White Supremacy Thesis

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The end of the American Civil War brought new opportunities to African Americans, most importantly freedom and suffrage. Congress passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and programs like the “Freedmen's Bureau”, which promised a new and prominent way of life for the black population. But tragically, not everyone was happy with these arrangements. White Southerners were so embedded in the idea of White Supremacy, it was presumably too much of a challenge for them to eat crow and treat the opposite race with dignity and respect. Slowly the tables began to turn, yet again, against the newly freed men, in Congress, but also by the Whites of the South who would find ways to subtly and not so subtly target African Americans. The decline of …show more content…
They woke up without jobs, no education or opportunity for better jobs, and hungry children. But there were jobs available..as minimum wage, plantation workers. That was just it. The former slave owners had found a loophole to not only “keep” their cotton pickers for little cost, but also trap blacks “in their place” at the bottom rung of the social ladder. The first of these evils was known as “sharecropping”. The freedmen were rented land where they grew crops; they were only allowed to keep half the profit. According to one sharecropper, the freedmen were dirt poor if they had a good year or not. Even if they kept a good account of what they owed and what they owned, they were obliged to pay up however much the landlord fancied, or else (Doc 4). To cripple Black success even further, freedmen were paid in “plantation tokens” that were only redeemable in the plantation general store. Sharecroppers who got any “funny ideas” about saving money and moving north would have no cash for travel (Doc 2). To hit yet another bird with this stone, destroy the future of the children of the sharecroppers, and prevent them from breaking the cycle of poverty, plantation owners played this card: To get the crop harvested, a black man needed all the help he …show more content…
With the withdrawal of the U.S. troops from the South, terrorist groups began to reemerge, festering and praying upon on the unprotected freedmen. The most notorious of these groups was the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK was a twisted organization of alter-ego night crawlers. Most led double lives of respected towns members by day and psychotic lynchers by night. They would find unsuspecting African Americans and string them up in a tree or worse. The county sheriff offices usually turn a blind eye to the on-goings of the KKK and sometimes even participated, but in case they didn’t, the yellow-bellied low lives would disguise themselves by covering their faces with sacks, or most commonly with ghost-like outfits with peaked head coverings and leary eye holes (Doc 8). That way no one would know who they were. They would target all sorts of people from the average black man who kept his head down and mouth shut, to the white, hoity-toity, Northerners who sympathized with the poor blacks. The KKK was especially interested in the black men who showed they were worth something, who made eye contact with their heads high, or refused to be referred to as “boy” when they were clearly over thirty. These men were too “uppity” for the white persons. In fact, they had a high risk of being hung for doing small things like communicating “inappropriately” with a white woman, showing of their
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