Thread by @LarryGlickman

One problem with this article is that it does not explore the long history of the term "white supremacy," which arose in the Jim Crow and was proudly and frequently used by white politicians and other thought leaders. /1
nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/…

The people who first embraced it were not critics but self-defined white supremacists, as in this claim by Georgia Senator A. O. Bacon in 1904. /2

At the Alabama Constitutional Convention of 1901, the attendees, who bragged "there is not a representative of the negro race among its one hundred and fifty members," framed the Civil War/Reconstruction era as a time of "negro supremacy." /3
newspapers.com/clip/61348423/

They explicitly framed "white supremacy" as a political project to overturn what they called "negro supremacy," which was really racial equality, by whites who were, they admitted, "numerically inferior in many states."/4
newspapers.com/clip/61348977/

"White supremacy" was the term employed by proponents of the reactionary political project to re-form a racial caste system in the wake of the Reconstruction era, and in particular it was popularized during the two decade period after 1890. /5

In that period, as C. Vann Woodward, argued, "The Mississippi Plan" became the "American Way," as many state governments in the South, beginning with MS in 1890, rewrote their constitutions to entrench Jim Crow and African American disfranchisement./6
fulcrum.org/concern/monogr…

And politicians and others continued to employ the phrase. Here's a letter writer to the Atlanta Constitution noting that "white supremacy" appeared to be Governor Eugene Talmadge's "main plank" in his campaign for re-election. /7
newspapers.com/clip/61350336/

Here's passage from an opinion piece in 1936: "White Supremacy has for its main object, the protection of WHITE SOCIETY, and particularly of the WHITE WOMAN from contamination from an inferior race." /8
newspapers.com/clip/61350785/

From the same piece. /9
newspapers.com/clip/61351133/

Michael Powell writes, "The rise in the use of `white supremacy' is in some ways a puzzle easily solved." But part of the solution, I believe, requires understanding the history of those who popularized the term as part of a racist, reactionary project after the Civil War. /10

I should mention that I learned a lot when I served on the committee for the dissertation that became this illuminating book by Janet Hudson. /11
kentuckypress.com/9780813192932/…