If you've ever wondered why US conservatives brand EVERY Black civil rights movement communism and/or socialism, it literally dates to slaveholders who said abolitionists wanted to redistribute their private wealth. Here's arch-slavery defender George Fitzhugh in 1856:
Tbf, abolitionists did want to redistribute slaveholders wealth, BY FREEING ENSLAVED HUMANS being held as chattel property.
The smear stuck tho. During Reconstruction, former slaveholders called US Grant and the Ku Klux Klan Act socialism for working on behalf of the freedmen, and who also were being targeted by new laws and police forces for the prison-lease system.
By the 20th century, when real socialists were agitating and organizing oppressed African American laborers in the South, the "SoCiAlIsM" charge was already there and ready to to be used by elite white Jim Crowers. And rest assured it was.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, the CPUSA, and the Cold War, this compounded. The socialism/communism charge was easy to deploy, and there were real socialists and communists around with a rival communist super power to boot.
Cold Warriors from McCarthy to Reagan relied on it to screw both workers and African Americans (plus many more). And tbc this isn't about whether socialism is good or bad (it's good actually), but it works on conservatives and lots of moderates.
That's why it's been used decade after decade after decade. And it's why mfers like Tom Cotton keep coming back to it.
You can also understand the whole civil-rights-as-socialism charge a lot better if you also know that 20th century redlining, blockbusting, land/farm theft from Black Americans was also a massive wealth transfer straight to elite whites. They're trying to protect what they stole.
An addendum:
To be very clear, it wasn't just Fitzhugh that expressed this sentiment. Here's Jefferson Davis repeating the US AG Caleb Cushing comparing abolitionists to socialists.
Jefferson Davis to Northern abolitionists: "the [socialist/abolitionist] doctrines you are preaching...will initiate in your midst a revolution destructive to all the rights of property, and to the safety of society."
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