Linking Black History with similar examples in other countries

In the heyday of American slavery, most white people did not feel they had to justify their denial of rights to Black people. They had all the power, and many of them believed that the subjugation of Black people was natural.

After the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery was passed in 1865, white people who opposed racial equality had to resort to increasingly subtle ways of asserting their power. What can we learn about discrimination against Blacks in the United States from similarly subtle discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland and against Indians and Blacks in Colombia?

At the one-hundredth birthday party of the late Strom Thurmond, Trent Lott, the influential senator from Mississippi, had this to say about his Republican colleague from South Carolina:

"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

The late Strom Thurmond's birthday party took place on December 5, 2002, nearly 40 years after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and more than 50 years after the senator ran a strongly segregationist presidential campaign. During that campaign, he declared that "all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches."

Lott soon apologized for a "poor choice of words" and denied that he had intended to endorse "discarded policies of the past." However, he consistently failed to explain what he had meant by "all these problems" and why the election of a segregationist candidate would have prevented them. This failure led directly to his resignation from his party's leadership.

During the controversy, several commentators called attention to the so-called "southern strategy," or the systematic attempt by the Republican Party to secure the votes of southern white men by playing up racial anxieties and expressing sympathy for racist attitudes. For both moral and strategic reasons, such sympathy couldn't be expressed openly, so a kind of code was created. In this code, politicians used a series of benign terms--most notoriously "states' rights"--to stand in for malignant concepts such as race-based segregation and racial inequality. Many political observers regarded Lott's comments as a nod and a wink to racists.

Activity: Read through the following sections of World Conflicts Today: "Civil Rights Movement" in Northern Ireland and "War of the Thousand Days" in Colombia. (Get a free trial!)

Then answer the following essential questions for critical thinking that ask you to draw connections between discrimination in the U.S. and discrimination in Northern Ireland and Colombia:

• After the creation of the state of Northern Ireland, how did Protestants deny Catholics the vote without appearing to discriminate on religious grounds?
  
  
• After Blacks officially received the vote in the United States, what tactics--not explicitly race-based--were used to prevent them from voting?
  
  
• What were the principal objectives of the "Regeneration Movement" in Colombia in the late 19th century?
  
  
• In what ways could that movement be regarded as an early version of the U.S. "southern strategy" explained above?