Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
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.