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Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

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hostility, can be expected of two-thirds of the adult white<br />

men. They will go to their graves unchanged. No one of<br />

them should ever again be trusted with political rights.<br />

And all the elemental power of civilization should be combined<br />

and brought into play to counterwork the anger and<br />

plots of such foes."(45)<br />

No sooner had the planter Confederacy been<br />

struck down, then poor whites began responding to the appeals<br />

of the KKK and the other planter guerrilla organizations.<br />

This was a mass phenomena. Their motivation was<br />

obvious: they desired to keep Afrikans as colonial subjects<br />

below even wage-labor. DuBois relates:<br />

"When, then, he faced the possibility of being<br />

himself compelled to compete with a Negro wage laborer,<br />

while both were hirelings of a white planter, his whole soul<br />

revolted. He turned, therefore, from war service to guerrilla<br />

warfare, particularly against Negroes. He joined<br />

secret organizations, like the Ku Klux Klan, which fed his<br />

vanity by making him co-worker with the white planter,<br />

and gave him a chance to maintain his race superiority by<br />

killing and intimidating 'niggers'; and even in secret forays<br />

of his own, he could drive away the planter's black help,<br />

leaving the land open to white labor. Or he could murder<br />

too successful freedmen."<br />

North or South, East or West, Euro-Amerikan<br />

workingmen were intent on driving out or pushing further<br />

down all subject labor-whether Afrikan, Mexicano or<br />

Chinese. In fact, despite the divisions of the Civil War<br />

there were few qualitative differences between Northern<br />

and Southern white labor. In part this is because there was<br />

considerable merging through migration within the Empire.<br />

So when Euro-Amerikan labor, greatly revived by<br />

the massive reinforcements immigrating from Old Europe,<br />

reorganized itself during the Civil War, it was not any<br />

strengthening of democratic forces; rather, it added new<br />

formations of oppressors, new blows being directed<br />

against the oppressed. Just as the petit-bourgeois workingmen's<br />

movements of the 1840's and 1850's, these were<br />

"white unions" for settlers only. So that when the<br />

representatives from eight craft trades met in Louisville in<br />

1864 to form the short-lived "International Industrial<br />

Assembly of North America", there was no mention of the<br />

emancipation of Afrikan labor.

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