What Republicans in the South are trying to do is to reimpose the political and social order that went by the name of Jim Crow.
Between the 1877 withdrawal of federal troops, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the South had a social order based on racism and the misogynistic tenets of the Southern Baptist Church. This required strict separation of the races, and the sexes. Blacks were either exiled to the North or condemned to lives of brutality. It wasn’t slavery. In many ways it was worse.
What sustained Jim Crow was a leaky economic boycott by the North. Atlanta tried to resist it, with economic exhibitions, with education, then with social pressure. (To learn more about the struggle, read anything by or about W.E.B. Dubois (1867-1963).)
The “white” history of this period, from Henry Grady’s New South Speech to the story of Coca-Cola, is much less heroic. What businesses mainly did was treat the South as a colony. Tobacco and cotton drew a price, but most of the value went elsewhere. What modernity came in, starting in the early 20th century, was a century-old order of textile manufacture, drawn from New England by cheap labor. The South remained backward.
The status quo was protected by white race riots, by lynching, and by laws like Georgia’s “county unit system,” which prevented liberals from ever winning statewide by requiring candidates to win a majority of its 159 counties. This was defended by poor white farmers, the “wool hat boys” whose muscle, and guns, maintained segregation.
The North built railway networks, utility systems, then scaled high-margin manufacturing. The South didn’t. That is, until the advent of air conditioning which, combined with the Civil Rights movement, blew the whole thing up.
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