Chapter 2 from the book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James W. Loewen demonstrates the struggle between the northern and the southern states related to the problem of African American representatives of the US. Restrictions provided toward the Black part of the American society since the pre-war times terrify an ordinary observer. This flow of disfranchisement was emphasized by the so-called Confederacy’s ‘great truth’ [white supremacy], as the national policy. The conflict further fell into the Civil War. Its outcomes showed the further flow of racism in the USA.
One observer admits:
“Until at least 1861, North and South, most white Americans defined “black inferiority” as the problem, to which slavery was the solution. The Civil War changed all that, at least for a time.”
This became a reason for many White anti-war democrats to blame African Americans in the conflict. All in all, the author describes the unfair attitude of the White majority toward the Black minority. This was based on the lawful basis of disenfranchisement, Jim Craw Laws, and the violence promoted by the Ku Klux Klan organization. Cruelty, inhumanity, and irrational approach were applied, as the reaction of White masses in America against the Black community.
The losses of the War were apparent since 1890 when most of the “white” laws were adopted and shared throughout the southern states. It was viable also in several northern states by means of the Democratic Party and conservative circles of the “white” society. The lynching of Blacks again was widespread in the United States and even with some White victims.
The facts of beholders note:
“A lynching is a public murder, not necessarily of an African American, although four of every five lynching victims have been nonwhites.”
Thus, de jure the War was defeated in favor of Southern Power in the US. Civic and economic restrictions took place due to manifests of Whites. Their motivation had nothing to share with African Americans. It considered no social, economic, and political rights. There was no right for Blacks to have private property and even ordinary jobs in comparison with White representatives of the society.