in Black and White

picture via @troutmouthidaho

On Thursday I attended a lecture by Professor Jill Gill titled  “Idaho in Black and White: Race, Civil Rights, and the Gem State’s Image”.

Jill Gill is a history professor and the Director of the Marilyn Shuler Human Rights Initiative at Boise State University. I was first introduced to Professor Gill at a City Club event, and I made a mental note that if she ever did a public lecture again I'd be sure to attend.

Notes from Idaho in Black and White...

Idaho might be best known for its racist ties to the Aryan Nations. California emigrant Richard Butler arrived in Idaho in 1974. He was drawn to Idaho by the cheap land, open gun laws, mountainous isolation and the whiteness of the population. He founded the Aryan Nations in 1977 and turned his compound into a racists’ retreat and operations center. As a result, Idaho was tied to Aryan activism. The work of local human rights heroes, who helped bankrupt Butler’s racist organization in 2000, is often overlooked.

But Idaho's racist past began long before 1974 and Richard Butler. White southerners populated the state, with an early wave of Confederates who fled the south. Former Confederates dominated Idaho politics in the 1860s and 1870s. Idaho’s elected officials solidified an Idaho-Southern states alliance on race during battles over federal anti-lynching bills. From 1922 until his death in 1940, Senator William Borah, R-ID, led the states’ rights fight against anti-lynching. He won the support of Dixiecrats (the Southern pro-segregation wing of the Democratic Party).

Then again in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy called for a civil rights bill, the Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedom (a Mississippi organization dedicated to segregation) ran advertisements in Idaho newspapers and sent out mass mailings against the Civil Rights Act. 75% of Idahoans opposed the Civil Right Act.

Again, in 1968, Idaho opposed the Fair Housing Act.

The 1970's were a time of white-flight to Idaho: enter Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations.

By the 1980s, the blatant racism in Idaho had become bad for business, tourism and universities. Despite this, Idaho - in 1990 - was among the last five states to create a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. The main force to finally create the holiday was not the admiration for Dr. King among legislators, but desperation to dispel Idaho’s damaged image. However, Idaho's reputation for racism appealed to conservative Californians seeking to relocate. This white-flight highway from California helped make Idaho one of the most conservative states in the nation.

Even today, Idaho lawmakers continue to champion states’ rights over human rights and women's rights - most recently with respect to Medicaid expansion, mandatory minimum reforms, pretrial detentions, expedited evictions, and protections for gay and transgender residents. The idea of "states’ rights" has become a coded excuse for racism while disenfranchising minorities, claiming “reverse discrimination,” citing religious freedom, and denying systemic inequities.

Idaho has a rough history.

During the Q&A portion of the lecture there was a book suggestion: A More Beautiful and Terrible History by Jeanne Theoharis.

And the lovely BSU student sitting next to me suggested I also read: Mothers Of Massive Resistance by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

I had to order both books from our local bookstore, neither were in stock. I'll keep you posted on my reviews.

As always, it is important to consider the history of things that came before you... your part in perpetuating hierarchies... and how you can help shape local, regional, and national politics and civil rights.

white rage

I just finished reading White Rage: The Unspoken Truth Of Our Racial Divide by  Carol Anderson.

I had been at a lecture where Professor Spencer Crew discussed the key events and actors involved in the civil rights movement and the pivotal role each played in establishing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During the Q&A part of the discussion, an audience member asked what book we should read to be better advocates for civil rights and Professor Crew suggested White Rage.

From GoodReads:

From the Civil War to our combustible present, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson reframes our continuing conversation about race, chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America.

As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, “white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,” she writes, “everyone had ignored the kindling.”

Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House.

Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.

How had I never learned in American History about Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction? Reconstruction was a tragic decade in the wake of the Civil War. This is where Anderson picks up her narrative. “America was at the crossroads,” she writes, “between its slaveholding past and the possibility of a truly inclusive, vibrant democracy.” 

Carol Anderson highlights President Andrew Johnson’s aggressive opposition to the enfranchisement of black Americans. She also details the horrors of paramilitary terrorism waged by the Klan and its affiliates. 

And with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, where Southern Democrats agreed to support Rutherford B. Hayes’s claim to the presidency in exchange for an end to Reconstruction,  the South plunged back into white supremacy.

 Anderson’s book is particularly acute in recalling the Supreme Court’s shameful role in repeatedly denying constitutional relief, and in securing and ratifying the legal apartheid we know as Jim Crow.

Embarrassingly, I had never thoughtfully put together the resistance to school integration after Brown v. Board of Education, and the “Southern strategy,” Nixon’s playbook for using white anger over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ... enshrining race-baiting as a political maneuver, and the Reagan administration’s machinations in the so-called War on Drugs, and the vitriolic hatred directed at Barack Obama.

The Afterword to the new edition called After The Election: Imagining is worth reading twice.

Don't miss this video of Carol Anderson speaking on White Rage...

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