Quotes from Carol Anderson

The truth is that the hard-fought victories of the Civil Rights Movement caused a reaction that stripped Brown of its power, severed the jugular of the Voting Rights Act, closed off access to higher education, poured crack cocaine into the inner cities, and locked up more black men proportionally than even apartheid-era South Africa.

Imagine if Reconstruction had actually honored the citizenship of four million freedpeople—provided the education, political autonomy, and economic wherewithal warranted by their and their ancestors' hundreds of years of free labor. If, instead of continually re-fighting the Civil War, we had actually moved on to rebuilding a strong, viable South, a South where poor whites, too—for they had been left out as well—could gain access to proper education. Imagine

Black respectability or "appropriate" behavior doesn't seem to matter. If anything, black achievement, black aspirations, and black success are construed as direct threats. Obama's presidency made that clear. Aspirations and the achievement of these aspirations provide no protection. Not even to the God-fearing. On

The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.

Black gains, it was assumed, could come only at the expense of whites.21 Not surprisingly, polls showed that as African Americans achieved greater access to their citizenship rights, white discomfort and unease mounted.

Sadly, the ascent of a black man to the presidency of the United States did not, despite all the talk of hope and a post-racial society, signal progress. Instead, it has led to a situation, not so unlike the era of Jim Crow, where a sense of physical vulnerability is shared across classes in the black community.86

What the paper failed to recognize was that black people's willingness to work had never been the problem. Having to work for free, under backbreaking conditions and the threat of the lash, was the real issue.

The Supreme Court thus identified states as the ultimate defenders of rights, although Southern states had repeatedly proven themselves the ultimate violators of those rights.

Since the days of enslavement, African Americans have fought to gain access to quality education. Education can be transformative. It reshapes the health outcomes of a people; it breaks the cycle of poverty; it improves housing conditions; it raises the standard of living. Perhaps, most meaningfully, educational attainment significantly increases voter participation.135 In short, education strengthens a democracy. As

Wisconsin took another tack when Republican governor Scott Walker championed a bill requiring a government-issued photo ID to vote, and then proceeded to close the Department of Motor Vehicles in areas with Democratic voters while simultaneously extending the hours in Republican strongholds.

The eighteenth-century origins of the "right to bear arms" explicitly excluded Black people.19 South Carolina encoded into law that the enslaved could not "carry or make use of fire-arms or any offensive weapons whatsoever" unless "in the presence of some white person.

Jim Crow dominated the lives of black people in America from 1890 well into the twentieth century. From conception to coffin, there was no nook or cranny of a black person's life that it did not touch.

The focus on the Klan also helped to designate racism as an individual aberration rather than something systemic, institutional, and pervasive.

Even for Detroit's liberal mayor, peace was based on black people quietly and gracefully accepting the fact that they had no right to their rights.

Using the targeted power of the criminal justice system as a tool of voter suppression meant that five times as many registered Democrats as Republicans were disfranchised. And for that, the nation paid dearly.

According to Human Rights Watch, "the proportion of blacks in prison populations exceeds the proportion among state residents in every single state.

This legislative ennui about musket-and rifle-toting insurgents also ignored that, from Shays's Rebellion to the Whiskey Rebellion, white men were the ones who had taken up arms against the United States of America. And in a pattern that would repeat itself well into the twenty-first century, there were little to no consequences for that.

The Second Amendment is so inherently, structurally flawed, so based on Black exclusion and debasement, that, unlike the other amendments, it can never be a pathway to civil and human rights for 47.5 million African Americans.

The brutally relentless tactics of stall and defy, then stall and undermine—tactics that went on for at least four decades—left the United States with millions of citizens who lacked the education needed to be competitive in a global, technology-driven economy.

Unlike in 1981, when Reagan had indicated that treatment for addicts was the route he would take, his speeches and policies now became focused on enforcement, criminals, and harsh, no-mercy punishment.

The whittling down of racism to sheet-wearing goons allowed a cloud of racial innocence to cover many whites who, although "resentful of black progress" and determined to ensure that racial inequality remained untouched, could see and project themselves as the "kind of upstanding white citizen[s]" who were "positively outraged at the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan.

Comprising 13 percent of the electorate, African Americans stood as the firewall between a democracy continuing to evolve and one threatened by the corrosion of a Trump presidency tainted with the "drip, drip, drip of scandal," ethics violations, foreign intrigue, and authoritarianism.

White rage doesn't have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively. In my Washington Post op-ed, therefore, I set out to make white rage visible, to blow graphite onto that hidden fingerprint and trace its historic movements over the past 150 years.

The truth is that when World War I provided the opportunity in the North for blacks to get jobs with unheard-of pay scales and, better yet, the chance for their children to finally have good schools, African Americans fled the oppressive conditions in the South.