Where Civil Rights Went Wrong....

a reply to: JoshuaCox

Ending slavery was obviously a good thing & a great start. But you're seemingly forgetting that other countries during the same time period also ended slavery and went a lot further in shorter time frames. The US ended slavery, then had several years of virtual slavery under the Black Codes, and then had nearly another century of forced racial segregation and legalized oppression and 2nd class citizenship.

In fact, the KKK, White League, and other terrorist white supremacist groups were both terrorizing minority groups & their non-minority allies and implementing racist laws throughout the country while Douglass was still alive. Have you ever looked up "lynching postcards"? Lynchings against black people was so common and so rarely enforced that entire towns would come together to watch the black victim get burned, mutilated, and hung. Then they would pose for photos, sell parts of the body as souvenirs, and literally send postcards with the lynchings and crowds (w/no faces blurred). And this continued for almost 70 years after Douglass died. That's why I'm saying he succeeded in the first 2 chapters but failed in the overall book. On a scale of 1 to 10, we went from a 0 to a 2 during his lifetime. That still isn't a success by anyone's standards.

Now compare that to Mexico, which ended slavery after it elected a black President in the 1820s. In fact, go back and look at most of Latin America and when they ended their slavery (since most African slaves were actually taken to South America). They completed more "chapters" in a much shorter time period than we did, which makes their efforts more "successful" in my book.

Or compare the time frames to the countries in Africa that pushed the colonizing Europeans out between the 1950s and 1980s. In a much shorter time frame, they have already started rebuilding their infrastructures and economies, have black central bankers, political parties & Heads of State, economic leaders & billionaires, religious leaders, national sports teams, entertainment industries, etc. And these successes happened in spite of the UK & CIA-backed coups and "revolutions" that were meant to stifle their progress, like in DR Congo and Angola.

If you want to talk about monumental civil rights leaders and the standards I'm comparing/contrasting American civil rights leaders against, you should look into the African decolonization leaders (here's a start). By comparison, American civil rights advances have been at a snail's pace. One of my personal heroes is Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of DR Congo. Now that's the type of civil rights leader we should be praising.

“Men and women of the Congo: victorious fighters for independence…we are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force. This was our fate for eighty years of a colonial regime; our wounds are too fresh and too painful still for us to drive them from our memory.”

This is an extract from the electrifying and spontaneous speech that the first democratically elected president of Congo-Léopoldville, Patrice Lumumba, gave when the Belgians formally handed over power to the new republic on 30 June 1960 in today’s Kinshasa. He decided, courageously – recklessly possibly – to deviate from the order of the heavily choreographed ceremony, after the Belgian king, in a speech punctuated by gun salutes, declared the Congo’s independence to be “the crowning of the work conceived of the genius of King Leopold II”. King Baudouin called on the nationalists “to show that we were right in trusting you”. Lumumba’s response was roughly translated for him as: “They’re not going to be your monkeys anymore.” The king promptly exited stage right.

Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba, by Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick

a reply to: enlightenedservant

Yea, but how many that ended it had slavery as entrenched as the south did??

It’s one thing to abolish slavery when only a fraction of your population is slaves..or there are enough slaves to eject the slavers,

But to abolish it where it is 25+% of the population and the ENTIRE economy revolves around it...

All those places you mentioned were able to eject the belligerents because they had the population advantage.. (I bet..hadn’t looked yet lol.)

The American blacks did not. If your able to retake the entire nation that is a different animal, and the abolitionists simply didn’t have the numbers for that.. most northerners didn’t care one way or the others about the African Americans.. really it’s kinda lucky we are where we are today...

Plus, the south had most of the things you listed after the war... for like 5 min..

Then the country decided to sacrifice the black population at the alter of the lost cause for reconciliation..


I think all your points show the change in the environment partially due to Douglass.. He couldn’t help it that Lincoln died and no one else had the character hold the course..

a reply to: JoshuaCox

Wait a second. So you're commenting on the things I mentioned without looking into them first? You might want to look into 1) the slave populations of South America & the Caribbean, and 2) the "Scramble for Africa" and African decolonization movement.

Something like 80% of the African slaves were sent to South America, with South American countries having 3 or 4 separate racial classes depending on the country. "Latinos" are literally the "white" upper class in those countries (then you have mulattoes, mestizos, Negroes, etc).

Angola was the Portuguese slave base for centuries (the Portuguese only left in the 1970s). Zimbabwe was an oppressive British colony until roughly 1980. And the reason I brought up Lumumba and the DR Congo is because it was in the DR Congo that the Belgians killed somewhere from 8 million to 15 million native Africans over a few decades. No one is sure of the total amount killed because they're still finding mass graves to this day.

Actually read up on the "Scramble for Africa" (here's a start) and the African decolonization struggles that I linked in the previous post and you'll see what I'm talking about. Compared to them, American progress on civil rights has come at a snail's pace.

ETA: I compare our civil rights movement to their decolonization movements and it's clear as day which efforts have been the most successful. And those colonies were literally set up to be exploited by the European colonial/imperial powers, so I'm not sure why you're acting like America's slave institution was the only one based on massive profits? Do you know where Tanzanite comes from? Or what South Africa and Zimbabwe's gold, platinum, and diamond industries are worth (white minority rule just ended in both of those countries over the last 40 years)? Portugal's former colony Angola is one of the world's top 15 or so oil producers, which is one reason the CIA and Apartheid South Africa were backing rebel factions in its civil war after the Portuguese left.

a reply to: Edumakated

How exactly are you supposed to become a financial power when your not considered an equal human and are not given any protection from the law???

