Ruling classes crushed the biracial Populist alliance through violence and electoral suppression
Evidence
The radicalization of Du Bois took place during a historical period characterized by a reintensification of the suppression of Blacks in the United States and the subsequent massive Black response. In the South and the Midwest, the Populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s, spurred by the conversion crisis of world capitalism and with its third-party aspirations built around an alliance between white and Black farmers/peasants and organized labor, had once again mobilized the Black masses. Legal and illegal violence, election corruption, and a renewed emphasis on white supremacy were the combined responses of the ruling classes, industrial and planter, which orchestrated state and federal power and the instruments of propaganda. Electoral restrictions stripping poor Blacks and whites from the vote were enacted in several states; lynchings accelerated (with the number of Black victims surpassing that of whites in 1889); and the Populist movement was transformed into a shambles by the unleashing of racial maneuvers. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 906
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The ruling-class response to Populism — splitting biracial alliances through racial maneuvers — echoes the divide-and-conquer dynamics documented throughout this book’s account of white supremacy as ideological weapon.