After the Civil War the South had an enormous problem. The Emancipation Proclamation had freed all of the slaves. The 13th Amendment likewise ended slavery. There was not much doubt, with the quick deployment of Federal Troops, that there would be no slavery tolerated anymore in the South.
And then Lincoln was assassinated; leaving a southern sympathizer, Andrew Johnson as President.
The Republican Party then was truly the GOP. The abolitionists had come from the Republican Party; it was much more progressive than today for sure.
But in areas of race relations, not as bad as the south (more about that in a minute) , but certainly the 19th century mind did not believe in the DNA equality that is a scientific fact in the 21st Century.
Northerners did not condone equality for African Americans. Southerners did condone equality for poor whites AND African Americans only backing up those impulses with a wave of terror from 1870 to 1965.
Of course at the time, many African Americans had not been free very long; had been purposefully made illiterate, families broken apart; etc. In short, there was a huge job of social, cultural and political healing to do; and the north was rebuilding and getting over the worst Civil War in human history. With Lincoln gone, nothing was done to reconcile slavery, to reparations, no educational remedies, nothing on the federal level. The states (the rebels) were allowed by the Supreme Court to interpret the 14th Amendment (equal protection under the law) and of course ALL the southern states elected to do NOTHING according to the 14th Amendment.
Johnson began working early (1866) to undo much of the groundwork that Lincoln had set. He withdrew the military from a south that was seething and hurting since the core of its prosperity (slave labor) was now gone.
So, the same plantation "mass" approach was resurrected with KKK and White Supremacy leading the charge. And the "lost cause" took the place in southern minds of the war to perpetuate slavery; starting a historical lie that to this day still exists in the south and on Fox News....people still argue that the Civil War was NOT a war over slavery when history proves the exact opposite.
The slave system was perpetuated with great violence and killing. If a slave got out of line, punishment was swift and sure; including death if need be.
Poor southern whites, who made up the core of the defeated Confederate Armies, had been used during slave times as overseers, field hands, foremen, and in some cases worked along side the slaves.
Remember, the reason for slave labor was a lack of good solid laborers to pick the cotton and cultivate the sugar and tobacco. The Indians did not work out well; kept dying and running away.
But the black African slave was a different story; He or she did not know where they were. The mid-passage usually reduced people to pliable robots; and then when they were sold, breaking family bonds, the last shred of resistance went away for most. But the plantation system as indeed violent and brutal, whippings and hangings were common; akin to the concentration camps of the Nazis in WWII>
And the poor whites were constantly reminded that they were just a few short steps above the Blacks; and that could all change if they did not support the "massa"..
And so, AGAINST THEIR SELF INTEREST, poor whites in the south cooperated with the development in post Civil War agriculture of share cropping, of Black Codes that essentially made slaves again of freedmen.
And the class that worked to keep it that way, in deference to their desires to not take the African Americans place at the bottom of the barrel, were the poor whites and middle class (very small in those days). There was no doubt if all the African Americans left, poor whites would take their place at the bottom of the barrel.
The rich got, as usual, richer and the poor, poorer. African Americans who tried to fight this Jim Crowe system were killed (lynching exploded in the south).
Those whites who sympathized with the freed Africans were ostracized and often burned out by the KKK. It was not just the African American who were targets; just whites were targeted and run out of the south constantly.
Fear ruled this unequal and unfair social/economic system.
When the south entered the 20th century it did so with an agrarian economy that was becoming woefully out of date. Poverty rates were huge. The industrialization of the north was not spreading into the south; which stayed stuck in slavery days.
WWI liberated many African Americans from the hell hole the south had become. The needs of the war gave some opportunity (more in WWII) that led the beginning of an exodus from the south of people who were realizing that they could not safely raise a family in the racist segregated south.
So they came north and ran into, poor whites who were being eaten alive by the capitalist system; underpaid and soon to get destroyed by the Great Depression.
When southern whites moved into northern cities, ghettos immediately went up. African Americans could only live in the most run down parts of town. White lower class men especially made up KKK groups who stated their white supremacy goals was to "keep the Nigras in their place"...and they did it with violent efficiency....no slight was left unpunished no matter how trivial...people were lynched for not moving off the sidewalk when a white person walked by; etc.
