

When we look at the above timeline, I believe that if Cuba had the resources of a developed nation, few if any people would be leaving. However, the United States clearly has these resources. Yet, the legacy of the sundown towns and institutionalized racist discrimination continues to be facts of life here.

I believe that the above timeline makes a clear argument that when a government makes a priority of human needs over profits, there is a clear possibility that racist discrimination can begin to vanish.