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(continued from yesterday's posting)
And, of course, the inevitable question arises...."Well, if Jim Crow is so much better for the general situation than the Welfare State, then we suppose you would be comfortable with re-instatement of the segregationist schema."
The answer is "No" and "Absolutely not". To a Conservative, rights are granted by the Creator, not by a central, State, or local government. Even if that government is substantially under the control of those most affected by the actions of that government, there should still be the greatest effort to extend the greatest amount of liberty to the citizen who is otherwise compliant with the laws necessary to provide order and basic public services.
We would strive to have an environment where a bakery owned by homosexuals could have and enforce the conditions of a sign on the wall that says, "We reserve the right to serve or not serve anyone, no-one, everyone, someone, extra-terrestrials, Eskimos, and/or whoever, at any time, or at no particular time. We own this bakery, and to the extent possible, we shall run it as we wish."
We would strive to have an environment where people could refuse to perform work for other people should that work imply a violation of the service provider's discretion to not do things that violate his/her understanding of sacramental or religious, and /or philosophical beliefs.
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The failure of the "uppers'' to re-establish control of society, after Reconstruction while a lower form of white society assumed the day-to-day oversight and administration of many hundreds of political entities in the South is a fundamental failure of the South. Frankly, in many cases, local political leaders had neither the breeding nor education to lead what was essentially a rural, feudalistic traditional society into a post-industrial, new reality. That fact became the curse of the South.
The greatest segregation, in many ways, were the Icons and Sacred Cows....in those days, the old veterans of Confederate service, and those blue-bloods and Plantation people who hid behind the iron gates. The old soldiers, with their grey garb and fancy golden french officers' scrolls on the sleeves died off, their uniforms frequently being buried with them. There were fewer and fewer people left to cajole, direct, scold, or provide blue-blooded "presence", and a fairer arbitrage of the "Negro situation".
As those people became fewer and fewer, and in the case of the wealthy, more and more distant and "behind the gates", people began to set up laws and regulations that would establish that the White lower classes were legally allowed to tell the Negroes where they had to find a restroom and/or a water fountain. Prescriptions and assignments were placed around until they transcended the ridiculous. Trolley cars and busses, restaurants and diners, movie theatres and and stadiums, churches and cemetery lot assignments, all had controls and procedures concerning who would drink, watch, listen, worship, travel, or be buried and when and where. Most hospitals had segregated emergency rooms, wards, and floors.
In most places the laws were followed. In some places, such as southern Louisiana, especially the southwestern part in the Cajun and swamp people country, Negro rules were posted and not followed. In southernmost Texas there were very few Negroes, and the few there were had close connections with many and diverse people in places like McAllen, Laredo, and Brownsville. McAllen's school district simply closed the required School for the Coloured, because it was foolish to maintain a separate school for 13 chilluns, when the "all white" schools (Latin and Anglo) had in those years almost 4,000 urchins. The Latins and Anglos, all considered 'white' by Texas Law, were technically not segregated but did attend neighborhood primaries. But entering Junior High, at the 7th grade forward, everyone went to the same schools.
My godmother was the one who proposed, as a trustee, the closure of the Coloured School, although to do so would be a violation of State law. She was elected President of the School Board during the next elections, partly because she had the gumption to get rid of the stupid rule, and because it saved considerable money. The State of Texas....in 1952 did not raise an issue with the closure and subsequent assignment of Negroes to standard classes.
I did not witness these Jim Crow laws except when travelling to points far out of my home area in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. A semester at LSU in Baton Rouge while staying with my brother and sister-in-law, was an eye opener, but so was New Orleans, where enforcement of segregated eating facilities and the like were very...how should we say.....optional.
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To summarise, it is my opinion that the Abolitionists hastened and forced the issue of Emancipation of the Slaves because they thought they had the moral high ground on a very basic issue. They also assumed, very broadly, that we in the South just loved having someone to whip and "keep down". They lived in an industrialised and increasingly industrialising North, where they could trap young Irish children in looming factories and throw these children into the street after they had lost too many fingers to be of further use.
