Unhappily the racism in our country was pervasive long before the 1950s and 60s, starting with slavery and staying with us since. The KKK (since we were talking about The Intruder) was originally formed in 1866 as a terrorist organization of ex-Confederates who rode through the southern countryside at night beating and killing newly-freed blacks to keep them "in their place". It was suppressed by the Federal government then but was resurrected in 1915 and hit its apex in the 20s, when it boasted a membership of over 4 million nationwide.
It was not strictly a southern organization: it had active chapters around the country, and guess what, Os -- its New York headquarters was in the very town we live in, Yaphank (pronounced "YAP-hank", not "ph" as an "f") on Long Island. (When Al Smith, the Governor of NY and a Roman Catholic, was the Democratic nominee for President in 1928, the Klan not only burned crosses in places like Oklahoma, they did so right here in Suffolk County, Long Island, which sent the only member of the NY delegation to the 1924 and 1928 conventions who was anti-Smith. Suffolk at that time was very insular and filled with small-town farmers and "baymen" who hated Smith's native New York City and the Catholics, Jews and immigrants in it.)
The KKK associated with the dominant political party in each state, though it was mainly a problem for the Democrats because the South at that time was one-party Democratic. In fact, the 1924 Democratic convention in New York City split bitterly over whether to adopt a plank condemning the Klan by name. Thanks to the intimidation of a few anti-Klan southern delegates, the plank lost by 1 vote (out of over 1200). But the most glaring such domination of a political party was in Indiana, where as one historian put it, the Klan "simply swallowed the GOP": in 1924, the Republicans swept the state, and every statewide elected official from the Governor on down, and most of the legislature, were either Klansmen or were aligned to the Klan. But a rape-murder scandal involving the head of the Indiana Klan in 1925 caused the organization to implode, and it dragged down all the Republicans elected as Klan supporters in 1924, and nationally the Klan declined precipitously thereafter.
Anyway, suffice to say that the civil rights movement galvanized the organization, which had again revived after WWII, and led to very public opposition. In 1946 U.S. Senator from Mississippi gave a radio address telling white voters to "visit" blacks (he didn't say "blacks") the night before the election to keep them from voting, and a Mississippi Congressman at that time called a Jewish colleague from New Yrok a *beep* on the House floor. But of course the KKK was only one part of the racist scene then. Throughout the South there were White Citizens Councils and the like, supposedly a "respectable" alternative to the thuggish Klan, and southern politicians fed the hysteria making racist speeches.
It's hard to imagine, now, that Eisenhower had to send Federal troops in to enforce court-ordered integration in the Little Rock schools in 1957. Privately, Ike was opposed to integration of schools, as he had been against integrating the armed forces, which Truman accomplished by executive order in 1947. After the Supreme Court struck down laws mandating segregated schools in 1954, the President, at a private White House dinner, commiserated with Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom Ike had appointed, asking him, "Can't you understand why some mother wouldn't want her sweet little blond-haired girl sitting next to some big black buck in the classroom?"
Of course, it was more than just the KKK, and there was discrimination against Jews, Hispanics, and just about everyone else you can name, in our great "melting pot". The sad part is that, the election of a black/biracial President notwithstanding, Obama's election has ramped up the level of dormant racism in this country. Tea Party rallies have featured lots of racist signs and slogans attacking Obama. Various Republican officials have made racist comments, such as the Treasurer of the Orange County (California) GOP, who compared Michelle Obama to an ape, refused her own chairman's demand she resign and was backed by her party organization; or the chairman of the Maine GOP, who recently said Obama won the state only because mysterious black people showed up to vote in rural counties where they didn't live, which is preposterous and which he was forced to take back.
That's only two of dozens of such instances. Since Obama's reelection hundreds of thousands of southerners have signed petitions asking to secede from the United States, and the number of racist tweets coming from the deep South spiked the day after the election. A county judge in Lubbock, Texas, went on TV a few days ago to say that he expected Obama to send in troops to insure that Lubbock County enforced Federal laws the judge didn't like, and that he intended to meet them at the county line with a tank and the local sheriff's department. Of course, southerners deny that any of this is racist -- it's all about states' rights...just as it was concerns about the Constitution, not -- Heaven forbid! -- racism that led them to decades-long violent resistance to civil rights laws, integration, voting rights for blacks, and so forth. The old one-party, racist Democratic South has been replaced by a one-party racist Republican South, and the degree of racist statements about Obama, including from supposedly responsible people in the GOP, across the country, is frankly mind-boggling in this day and age.
My apologies for the lengthy disquisition (you know me!), but if anything Obama's election has only made the "race problem" in the US more blatant. The North and West have little problem with him, but the South and a few other spots surely do. They'd have voted against him even if he was white, since his policies are too liberal for most southerners, but the racial context has pumped up the size and virulence of the Republican vote and torn away the thin veneer of civility that masked the still-rampant racism in much of this country.
I never thought I'd live to see a black President, and I'm proud it has happened (and of course I voted for him), but the truth is we as Americans still have a long way to go.
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