Glen Contrarian
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Re: Police: Multiple Victims in South Carolina church shooting [W:224]
You're aware that there have been numerous incarnations of the KKK, right? Only the first had anything whatsoever to do with Confederacy, and that was simply because it happened to be an insurgent group made up of Southern veterans from the Civil War.
Among the Klan's later incarnations, the strongest bastion for roughly half of the Twentieth Century was the Midwest, not the South. Indiana, in point of fact, had the highest rate of Klan membership per capita in the entire country prior to 1940, and they tended to be just as focused on Catholics (the largest lynch mob in American history was actually formed to try and capture some random foreigner at a train station which wild rumor held was secretly the Pope in disguise) and European immigrants as they ever were African Americans.
Where the modern Klan, which legitimately was reformed to deal with the issue of desegregation in the 1960s, is concerned, they have about as much to do with the actual C.S.A. as the Waffen S.S. had to do with the medieval order of the Teutonic Knights - which is to say, next to nothing at all. Just because a bunch of whackjobs try to co-opt a certain symbol in order to bolster their own perceived legitimacy, doesn't mean that they are correct in doing so.[/QUOTE]
I appreciate the fact that you're trying to approach the debate in a thoughtful and logical way...but I still have to disagree with you in the strongest of terms. It was never 'just' the Klan. Nowhere else in America did blacks face what they did - and to some extent still do - to this very day.
I graduated high school in Shaw, MS. in 1980. When I came home on leave from the Navy in 1984, I took a walk down the main street. There was only one doctor's office in town, and it had two doors. Above one door was "white", and above the other door was "colored"...and people still abided by these signs.
This was twenty years after the Civil Rights Act.
This is false. Lincoln was a well known moderate on the issue of slavery.
THAT is why he was elected. He actually beat out a blatant anti-slavery firebrand for the Republican nomination, precisely because the party knew that a candidate running primarily on the issue of slavery would be unelectable.
The South simply wasn't willing to compromise at all, unfortunately.
You're aware that there have been numerous incarnations of the KKK, right? Only the first had anything whatsoever to do with Confederacy, and that was simply because it happened to be an insurgent group made up of Southern veterans from the Civil War.
Among the Klan's later incarnations, the strongest bastion for roughly half of the Twentieth Century was the Midwest, not the South. Indiana, in point of fact, had the highest rate of Klan membership per capita in the entire country prior to 1940, and they tended to be just as focused on Catholics (the largest lynch mob in American history was actually formed to try and capture some random foreigner at a train station which wild rumor held was secretly the Pope in disguise) and European immigrants as they ever were African Americans.
Where the modern Klan, which legitimately was reformed to deal with the issue of desegregation in the 1960s, is concerned, they have about as much to do with the actual C.S.A. as the Waffen S.S. had to do with the medieval order of the Teutonic Knights - which is to say, next to nothing at all. Just because a bunch of whackjobs try to co-opt a certain symbol in order to bolster their own perceived legitimacy, doesn't mean that they are correct in doing so.[/QUOTE]
I appreciate the fact that you're trying to approach the debate in a thoughtful and logical way...but I still have to disagree with you in the strongest of terms. It was never 'just' the Klan. Nowhere else in America did blacks face what they did - and to some extent still do - to this very day.
I graduated high school in Shaw, MS. in 1980. When I came home on leave from the Navy in 1984, I took a walk down the main street. There was only one doctor's office in town, and it had two doors. Above one door was "white", and above the other door was "colored"...and people still abided by these signs.
This was twenty years after the Civil Rights Act.