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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