Pull up your boot strap logic only works when things are relatively equal...



Take the sharecropping era...

The freedmen didn’t start share cropping because it was the most efficient option..

They started share cropping because right after the war the people who took jobs in the south for wages were never came paid.. and the state law enforcement wouldn’t touch it..

I bet the first case in The south where a white man was convicted of something he did to a black guy, didn’t come till the 1950s...

They literally took it as a point of pride that had never happened..

You should read the accounts of the southern whites.. the white supremacy is to a level that is insane for a modern person to even contemplate..

So share cropping

a reply to: enlightenedservant

This is a cheesy conspiracy site , not a college essay.. of course I commented without reading any further lol..

Still reading lol..

a reply to: enlightenedservant

Yea but I think the south became a totally different dynamic...because the south was just dealt a total military defeat and was looking for someone to blame it on..

After the northern politicians decided to bail on reconstruction, it was juT a free for all of retaliation..

Just so it’s said, retaliation for the audacity to dare want freedom and equality..


Why blame yourself for all the lives and wealth lost when you have a perfectly good minority population, you outnumber and out gun????

I think the American experiment has bred a lot of firsts.. first election during a civil war.. first rebellion that led to war where no one was executed..

So for the previous instances of “enslaved peoples seeking equality” none of them were dealing with a dynamic where could blame so much loss on them...

750,000 lives and 4 billion dollars in slaves freed alone?!?!! That’s ignoring all the property damage during the war!!

“It’s gotta be someone’s fault except mine...

So it was alll the fault of those damn slaves cause they just wouldn’t stay in their places.. “

That was all BS of course, but tell me you can’t see it playing out just like that..

It definitely has never been replicated since Spartacus.. and the Romans crucified one every however many feet from where ever to Rome..


I’ve read some on the Caribbean stuff.. Haiti to be exact.

If I’m right that’s considered the only successful slave rebellion in history..

The African stuff I don’t know from Adam but will hopefully run across some facinating stories on it..

originally posted by: JoshuaCox
a reply to: enlightenedservant

This is a cheesy conspiracy site , not a college essay.. of course I commented without reading any further lol..

Still reading lol..

LOL Fair enough.



this is still funny to me, btw

"I freed the what?!" - Abe Lincoln

lol, that never gets old.

a reply to: JoshuaCox

Ok, lets see if I can organize my thoughts.

1) I agree that American minorities faced barbaric oppression after slavery ended.

2) I agree that American slaveowners lost a lot of money from losing the institution of slavery.

3) I disagree that the American slaveowners lost more money from losing slaves than the imperial powers lost from losing their colonies.

4) When comparing American civil rights figures to other American civil rights figures, people like Frederick Douglass definitely stand out. His impact is better viewed in context though (as in, based on his time period), since each time period had completely different hurdles to overcome. He helped us get our status from a 0 to a 2, but the end goal was to get to a 10 (full equality).

5) When comparing American civil rights figures to non-American civil rights figures (particularly the ones in Africa), most of our American civil rights advances come up woefully short, especially when looking at the amount of time it took to make those advances.

6) I actually think the American civil rights movement hasn't gone far enough. I think people forget that we still have many Natives trapped on poverty stricken reservations.

7) I don't think it's possible to accurately say which country or region suffered the most from civil rights abuses and backlashes from their former ruling class.

For example, some estimates say that more than 1 million Algerian citizens died in Algeria's war for independence from France (Algerian historians usually say around 1.5 million while French historians usually say 300,000-400,000). Several million Indochina citizens died fighting off their former French colonial masters in the First and 2nd Indochina Wars (The 2nd Indochina War is called the Vietnam War in the US). The CIA and Apartheid South Africa waged a proxy war in Angola that lasted roughly 30 years & decimated much of the country after the Portuguese were kicked out in the 1970s. Sudan had a roughly 30 year proxy war after independence. DR Congo's leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated and they've been embroiled in one proxy war after another ever since (in fact, a lot of those decolonization leaders were eventually assassinated).

Then you have places like South Africa and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe only achieved independence around 1980 and the West has been bitter about it ever since. Sanctions, assassination attempts, currency manipulation to crash their economy, etc (like what happened in Haiti). Go look at the anti-Mugabe threads right now on ATS to get a better idea. Yes, he's a crappy leader in many regards. But Zimbabwe is/was still better under his rule for the black majority than it was under the oppressive British rule. But many people in the West still hate him to this day for kicking out so many of the former oppressors and exploiters (he was the leader of one of the major rebel groups that opposed British rule).

8) You should definitely look into the decolonization efforts. It'll change your perspective on a lot of things & you'll see why I have much highers standards when it comes to civil rights successes. Almost the entire Cold War was about former empires (the capitalist countries) trying to keep their former colonies as vassal states, while the communists helped arm and support the former colonial workers to help them achieve independence. What couldn't be settled through war was often settled by giving "independence" that came with strings attached, like strategic alliances, central banking controls, trade deals, reconciliation without punishment, etc.

That's why the proxy wars lasted so long and that's why many places in Africa are having to rebuild from scratch. But of course they don't teach this in our schools here, so most US citizens don't have the slightest clue. It would be like looking at Iraq or Libya 10 years from now and saying "wow, those people are poor and poverty stricken. WTF is wrong with them?", all while completely ignoring the wars and sanctions that destroyed them in the first place.