Once again, the rich whites were able to manipulate the masses, keeping BOTH African Americans down AND white middle and lower class.
Then came WWII that changed everything. America went on a full war footing, supplying not just U.S. Troops but Russia Britain and China as well as all the Allies. American became the arsenal of democracy; running triple shifts at plants, providing work for all; including people of color.
Meanwhile, in the north, laws were put in place forbidding inter-racial marriages. Housing patterns were manipulated, keeping people of color out of the suburbs. And, the lower class whites were once again, in the north this time, told by the ruling class that the African Americans were their enemies; that "uppity" blacks need to be segregated with separate schools, communities; etc. While segregation was not as overt as in the south, it still existed; for those immigrants who were crowding into northern cities like Boston, New York, St. Louis; etc., they became the new black.
In the middle of the twentieth century Civil Rights movements for the first time, started making inroads into the wonder land of racism that white supremacy had created. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act, began to fulfill the promises that had been made almost 100 years previously. But, still, the progress was slow; college football teams were still essentially segregated when I played at Stanford from 65 to 69 (we only had eight African Americans, a Japanese American and a few Mexican Americans on the Stanford Varsity).
Integration was attempted with forced busing and tripped yet another white supremacy backlash; that elected Nixon and later Reagan; Republicans whose party had adopted the Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party; who finally rid itself of the racist white supremacists that had plagued the party since before the Civil War. Republicans, dominated by southerner Senators, began sounding a lot like post Civil War Democrats, fighting social justice at every turn for all minorities; especially African Americans.
The GOP, desperate to stop the New Deal run out, started a "southern strategy" and adopted segregationists and racist Senators and Congressmen in great numbers. The Democrats, to their credit, let these 'dixiecrats' go....and became the party of equality and diversity.
But the phenomenon of poor white people getting fooled by rich white supremacists to do their dirty work and work for nothing, continued and continues to this day.
Right now, the "Conservatives and Trump" are fighting to end the Affordable Care Act (which helps a majority of people of color, seniors and children).....and also helps many poor rural whites (the descendants of those overseers and flunkies of the Jim Crowe south who would do anything to not drop to the class level of African Americans.
So the phenomenon continues of white middle class and lower middle class citizens voting directly against their own interests in the mistaken assumption that this was the way to preserve their at least superior standing to people of color in their cities.
The sad fact is the ruling elite, in the south and the north, perfected in response to the New Deal, anti-union and anti-human rights positions, that calls for there never to be universal single payer health care for example in the United States.
To have government run health care, single payer, would break the strangle hold small business owners have on poor whites; dangling health care benefits over their heads or using the poor white's antipathy toward unions and minimum wages to continue to make huge profits; not paying any benefits at all with wages well under $10 an hour. Universal health care would also give a "portability" to workers, who could work anywhere knowing health care was affordable and available and hence not be enslaved to a job that one of the few to "pay health insurance benefits"...
This has created a social group I call the "huddled masses", poor whites and persecuted African Americans who work over 40 hours a week for starvation wages, lose their homes and be homeless or lose their children to inner-city violence. And now rural whites are addicted in ever growing numbers to the opioid epidemic.
And this time around they elected a Billionaire in Donald Trump as President and almost impossible to understand (unless you read this blog) event!
And they continue to vote against the very reforms, and reformers (Democrats) who could break their treadmill of poverty.
And, just like the overseers in 1840, poor whites vote for racist white supremacists who promise them that they won't lose their status to "those people", and put one conservative fascist into office after another, who once secured, votes directly against the self-interests of poor white folks.
And tragically this is the same trick the plantation "Masters ie., Massas" used for hundreds of years to perpetuate the slavery system...use racism and prejudice to threaten whites with the unimaginable: African American attaining a higher status than them.
And predictably, when American actually elected a Black President, the backlash was swift and sure; electing more racists and fascists to office in rural white states, enacting voter suppression laws, cheating in elections even to the point of accepting and collaborating with Russian plutocrats in direct treason to the United States to win the 2016 Presidential Election.
Sound far fetched? No more far fetched as a class of people who vote against their self interests because of racial status fear over and over and over again; leaving the rich to get even richer and a whole lot of folks POORER!
