Why Research Matters: “This deep-seated prejudice against color is assiduously cultivated by the public journals (1866).”

This book, published by a Johns Hopkins professor in 1908, is important. 
If you are concerned by dog whistles on Fox News, Rep. Steve King and his ilk, Charlottesville, and President Trump’s equivalence of some American Nazis as “very fine people” along with civil rights protesters, this book is a lost treasure. 

Prof. Flack details, minutely, how racist politicians and judges, over the 50 years that transpired from 1868 (when the 14^th Amendment was ratified—an amendment that ensures equal treatment under the law to all persons) to 1908, stole that legal promise from people of color.

Prof. Flack’s research points to an obscure but important Report of the House of Representatives. 

You can read it online here, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433081821161;view=1up;seq=1 (the pages load a bit slowly so give it a few seconds, and scroll down, past the first few pages [they are blank]).

If you thumb through the first few pages, you will be disheartened to see how much of American society today resembles the South immediately after the Civil War.

Here is how liberals in the House—then called Radical Republicans—reported on rural Southerners and the newspapers they read: 

“The feeling in many places of the country towards emancipated slaves, especially among the uneducated and ignorant, is one of vindictive and malicious hatred. This deep-seated prejudice against color is assiduously cultivated by the public journals, and leaders to acts of cruelty, oppression, and murder, which the local authorities are at no pains to prevent or punish.”

This Report was published in 1866. Compare for yourself its similarity to our current climate.

The Report was produced by the House Committee on Reconstruction. The Reconstruction vision is at stake today, in my view.

Thank you, Prof. Flack—and rest in peace.