Sherry Chandler » The Solid South
The Solid South
By 1903, 40,000 poor whites had been disenfranchised in Alabama. By 1941, about 600,000 whites and 500,000 African Americans had lost the right to vote, mostly as a result of poll taxes. The choice of the name “Redeemers” was a cynical ploy to conflate religiosity with racism and exploitation. The disenfranchising of poor whites was deliberate as was the move to alienate whites from blacks. If you could convince a man that his white skin made him better than his brown neighbor, then you could control that white man. It isn’t race, it’s class. We still haven’t figured that out.
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