Many recall the playing of "Dixie," the standard-bearer of the white South, on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1960s; this city is where many of the worst and most violent Civil Rights Movement protests occurred. The South was preoccupied with their deep losses during the Civil War. This preoccupation was not unlike that of Nazi Germany, after Germany's deep losses during WWI, before the Nazis were even formed. Largely, like the Nazis, the pre-Civil-War South had severe economic problems. Seven immigrants out of eight from other countries settled into the northern United States, and twice as many whites left the South for the North as the ones heading in the other direction.

There were deep-seated controversies over adding the slave state of Missouri to the Union, the acquisition of Texas as a slave state in 1845, and Manifest Destiny being used as an argument for gaining new territories where slavery would become an issue, which mostly occurred after the much less devastating Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. Meanwhile, the extremely popular anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852 helped increase northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which was designed to recapture escapees.

It has been said that the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, John Brown's raid of Harper's Ferry in 1859 and the split in the Democratic Party in 1860 all led to the war, and the election of Lincoln in 1860 was the last straw for the South, being the main trigger for the secession. During this period, many looked for a compromise, such as having some of the states "free" and some remaining "slave," or perhaps allowing the expansion of slavery for a few more years.

The best known of these attempts is the Crittenden Compromise. It was an unsuccessful proposal by Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden, which tried to resolve the secession crisis of 1860-1861. It addressed the concerns which were leading to secession, containing a preamble, six proposed Constitutional Amendments, and four proposed Congressional resolutions. But both the House and the Senate rejected it in 1861, as it was seen as making too heavy of concessions to the South. President Lincoln stopped it cold, because he was elected primarily for opposing the expansion of slavery, and the South's reaction to this rejection led almost immediately to the Civil War.

In short, every effort to compromise failed. Slavery was neither easy to resolve, nor was it an issue that would "go away." The South stubbornly and steadfastly maintained the belief that slavery was a needed thing, and that they would not stop until they had their ways about it. It would require firmer actions on their part, but mostly, they oriented toward taking it out on "the Negro," who was supposed to warrant such treatment.

"He" was their favorite scapegoat, whom they blamed for the Confederacy having lost the war, even after an untold number of black soldiers had died on the South's side, fighting for them. In Birmingham during the Sixties, whites were known to "scapegoat" young black men, breaking their backs with high-pressure water hoses during peaceful civil rights protests. They also bombed black people's houses, businesses and churches, threatening the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. this way dozens of times. His primary "seat" of operations for his beloved Civil Rights Movement was in Birmingham in the 1960s.

During these dreadful times, the South had sporadic outbursts of lynching, mutilating and burning black men alive. They particularly wanted to oppress the blacks, as they were perceived as "troublemakers," too inferior to be perceived as "real people." Dr. King's and many other people's popular term for black people during his times was "Negros," and it was qualified how Negro people felt about themselves and their lives.

During the 1960s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered Dr. King to be followed around by listening devices, with all of his places of residents being "bugged," and several of his private life statements were put on tape. One of these many hundreds of FBI tapes supposedly recorded MLK during a moment of passion yelling, "I'm not a Negro tonight!" Howsoever, just before King's assassination, many black men or Negros wore signs that boldly stated, "I am a Man" during their protests. They were promoting the idea that they were people, and not animals, as they'd been labeled during the slavery period.

In any event, many such black men fought and died passionately for the South during the Civil War for a variety of reasons, including the many different opinions about slavery and how the overall structure of it should be handled. Also, many such slaves grew up in close circumstances with their white masters, and were actually steadfast friends. Their actual circumstances are hard to fathom, but they didn't want to see the depravity and degradation that would occur should the South lose. Sometimes, slavery was not an entire evil, as some masters were more conciliatory, so this caused much factionalism. But on the whole, it is thought these black men were trying to aid the white South and impress them with their raw courage and utmost perseverance against all odds.

Often, both southern slave and freedmen blacks and their northern counterparts fought with extreme ferocity, leaping into the fray even when their jobs did not entail a soldier's duty. For one thing, the white North was reluctant to use them, and it took a long time to get the Union Army to accept black troops. They didn't need them like the South, where nearly a third of their population was now black. For another, the white southern attitudes that were extremely pro-slavery meant blacks were supposed to be indolent, permissive and docile. When southern black cooks, bottle-washers and horse tenders leapt gladly into battle with shouts such as "Fo' Massa!" and "Give it to 'em boys - give 'em Hell!" for their side of the gruesome fray, whites were shocked, impressed - and appalled.

This caused the development immediately after the war of several groups of white people who wanted to oppress, subjugate and otherwise control the growing black southern population. The most famous of these groups was the Ku Klux Klan, which of course hid their practices under many other names as well, as they were an illegal and secret society of white racial supremacists, which had been formed up immediately after the South lost in the Civil War. The original idea behind the KKK, or Klan as they are often called, was to "avenge" the losses of the white South - by taking them out on Black Americans.

Read the next article in this series, "The Ku Klux Klan - Begins in 1866" and the other articles in this long article series about why racism was and is so prevalent in the American South.



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