I suspect a lot of the difference is just 911 response time. I think a lot of the decrease in traffic fatalities in the last 50 years is due to improvements in trauma care. Even in the case of identical accidents, the person who is 50 miles from the nearest hospital and who is in a cell phone dead zone has a lot worse chance of surviving than the person who is only a few miles from a trauma center.
I also wonder what our murder rate would be without the improvements in trauma care?
Part of the problem is, though, that a lot of criticisms of Southern racism come from a viewpoint of superiority. There’s the attitude of “Oh, look at the ignorant racist South. How different it is from the racial harmony of my own state.”. You’re not going to find many Southerners who deny that there was racism in the South, and the effects of that racism still affect the South today. But racism isn’t a Southern problem, it’s an American problem, and I think that a lot of Southerns are tired of being made scapegoats about the issue of racism, and tired of the stereotype that still exists that all Southerners are just a bunch of racist crackers.
To quote Randy Newman on this, from his song Rednecks:
Aside: I knew Forrest’s granddaughter when I was a kid. She owned a country store on Lookout Mountain, and was a fine lady. So I guess I think of her and, yeah, get a little defensive when people launch into tired attacks on Forrest based on half-truths. Forrest bears plenty of legitimate criticism without falling back on the false story that he started the KKK.
As for the KKK, my impression is that Forrest saw it as a political tool more than anything, a way of regaining power from the Republicans. But there was never any real central control in the organization, and most of the local chapters just spun off into violence against black folks. I just don’t think you can lay all that at the feet of Forrest. He disbanded the Klan pretty quickly when he saw what was happening.
And as I mentioned before, in his later life he spoke out against racial strife and in favor of reconciliation. Allow for some redemption.
Coming at the subject with a perspective of superiority is silly for many reasons. But there is a huge difference between acknowledging the racism of the North (and West), and believing that there were no historical regional differences with respect to the cultural and institutional dominance of white supremacist views.
We can debate the origin of those historical differences, such as whether the explanation is purely a matter of the economics of slavery and the ensuing culture of slavery, but there is no room for reasonable disagreement over the existence of real differences that go beyond regions simply expressing equivalent racism differently.
He didn’t disband the Klan, though. He ended his association with the Klan, and he claimed to have disbanded the Klan, but like you said, there was no real central control in the organization, and the various Klan groups kept doing what they were doing. And the thing is, the violence against black folks was almost never violence against black folks for its own sake. Klan violence was political, directed against the Union League, the Liberty League, and other elements of Southern Republicanism. The violence was targeted, against blacks trying to exercise civil rights, against people trying to educate blacks, against Republican party organizations, and against supporters of the Reconstruction government.
Forrest terminated his association with the Klan in 1869, but the Klan continued until the passage of the Force Act of 1870 and the Civil Rights Act of 1871 let the federal government use the military, and suspend habeus corpus to forcibly suppress it.
Forrest himself is a complicated individual that there’s a lot to like about and a lot to hate about, and I think so much myth developed around Forrest that its pretty much impossible to look at him objectively. I would recommend the book “The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest”. As Publishers Weekly describes it:
How is that Forrest’s fault, though?
(I’ll check out your book recommendation.)
The United States military, today, has dozens of installations, and a few ships, named after Confederate commanders.
The reality is that the Klan began manifesting the racist/intimidation tactics for which it became notorious quite early on in its existence.
“Former Confederate officers, the six young men (who founded the Klan) organized as a social club or fraternity and spent their time in horseplay of various types, including wearing disguises and galloping about town after dark. They were surprised to learn that their nightly appearances were causing fear, particularly among former slaves in the area. They quickly took advantage of this effect and the group began a rapid expansion.”
In other words, night-riding by Klan members quickly mutated from being a goofy prank into a means of oppression.
I think a big part of the perception among some that there’s “something wrong with the South” stems from persistent denialism among a discouraging number of people who identify strongly with “Southern heritage” (of course, most people living in the South today (including a large immigrant population) have forgotten about the Lost Cause, do not care about those golden days of yore or have accepted history’s lessons about development of the South.
There are undoubtedly some non-Southerners who engage in false or hypocritical stereotyping about the region. From the standpoint of someone who’s lived in the South for a good stretch and followed public discussions/debates (including on this board), my perception is that much of the residual friction would die out quickly if “Lost Cause apologists” would just stick a fork in it and move on.
[quote=“Jackmannii, post:88, topic:556653”]
So what about the non-Southerners who engage in false or hypocritical (I would also include hypercritical) stereotyping? How about THEY stick a fork in it and move on?
From your cite:
I knew there had been slaves in all 13 Colonies, and that some of them landed in new England, but I had no idea of the extent. Thanks for the link and ignorance fought.
