You must remember that after Reconstruction failed, the Northern business elite formed a partnership with the Southern commercial interests, with the antebellum elite becoming junior partners in the commercial development of the South. From Richmond to New Orleans, whether we are talking about tobacco, cotton, lumber, coal, manufacture of textiles, cigarettes, and furniture, or tourism, the old families retained control of the South, sharing it with ambitious newcomers, including former members of the lower classes, Jews, and transplanted Northerners. These elites kept unions out of the South and used the color line to divide the workers to focus their hatred on the opposite race rather than the wealthy classes. Yankee capitalists could not have accomplished this without the assistance of their Southern junior partners. In their own home turf of what we now call the Rust Belt, they were unable to play ethnic groups against each other as successfully as the race card was played by the Southern elite. More importantly, the Northern industrialists did not keep unions out.
What continues to amaze me today is that those who are the first to shout about inequality and the legacy of slavery are also the ones foisting economic indenture on the illegal aliens (whose labor is primarily exploited by financial elites) and selling it to progressives and religious hypocrites as some kind of humanitarianism. Later generations will look at the current exploitation and wonder how we all sat by and let it happen, the same way today's yammering class pilliories yesterday's white majority over the slavery that was practiced by a predominantly elite minority of whites.