and not just in the Confederacy. It was the general opinion of White Americans that Blacks were intellectually and socially inferior to Whites and that they were not intellectually and socially prepared to participate in civic life. No matter how people like to whitewash it and say their upbringing was different, it was the very rare American who held a different view of Blacks until well into the 20th Century. Of course, the fact that the vast majority of Blacks had been kept pig ignorant for four hundred years made it just true enough.

The heyday of the Klan wasn’t the 1870s when it was mostly a guerilla movement against US Troops and their Black supporters and officeholders in the occupied South – few Southern Whites could vote until their states were “restored to the union” and the last of that was in 1877. Consequently, most political offices were held be either Blacks or carpetbaggers. The situation didn’t bring about a lot of love. The peak wasn’t in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1950s and early ’60s. It was in Indiana in the 1920s and ’30s, the state with the largest Klan membership. The Klan went so far as to stage a march of many tens of thousands of masked and robed Klansmen in DC.

Interestingly, the most liberal areas with regard to equal civil rights for Blacks were those with no Blacks. Civil rights pressure came largely from the churches and from the various progressive and communist groups in the Country beginning after WWI and reaching full song after WWII. Frankly, Soviet propaganda criticizing the US for its race relations had as much to do with the US beginning to entertain full civil rights as anything else. Throw in some guilt for the treatment of the Nisei as well. Brown v. The Board is essentially a revisiting of the Nisei cases. Especially, on the Church and liberal Northerner sides of the issue, there was and, I think, remains a tremendous amount of paternalism. A Yankee liberal today sounds just like a Southern slave owner of the 1850s talking about all he does for “his” Blacks.

I don’t try to “pass,” to use an old Black word; I was raised in the Jim Crow South by an old family that had owned slaves and that had fought and some died for the Confederacy. White superiority was in the air I breathed and in the water I drank from a water fountain marked “White Only.” It was an easy, comfortable racism in whch I was almost raised by the Black handyman on the Place. During the growing season my playmates were Black as often as they were White and when I got older we worked side by side in the fields. But they came in through the back door if they came in the house at all. That was odd, because we’d all share the same dipper at the water bucket in the field without a thought. My Dad had a simple attitude about race developed in his life as a small town merchant; he taught me that it didn’t matter what color the hand was if the money was green. We had a lot of both personal and business associations with the Jewish merchants in our area and this very much reflected their attitudes as well. Having come through all the changes, I came to not care what color a man’s skin was as long as he didn’t care what color mine was, but I still have a very strong distaste for Yankees from places with a 2% Black population lecturing me on race relations.

In any event, the paternalism of slavery is alive and well and it is alive and well in both the Black and White liberal communities. The liberals still believe that if Massa doesn’t provide them, there will be no shoes and all too many Blacks still think that Massa should provide new shoes.