Racial Violence in ReconstructionUnfortunately, most history texts refuse to call them DEMOCRAT mobs.More premeditated was the violence committed by organized vigilante groups, sometimes called nightriders or bushwhackers. Groups of nightriders—called so because they often operated at night, under cover of darkness and wearing disguises—sought to curtail African American political involvement by harassing and killing black candidates and office holders and frightening voters away from the polls. They also aimed to limit black economic mobility by terrorizing freedpeople who tried to purchase land or otherwise become too independent from the white masters they used to rely on. They were terrorists and vigilantes, determined to stop the erosion of the antebellum South, and they were widespread and numerous, operating throughout the South. The Ku Klux Klan emerged in the late 1860s as the most infamous of these groups.
It started way before that. The riots in Baltimore were led by the “Plug Uglies”, as well as Democrat Party secessionists, a violent street gang of mostly dock workers affiliated with the city's Democrat government. Lynch mobs played a part in the secessionist movements in Texas and the border states, which is one of the reasons why even future Confederate Army generals came out against Secession in the run up to the Civil War. Way before the Civil War, mobs attacked any attempt to disseminate anti-slavery views, whether abolitionist or ‘emancipation and repatriation,’ even going to the extreme of burning down US Post Offices to prevent the mailing of such propaganda materials to slave owners. Bleeding Kansas bled because violent mobs crossed the border from Missouri to support the Democrat Party effort to bring Kansas into the Union as a Democrat state. The movie “The Gangs of New York” presents a highly fictionalized story of the role of violent street mobs in the politics of the city, going back to the 1840’s. The Democrat Party has always used mobs to gain or hang onto power. And I'm a registered Democrat!
That is not to say that other political parties, either today or in the past, have not used street violence to advance their causes at times.
So why did so many blacks turn DEM when the GOP was responsible for so many of their freedoms?!
Thank you God that so many of them are realizing this and yet the Dems still want them to stay on the plantation.