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I’m of course talking about the South after the civil War. The North occupied the region with the army and reduced states to military provinces. They used the black population to rule over the whites, many of whom were disenfranchised. The Carpetbaggers and Southern unionists controlled the former confederacy with the aid of black politicians, many of whom were not fit for office, and Republican governments were, sometimes with the best of intentions, tyrannies that looted.misused the resources of the states. Meanwhile the northern and western states refused to allow black emigration from the South.

The white majority, of course, did not accept this and so sometimes with terror and intimidation, they fought back. After the depression hit in 1873, with a majority of whites having regained the right to vote, the “redeemers” took back the governments of the states. The crisis of 1877,ended with the North abandoning both while and black Republicans to their fates. It took about twenty years, but by the mid-90s, most blacks —and a lot of illiterate whites—had been stripped of the right to vote and the South was left in the hands of regimes whose rule was based on white supremacy.

Cotton remained king, and except for some limited industrialization, the South remained an agricultural province, dependent on Northern money until Johnson’s day. The whites of the regions were despised for their poverty and for their repression of the blacks. But they were left in control so long as they stayed in their place. Politically they formed a single bloc and supported the man chosen by northern Democrats. But no southerner was to ask for the office of President. The first southern to come to the office of president in the normal way was Jimmy Carter in 1977. It would not have been possible if segregation had not been broken and both whites and blacks given their freedom of action. The Boll weevil plague in the early 1900s began the death of King Cotton, forcing many blacks to move north despite the lack of welcome from the workers of the north, No accident that the Midwest was the real center of the KKK, at least in its most popular phase.

But after WWI, the agricultural sector throughout the country began its long decline. The weather, the Great Depression, and finally the war, changed the South especially. The blacks were increasingly prosperous and without this, no Civil Rights movement, which in its first phases was largely middle--class.

Despite this respectability, however, it was hardly non-violent. The “marches” were mob-action, where violence, while remarkably well-controlled, was always there. Just ask any white Southerner who had a family member who was an officer of the law. It was a revolution and like all such it created a disrespect for all law, not just unjust law. And to break the back of the Segregation culture, the Civil Rights Act went too far, and overrode many legitimate property. A law that tells you that you cannot rent to a black high school teacher can in the end tell you to do anything. Which is why Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act. As in every revolution, much evil comes. Level the forest, plow up the grass, and then comes to wind to blow the soil away.