Saturday, July 10, 2021

Donald Trump made white supremacists great again

I have been featuring Letters From an American historian, and my and sometimes other of her readers' comments. Her Facebook page shows 1.4 million followers.

Heather Cox Richardson

an American historian and professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Wikipedia

Here is the lead for Heather's July 9 letter about how the 14th Amendment came to be. Below it and my comment is the full letter.

July 9, 2021

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement. In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after an actor had murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.


As this 78-year-old white former Birmingham, Alabama practicing attorney recalls, promising to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with religious conservatives had a lot to do with Donald Trump getting elected in 2016. White religious conservatives, it turned out. The jury's still out on how far the Trump-packed SCOTUS will go in voting cases. The jury is in on Trump made white supremacists great again in America. Look at photos of the Charlottesville Confederate monuments rally while Trump was president. Look at photos of MAGA rallies before, during and after Trump was president. Seas of white people. Look at the white Jan 6 mob Trump egged on to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden had won. Look at how most Republicans in Congress sided with Trump in claiming the 2020 election was stolen. Unsaid, by blacks. Not long ago, I did that laundry list on Facebook with photos of those white seas, to which I added a photo of a Klansman in full dress raising left hand in a heil. Facebook put me in jail for the Klansman photo violating its community standards.

Full letter:

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

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