re: #286 Belafon

We didn’t go through and systematically destroy all of the things that supported slavery. Reconstruction tried, but, like going to the moon, people got bored with it and moved on. And that allowed a system to be restored that was slavery in everything but name. Jim Crow and the statues were consequences of that. If we had truly ended slavery, we would have completely redone the economy of the south, redivided the land so that it didn’t match the plantations, and introduced more manufacturing.

Shorter: We still have to have the final battle over slavery.

We didn’t even really need to do all that much.

If we’d just stuck to the 14th Amendment’s promise of “equal protection under the law”, Wilmington and Tulsa and Rosewood and a hundred other places wouldn’t have happened the way they did, and black people would have built their own economic equality all by themselves.

They just needed for white people to not aggressively interfere.