Anti-Black reports fabricated on Democratic sources spread north to justify abandoning Reconstruction

Evidence

Some failed to speak out because they were too busy blaming Black people for the failures of Reconstruction. And how could they not? Northern press reports regularly depicted Black voters and politicians as self-destructively stupid and corrupt. The Associated Press relied on anti-Black, anti-Reconstruction southern papers for daily dispatches. New York Tribune reporter James S. Pike blanketed northerners with racist fairytales of corrupt, incompetent, lazy Black politicians who conquered and deprived White South Carolinians during the “tragedy” of Reconstruction. These claims were published in his widely circulated newspaper articles in 1873, republished as The Prostrate State, South Carolina Under Negro Government in 1874. Pike’s Democratic sources were happy to blame the southern corruption on Black people, as it diverted attention from their principal role in the corruption. Pike’s well-written novel passed as eyewitness journalism. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 680

Categorization

• XREF: This is a textbook instance of Kendi’s core inversion: racist ideas (Pike’s fairytales) produced to justify racist policy (abandoning Reconstruction). Connects to the reader’s central test of the book’s thesis.