I’m still not seeing a cite for your original claims. All you’ve done is grab a few random bottom/top ten lists. If we’re going on the U.S. Census definition of the South, then keep in mind it is this list of states:
Alabama
Arkansas
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maryland
Mississippi
North Carolina
Oklahoma
South Carolina
Tennessee
Texas
Virginia
West Virginia
What you have shown is that some of those states rank poorly on some lists. What does that really show about the South as a whole versus one of the other 3 Census Define Regions?
How about you come back after you’ve actually done some research? (FWIW I have no idea what you will find.) I do know that it’s kinda ridiculous to assume that your lists are very conclusive when you can combine the population of West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky and you are still at a number lower than the population of Texas or Florida by themselves (you can throw Tennessee in there and you just barely surpass Florida’s population and are still under that of Texas.) Which is to say that while yeah, the South has a lot of poor states many of them are low population states and if you were to represent them as a % of the population of the total south it’d be questionable to use those states as the basis for any conclusive argument. I also know that Maryland (which is, by census definition part of the South), is usually at or near the very top in measures of per capita income by state.
I also know people will argue “oh but Maryland isn’t southern”, which is to mean people that intrinsically dislike the south don’t think of Maryland as “a state full of hillbilly/rednecks.” However we’re going off the census here so you don’t get to cherry pick. Or if you do want to cherry pick then you will have a hard time keeping West Virginia and Kentucky on the list as far as I’m concerned.
Part of your argument of course was also that your list of things goes to show that “something is wrong” with the South (let’s ignore for the moment you haven’t done any real work to substantiate your list at all), you also can’t really link all of those issues for the South as a whole. How do you explain the high poverty rates in West Virginia and Kentucky but also explain how those two states are amongst the safest in the whole country, in terms of both violent and property crime (from your cite.)
Do your own fucking research. I linked to the data that shows the ones at the bottom tend to be southern and the ones at the top tend to not be. If you want to run a regression analysis or something go ahead.
Actually, you’ll find a number of similarities between the South after the Civil War and Germany after the First World War.
What the apologists don’t like to talk about is the amount of people involved. The apologists like to throw up anecdotes about individual slaves in the north - which is easy because you can practically identify every northern slave by name. New Jersey, which was the biggest slave holding state in the north, had a maximum of 12,000 slaves. When slavery was abolished in New Jersey there were eighteen slaves left in the entire state. At the same time, in the southern states there were individuals who owned hundreds of slaves and the total number of slaves was about four million.
So claiming that there were slaves in the north and the south so the situations were equivalent is like claiming that Jews died in Germany and the United States during World War II.
Surprisingly, apologists ignore the other big equivalency between the north and the south - how slavery ended. Because the two regions abolished slavery by identical means. In the north, slavery was abolished by the people of the northern states. And in the south, slavery was also abolished by the people of the northern states.
New York had the largest slave population of the northern states:
And as of 1790, there were nearly as many slaves in New York (21,193) as in Georgia (29,264). Cite.
But yeah, the ratios changed very rapidly after that.
Yankees tend to argue that southerners should “get over” the Civil War, but they always seem to bring it up in arguements. Shouldn’t there be some sort of Godwin’s law for that?
Here’s what they really mean:
If you Southerners would just meekly accept the status of the South as whipping boy for the nation we could all move on.
It’s not. Although, if you read Jack Hurst’s biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest, he suggests that Forrest might have actually disbanded the Klan (in Tennesee) in 1870 after Senter became governor and gave former Confederates back the right to vote, which sort of would make sense to me. (Hurst also suggests that Forrest’s early support of the Klan and his later repudiation of it was motivated primarily by his interests in the railroad; that he supported the Klan early on because he thought it was necessary to restore order and the South’s economy, and that he turned against it when he was afraid that it would interfere with his plan to import African laborers to build his railroad. You really need to read that section of Hurst’s book…the plan is a little insane. He gave an interview with a paper where he talks about how he wants to hire African labor and he thinks he can get federal support for it, and people will get over their race prejudice how smart and hard working the Africans are, and he and his associates already brought over 400, and only 6% died on the trip, and as soon as he taught them to stop eating grasshoppers and start eating cooked meat, they were the best workers he ever had.)
But I think it’s easy to overstate Forrest’s control of the Klan. It gets mentioned because of the Grand Wizard title, and also because Forrest was probably the most influential person associated with the Klan, but he didn’t really have any power with the Klan outside of Tennessee, and even inside the state, it was mostly titular.
Yes, and therefore what? What is it that you think follows from that fact that contradicts my statement?
And shall we explore who sponsored the naming of those vessels and installations?