Southern Reconstruction

‘63 we lost the South 
Our sacred cow, our noble cause 
Our heritage was ripped away,
Our way of life was sacrificed
To Lincoln's law, a wicked wedge
A power play for Blue and Gray

Years and years of grinding toil 
In blood and soil, our precious lives 
For God and kin, we gave our all
We scrimped and saved and taught our slaves
To tow the line, sink or swim
Run or crawl, to rise or fall

Now we've been scammed 
And I'll be damned
If we'll allow a colored man
To walk in here and take command
Of any inch of southern land
Our home, our space
Take away the colored race
We will never be replaced

All we want is freedom
We want freedom of our own
North is not our beacon
We can find our way alone
Kiss and call it even
Leave and we can let it go away then
We can all forget the crying
And the million dead or dying
Talk the owners into hiring
Bring the buyers back to buying
Get suppliers re-supplying
Market engines up and firing
Nothing sounds as gratifying

‘69 we'd seen enough
To call their bluff, the growing mass 
Of former slaves had gained control
Through legal fights and voting rights
New laws were passed, they came in waves
In fits and throes like body blows 

Now we aim to make it clear 
The law down here may seem insane 
Might hunt you down and hang you high
Remember jury and the judge
Are all the same for Black and Brown
Wrong or right, we're always White 

Now we've been scammed 
And I'll be damned
If we'll allow a colored man
To walk in here and take command
Of any inch of southern land
Our home, our space
Take away the colored race
We will never be replaced

The Back Story

The period after the Civil War known as Reconstruction was remarkable for how it introduced swift and significant change and advancement for some of the communities of formerly enslaved Africans. But White resentment in the South was intense and was allowed to build over the dozen or so years following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. After Lincoln’s assassination and the succession of Andrew Johnson to the presidency, the commitment to support the south in its enforcement of the new laws waned. U.S. troops were gradually withdrawn and the states were left to police themselves.

Confederacy sympathizers often claim that the point of the war was not over slavery but over states rights. The southern states were indeed fighting for the right to govern themselves, but that was in order to keep their systems in place. And those systems relied implicitly on the labor force provided by slavery. As became apparent immediately following the war, their economy crumbled as soon as the formerly enslaved either insisted on being paid a fair wage to work – or simply left the confines of their plantations.

The effort to reinstate a master slave dynamic was swift and fierce. Local laws now often referred to as Black Codes quickly adapted as they did with the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Slave Codes. Over time, public complicity and motivated White supremacists were able to restructure a new, brutally efficient system of subjugation known as Jim Crow.

The Whiteness Factor

The very idea of Black success: intelligence, affluence, and certainly power, was reprehensible to Whites who believed that theirs was a chosen race, ordained by God to subdue the earth and to have dominion over it (Genesis 1:28). Apparently, this meant to the exclusion of everyone who was not White. Watching former enslaved people learn to read and write, become competent in business and grow in influence through elected government position, threatened the narrative of dominance that had formerly been achieved through violence. Black success exposed the false narrative of White superiority for what it was and left Whites feeling angry, ashamed and confused.

Internalized White superiority (the notion that White culture is the norm for all that is good in humanity) was and still is the basis for dehumanizing People of Color and, particularly, those with the darkest skin tones.¹

1. People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond