How Race Survived US History by David R. Roediger

Author:David R. Roediger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Coda: White Empire, Mississippi Plan

It was a familiar early 1870s story. White paramilitary organizations, loosely affiliated under the name Ku Klux Klan, conducted a series of sustained, bloody, and politically targeted raids, reaching right into the halls of the legally constituted government. Their leader, Mississippi-born James T. Proctor, was descended from a wealthy Louisiana slaveholding family and won celebrity fighting in the Civil War, losing a leg and gaining the picturesque nickname “Timber-Toes.” By 1874, with no little help from Klan terror, regime change took place.

But this story unfolded in Fiji, with Proctor and other Klansmen enmeshed in British intrigues to penetrate that island economically and politically. The goal was to install a new regime based not on the Democratic Party but on the British Empire, which colonized Fiji in 1874. The “niggers” under attack were “indigenes” in Fiji, not ex-slaves. Proctor’s peculiar tale intersects tellingly with the main stories of this chapter. His post–Civil War career in the Pacific centered on what Gerald Horne’s fine account calls “black-birding,” a new slave trade moving island peoples to labor in the colonies of Queensland and Fiji. His enterprise, understudied but shared by many Southerners relocating to the Pacific after the Confederacy’s defeat, capitalized on US reputation and experience regarding white management of other races. That figures like Proctor enslaved indigenous people in the Pacific reminds us that the forms of racial violence practiced against slaves in the US South and Indians in the US West were closely related. But most of all for present purposes, the peregrinations of the Klan force us to ask how the world of empire and the final extinguishing of jubilee coexisted.

In one of the most provocative passages produced by a US historian of his generation, C. Vann Woodward’s 1951 Origins of the New South raised exactly this question. Vann Woodward reflected on the fact that in specific Southern US locales and coalitions Afro-Southerners continued to vote (whether under the aegis of paternalist white Democrats or dissenting forces) after the withdrawal of federal troops. He noted that it was only in the 1890s that the “Mississippi Plan” brought near-total disenfranchisement, and that it took further time for that brutal plan to become the “American Way”: it was 1896 before Plessy v. Ferguson found the Supreme Court blessing the legality of Jim Crow. The three decades after 1890 witnessed a new “nadir” of racist terror and lynch law. Vann Woodward blamed this regression in large part on the reaction to black participation, potential and real, in populist electoral coalitions of the 1890s.

But Vann Woodward refused to treat the origins of this reaction as a wholly domestic matter. He insisted that turn of the century US imperial adventures in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines conditioned how thoroughly the “Mississippi Plan became the American Way.” Remaining Northern opponents of the worst Southern abuses of civil rights came as pro-imperialists to themselves embrace oppression and atrocity directed against people of color in occupied territories. So it was that the

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