White supremacy unified all Southern classes but leadership stayed with the displaced elite

Evidence

Of the early Ku Klux Klan, Allan Trelease writes: “Klan membership throughout the South resembled that in Tennessee; it was drawn from every rank and class of white society… . The maintenance of white supremacy, and the old order generally, was a cause in which white men of all classes felt an interest.” White Terror, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1971, p. 51. “Leadership within the organization more clearly belonged to the professional and planter class which had governed the region before the Radicals displaced them politically, but their economic and social power was hardly affected.” … On the level of Federal law and Constitutionally guaranteed rights, the story was the same: “If by 1890 it had become clear to the American Negro that he could not expect to obtain justice and fair play through the regular political processes of the national and state governments it would soon become equally clear to him that he could not expect much more from the courts of the land and especially the United States Supreme Court.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2169

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier material on post-Reconstruction white terror as a cross-class cause and the neutralizing of federal rights protection — bears on the Black radical tradition’s loss of legal and political avenues.