The Lash

The violent, hostile, reaction of Whites to the Civil Rights is often referred to as a "backlash." I'm dropping the "back", because that implies that Whites were rather passive and quiescent until Negro rabble-rousers arrived and started making trouble, and that's just not what happened.

Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, has a great post up detailing some of the letters received by Illinois Senator Paul Douglas (D), a great liberal champion and supporter of federal legislation to end housing discrimination. They are, to say the least, revealing -- both in how rawly they demonstrate the White hatred that flowed through Chicago at that time, and how the arguments his constituents made echo eerily of those put forward today.

It also helps expand my previous post's notation of Black mistrust of Whites -- how being too trusting could be lethal of you were Black. I used the classic archetype of the racist southern father, organizing a lynch mob against the Black man with the temerity to want to marry his daughter. But this example from Perlstein works just as well: "a teenager answering a job ad walked over the border from Chicago into the all-white city of Cicero, and for that sin and no other was beaten to death."

He trusted. And he died for that trust.