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Taulby Edmondson Profile picture
@TaulbyE324
May 26, 2021 • 11 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
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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More from @TaulbyE324

Taulby Edmondson Profile picture
Dec 10, 2022
An important & rigorous report--which had significant crossover with Pres Truman's Committee on Civil Rights--that highlighted how "urban renewal" programs & the real estate sector systematically relegated African Americans into slum conditions.
It showed how urban renewal led to Black neighborhoods being cleared & replaced with new housing restricted to middle-class whites & white landlords. It showed the systematic nature (policed by real estate and residents' associations) of racialized wealth transfer/theft.
Here's a tenet from the Washington Real Estate Board Code of Ethics, shown in the report: "[N]o property in a white section should ever be sold, rented, advertised or offered to colored people." Such clauses existed in real estate covenants across the country.
Read 5 tweets
Taulby Edmondson Profile picture
Nov 16, 2022
Something very important about Lee in Virginia history is that after the war, when he was president of Washington College, he let students (many of them his former soldiers) turn the college's town into a haven for white supremacist terrorism & sexual violence against Black women
When he did confront those students (the Freedman's Bureau was watching), he punished them more laxly than students who weren't engaging in open racial violence, all while he himself openly opposed Black suffrage, civil rights, & refused to rule out another rebellion due to it.
During his tenure, & especially after his death, Confederates & opponents of Reconstruction were recruited to attend & staff the college. Once there, they played a significant role in creating the cult of Lee & the Lost Cause movement that sustained opposition to Black equality.
Read 6 tweets
Taulby Edmondson Profile picture
Apr 18, 2022
1964 Civil Rights Act: Dem party vote included members in Southern states. When geography is controlled for, it's clear how much the historical D South weighed down overall party support. Support was more uniform across both parties elsewhere (Ds more so).
Here we can see just how stark the difference is between the straight party vote and party vote controlling for geography:
The opposition to civil rights among (white) Southern voters seen therein, set up the opportunity to capture that voting block as the D party pursued non-Southern & Black support. The GOP seized that opportunity and its "Southern Strategy" came just years later.
Read 4 tweets
Taulby Edmondson Profile picture
Apr 16, 2022
Know that when scholars of race & politics point out how the GOP transitioned to largely pandering to white nationalism for political gain for the last five decades (and modern conservatives get *real* pissy about it), that observers knew it back then too & called it out. 🧵👇
At this point, it's either a willful ignorance (head-spinning rationalizations and sticking their heads in the sand) or blatant lying. And there's a lot of both.
For clarity: Jackie Robinson was a R in 1964, like many African Americans, bc the GOP was historically the party of Black civil rights. But what he was putting voice to here was a Black exodus from the party that, yes, had already started, but was about to turn into a downpour.
Read 4 tweets
Taulby Edmondson Profile picture
Feb 5, 2022
White people casting themselves as the victims of racial violence is one of the defining features of American white supremacy that spans the US's entire history.
Slaveholders fearful of insurrections & abolitionists, Klansmen defining freedmen as threats to the white public, suburban whites saying Black people depreciate their home values. And on and on and on and on. Ever the victims.
This movie is a lot of things, but it's also a three-hour victimization narrative. It's integral to how white supremacy is maintained.
Read 5 tweets
Taulby Edmondson Profile picture
May 28, 2021
Y'all, Fitzhugh literally wrote "Socialism, not Abolitionism, is the real object of Black Republicanism" IN the source I tweeted. If you're unfamiliar with Civil War-era insults, Black Republicans is what pro-slavery folks called Rs for supposedly working for African Americans.
Did I do an ad hom? Sure. But 1) it's true. And 2) Magnus misrepresented me and tried to make it about Fitzhugh, which isn't what I was talking about at all. Gonna guess that primary source, being as clear as it is, is the problem for them.
I mean good lord. That someone in the 1850s thought complexly on slavery and the economy, while also still being pro-slavery, isn't fucking news.
Read 6 tweets

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