Mass struggles can move racialized working-class majorities leftward

Evidence

Their withdrawal was physical, of course, as working-class whites abandoned the city for the still-segregated suburbs. But their retreat also took place in a larger sense, as working-class whites withdrew their support—financial, social, and political—from a society that they felt had abandoned them. Just as the desegregation of their neighborhoods had led them to reject the concept of “community,” the desegregation of the public spaces around those neighborhoods led them to rise up against Atlanta’s plans for progress, too. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 252 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

IN SEPTEMBER 1946 Holt Gewinner stood in a vacant lot near the Piedmont Mills on Atlanta’s West Side and served up a half-hour rant to gathering workers. … His address covered the usual range of extremist arguments, but he ended with an issue he knew would interest his audience more than anything else. “The reason veterans cannot find housing,” Gewinner argued, “is that unscrupulous real estate dealers are selling white property to Negroes, thus forcing all whites in the neighborhood to move.” The crowd had been watching with some curiosity until then, but now it cheered “enthusiastically and spontaneously.” … The pledge cards he distributed were short and simple. “I want the Columbians to continue the fight for the American white working man,” the signers swore. “I want the Columbians to continue the fight to effectively separate the white and black races.” Several mill workers inked their names on the spot and urged friends to follow suit. One of them, a bus driver who had arrived late, seemed reluctant. “I don’t know anything about it,” he protested. One of the newest recruits summed it up for him: “It’s to keep the niggers down.” — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 104 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

SOUTH CAROLINA SENATOR Matthew Butler and Alabama senator and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon John Tyler Morgan introduced a congressional bill on January 7, 1890, to fund Black emigration to Africa. It was an ingenious solution to the class and racial problems of big southern landowners. Withering under a southern agricultural depression, many White “dirt farmers” were raging against the Black farmers; others were joining with Blacks to rage against White landowners in the rising interracial, antiracist populist movement. The colonization bill was a deflective measure. It pointed White farmers to southern Blacks—and not rich White landowners—as the chief cause of the southern agrarian depression. White farmers could easily see how the mass ejection of southern Blacks would increase their own labor value. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 711 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Housing scarcity and residential transition drove working-class whites into organized racism — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 104; Ethnic divisions within a working class can be exploited to strengthen capitalist rule; Desegregation of public spaces drove working-class whites to reject civic community and city progress — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 252 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Housing scarcity and residential transition drove working-class whites into organized racism #contradicts (0.80) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 104
• Desegregation of public spaces drove working-class whites to reject civic community and city progress #contradicts (0.80) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 252
• Ethnic divisions within a working class can be exploited to strengthen capitalist rule #complicates (0.72)
• Racial ideas were deployed to deflect economic class resentment away from elites #contradicts (0.72) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 711