Uplift suasion never protected Black people from racist terror

Evidence

The other threat to White male dominance was upwardly mobile Black people. Klan terrorism showed the charade that was always the strategy of uplift suasion. The Klan did “not like to see the negro go ahead,” reported a White Mississippian. Landless Blacks were terrorized by landowners. Landowning Blacks were terrorized by the Klan. In March 1870, President Grant sent to Congress documentary evidence of more than 5,000 cases of White terrorism. Between May 1870 and April 1871, Congress passed three poorly funded Enforcement Acts that dispatched election supervisors to the South, criminalized interference with Black voting, and turned a wide range of Klan-type terrorist acts into federal offenses. As a result, the Klan had “nominally dissolved” by 1871, but the train of terror still rushed down the tracks under new names. It became clear to all, as a northern transplant explained, that only “steady, unswerving power from without” could guarantee peace and the survival of southern Republicanism. A steady, unswerving Black power from within could have done so, too, but Republicans remained unwilling to fortify Blacks with Buffalo Soldiers and land. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 667

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence against the reader’s test case of whether ideas precede policy — here the racist terror is policy/power acting, and uplift ideology fails to shield its targets.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the reader’s core question for this book: the Klan’s terrorism of even landowning Blacks undercuts the uplift-as-progress story.