They lived in a place where race riots broke out against Negroes who would gather in urban places while making their way to some favourable stop on the Underground Railway. Their hands were stained by the low wages, horrid working conditions, and cut-throatery of the world of the Bankers and Industrialists and the continuously increasing numbers of wounded and dead factory workers.
It became a rage....very much like the ridiculous causes among the "progressives" to this day....Equal Pay!!!! Glass Ceiling!!!! 15.00/hr Minimum Wage!!!! Black Lives Matter!!!! Hands Up! Don't Shoot!!!!
Further, the worst of the racists were people to whom the progressives and leftists of to-day's American give all adulation and esteem like Margaret Sanger, Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the like.
Southerners who travelled to the North during the antebellum period were often stunned at the conditions under which the northern labour force worked in those days. They would tell their northern cousins that, "....if we were to treat our people like this there would be slave riots throughout the South." In fact, true Slave uprisings occurred, but as a per capita thing, it never reached the level of the labour unrest in the North before and then after the War Between the States.
Jefferson Davis and his older brother Joseph were part of a movement that was active in the South, concerning self-government by the slaves over matters that directly concerned them. They established a jury system that actually worked after several false starts (a decision by a jury to give 5,000 lashes for a theft of a number of laying hens, on the first case, for instance).
As in the case for War against the South, the industrialists and bankers knew that the major financial interests would have to move before the process of manumission would take away the incentive for the argument for abolition. The number of Negroes gaining manumission, sometimes by will and testament, sometimes because it was just time, and sometimes because, whether the Negro was equal or not the "peculiar institution" was expensive and repulsive and becoming an economic anachronism.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the forces for radical social change knew that the Negro had arrived at a bifurcated choice set. Keep on with the pleasant Nat King Cole, Platters, and Mills Brothers image and Jackie Robinson, et al and unemployment just slightly higher than the White rate and economic advance moving slowly ahead or take the path of "Freedom Now" and confrontation.
The left knew that it would win if it could pose the question about the path for the Negro population so that it would seem rational to be confrontational. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, very much a communist front and provocateur for violent confrontation, also known as "peaceful demonstrations", departed from the staid, establish pastors and Black professionals. They hoped that they could provoke over-reactions of the "white power structure" and wake up the yahoos and white trash to come out and show the "darkies" how the cow at the cabbage and put them in their place.
Lamentably, the SCLC and other such groups played their cards better, and involved the press correctly, and managed to play the role of the Pied Piper so as to take the nation off to this mess we have right now. The SCLC and subsequent black groups, thinking they had accomplished something, perhaps, would soon learn that they were being tooled around by an extreme left-wing group that wanted to convert the Black Race in America into a voting bloc that would support the progressive marxist agenda, and thereby the destruction of American.
The most sure and certain way to do this would be to begin a "cattle drive" of the American population of Black African descended peoples into the snake pit of public assistance and all of its helping hands. It took only two generations of the United States government spending other peoples' money to bring the bulk of the Black population to the point of servitude.
Along with that debasing came the good news for the leftist social engineers and political gurus that black people were killing each other at record levels, black church attendance had fallen as a portion of the black population, even more precipitously than the White cohort of the overall population. This would mean more and more calls for more and more programmes to address the problems that the previous programmes had caused. That would keep numerous Democrat Party sacred cows and sacred institutions and the Democrat Urban hegemony safe for at least a little longer.
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Northern elitists, social engineers, bankers, and politicians and a book by the name of Uncle Tom's Cabin hastened the dash to Emancipation, managed to kill a million people on two sides of an issue in a totally useless war, and brought an end to the manumission process that was actually turning Black Folks out of slavery and to solid Freeman status at an increasing rate in 1860.
After helping to set back true social improvement by 80 to 100 years, the same Northern intellectuals and political charlatans came along just in time to fuel the racial animosity fires so as to discard the actual condition of things in the 1955 - 1960 period, and the solid improvements that were being made in the American and Black American and White American social construct.
We are facing the fruits of those "improvements" again. Think of all the falsehoods and falsities of these ghouls who have "led" us for the past seven years.
El Gringo Viejo
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